Category: Evil

My Next Computer is not Going to Be Windows 10

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The latest Microsoft operating system is a privacy horror show:

By default, Microsoft gets to see your location, keystrokes and browser history — and listen to your microphone, and some of that stuff is shared with “trusted [by Microsoft, not by you] partners.”

You can turn this all off, of course, by digging through screen after screen of “privacy” dashboards, navigating the welter of tickboxes that serve the same purposes as all those clean, ration-seeming lines on the craps table: to complexify the proposition so you can’t figure out if the odds are in your favor.

Oh, and if you’ve already chosen to use Firefox as your default browser, Microsoft overrides your decision when you “upgrade” and switches you to the latest incarnation of the immortal undead monster formerly known as Internet Explorer.

See also here, where they note that you cannot shut the service off except by getting deep into dodgy operating system functions, and it listens to everything that you say.

A ain’t gonna go Mac though:  I hate walled gardens, so it’s probably some flavor of Linux for me next time around.

A Noun, and a Verb, and 91………Whatever

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Rudy “A Noun, a Verb and 9/11” Giuliani some how managed to forget the 911 terrorist attacks:

In early January 2010, Rudy Giuliani, known for his obsessive focus on the 9/11 attacks, made a bizarre comment on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The former mayor argued, “What [President Obama] should be doing is following the right things that [George W. Bush] did – one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror.”
Giuliani added, “We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We’ve had one under Obama.”
Of course, we had a very memorable domestic attack under Bush. The “one” under Obama, in this case, apparently referred to “Underwear Bomber” Umar Abdulmutallab, who attempted to detonate a concealed explosive on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, but who failed. This “attack,” fortunately, led to zero casualties.
More than six years later, Giuliani is still confused.

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Monday said terrorists failed to successfully strike the United States in the eight years before President Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton took office.
“Under those eight years, before Obama came along, we didn’t have any successful radical Islamic terrorist attack in the United States,” Giuliani said Monday ahead of a speech by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on foreign policy. “They all started when Clinton and Obama got into office.”

Seriously.  Giuliani is a man who has been a horror show his entire life, (he announced his divorce in a press conference before he told his then wife) with the exception of one day, and when it is inconvenient, it slips his mind.

What a horrible man.

F%$# Me. I Agree with Rand Paul.

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I guess that we file this under that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, because Senator Aqua Buddha is opposing the massive arms sale to Saudi Arabia because of their indiscriminate brutality in Yemen:

Citing concerns over Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he’s looking for ways to stop a $1.15 billion weapons deal with Riyadh that would include the sale of 130 Abrams battle tanks, 20 armored vehicles, and other military equipment.

Paul’s pledge comes as Saudi Arabia resumed its bombardment of the Yemeni capital of Sanaa following the collapse of peace talks in Kuwait between representatives of the government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

“I will work with a bipartisan coalition to explore forcing a vote on blocking this sale,” Paul told Foreign Policy in a statement. “Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally with a poor human rights record. We should not rush to sell them advanced arms and promote an arms race in the Middle East.”

Humanitarian organizations are criticizing the proposed weapons sale as a setback for efforts to bring pressure on Riyadh to throttle back its military campaign. The U.N. estimates that at least 6,400 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the conflict while more than 2.8 million have been displaced from their homes.

He’s right.

Saudi Arabia provided support for the 911 bombers, and they created ISIS.

They are not our allies, and we should not be helping them in Yemen, which, among other things, has resulted in a massive increase in the power of al Qaeda in that nation.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Explores New Frontiers in Lame

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Remember when I wrote that Debbie Wasserman Schults had agreed to debates with primary challenger Tim Canova?

Now we learn that the Congresswoman has defined agreeing to debate as one 15 minute long joint appearance. After the introductions and opening statements, that leaves time for ……… well ……… nothing:

Last week, Debbie Wasserman Schultz told Sun Sentinel Editor, Rosemary O’Hara, that she was in debate discussions with me. That statement was a complete fabrication. In fact, Wasserman Schultz and no one from her campaign has ever responded to the debate challenge that I made back in April.

Days ago, I tried again in an open letter and by email to Wasserman Schultz and her staff to suggest a series of two-hour debates. Again, I never received any reply. Instead, Jim Defede of WFOR CBS 4 Local News sent an invitation to both candidates to debate on his Sunday morning 8:30am talk show, Facing South Florida. At 4pm, my campaign learned that Wasserman Schultz said she “scheduled” a debate.

After four months of dodging debates and running scared, Wasserman Schultz now wants to schedule a 15 minute debate? If she believes one 15 minute debate is sufficient to defend her record, it shows she’s learned nothing from her failures in scheduling debates at the DNC before her shameful resignation. In April, I proposed a series of real debates, and that’s still my hope, that the voters will get the benefit of hearing us discuss the issues in more than one debate of at least two-hours each to cover a wide range of issues of importance to all of us.

Great googly moogly.

DWS has got to be the lamest politician in Florida, and considering that Jeb “Miss Congeniality” Bush and Rick “Governor Batboy” Scott are Florida politicians, that’s saying a lot.

I so hope Tim Canova wins the primary.

Remember When I Suggested That Some Hillary Supporters Were a Bit ……… Hinky?

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Well, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who wants very much to be the next CIA Director, who recently endorsed Hillary Clinton, is calling for the assassination of Russians and Iranians in Syria:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell said in an interview Monday that U.S. policy in Syria should be to make Iran and Russia “pay a price” by arming local groups and instructing them to kill Iranian and Russian personnel in the country.

Morell was appearing on the Charlie Rose show on PBS in the wake of his publicly endorsing Hillary Clinton on the New York Times opinion pages.

Clinton has expressed support for increased military intervention in Syria against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government. Iran and Russia are backing Assad.

“What they need is to have the Russians and Iranians pay a little price,” Morell said. “When we were in Iraq, the Iranians were giving weapons to the Shia militia, who were killing American soldiers, right? The Iranians were making us pay a price. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price.”

Morell said the killing of Russians and Iranians should be undertaken “covertly, so you don’t tell the world about it, you don’t stand up at the Pentagon and say ‘we did this.’ But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.”

Morell also proposed that U.S. forces begin bombing Syrian government installations, including government offices, aircraft and presidential guard positions. The former acting CIA director said that he wanted to “scare Assad.” Morell clarified that he wasn’t actually calling for Assad’s assassination.

………

Morell’s endorsement of Clinton was quickly seen as a sign that he was interested in a role in a possible Clinton administration. He wrote that Clinton would be a “highly qualified commander in chief” and a “strong proponent of a more aggressive approach” to the conflict in Syria.

………

This weekend, Hillary Clinton touted Morell’s endorsement on her Twitter page:

“She will deliver on the most important duty of a president—keeping our nation safe.” —Michael Morell on Hillary https://t.co/zmI3BOCH9Y

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 7, 2016

Anyone can say that they endorse you, but the fact that you are touting the endorsement of this Fruitloop does engender confidence in your judgement.

When Donald F%$#ing Trump can make an argument that he is the peace candidate, you are doing something seriously wrong.

The Internet of Things Got Hacked Again, Things that go Buzz in the Night Edition

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In news of the coming tech utopia, a network enabled sexual aid has been hacked, and even in the unhacked condition, it sends personal data back to the manufacturer.

The Internet of Things That Can Be Hacked grows daily. Lightbulbs, trucks, and fridges all have computers inside them now, and all have been hacked by someone. But at least you don’t put those inside your body.

Two years ago, someone had the good idea to put a bluetooth connection inside a vibrator, and the We-Vibe 4 Plus was born. The vibrator can connect with a smartphone app that its makers say “allows couples to keep their flame ignited – together or apart”: that is, it can be controlled remotely, while, say, making a video call.

The consequences of a wrong number are left to reader’s imagination.

But at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas, two independent hackers from New Zealand, who go by the handles goldfisk and follower, revealed that the way the vibrator speaks with its controlling app isn’t really secure at all – making it possible to remotely seize control of the vibrator and activate it at will.

In their talk, Hacking the Internet of Vibrating Things, Follower argued that despite titters at the back of the room, the security of a sex toy should be taken seriously. “The company that makes this vibrator, Standard Innovation: They have over 2 million people using their devices, so what’s at stake is 2 million people.”

“A lot of people in the past have said it’s not really a serious issue,” he added, “but if you come back to the fact that we’re talking about people, unwanted activation of a vibrator is potentially sexual assault.”

Potentially worse still, the pair discovered that the app itself was phoning home, letting the manufacturer discover some very intimate information about users.

(emphasis mine)

I want no part of this brave new world.

Seriously? Boasting About an Endorsement from John f%$#ing Negroponte?

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It appears that the latest endorsement for Hillary Clinton from the “Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity” crowd is in, and her campaign is crowing about John Negroponte’s Endorsement, probably because Henry Kissinger was busy:

In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte. ………

 ………

 Well, that’s special, isn’t it? And what did Negroponte do while serving “in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960”? I’m glad you asked.

 In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country’s murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)………

 In any case, the essential Robert Parry has been dogging this story for nearly 40 years now. From In These Times:

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador in the early ’80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that’s one of the reasons Bush picked him. Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran military in the ’80s.

 In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States. “Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.” It’s unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

 ………

 “Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous,” said Dodd. “I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987],” [Senator Christopher] Dodd said.

Hillary Clinton has been completely captured by they dysfunctional, immoral, and incompetent foreign policy consensus that has been mismanaging our foreign policy since the 1960s.

This The Best and the Brightest crap really needs to end.

It has produced nothing but death and misery and failure.

David Sirota Collects Another Scalp

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Last month David Sirota’s reporting revealed conflicts of interest in the review of the merger between Anthem and Cigna, resulting in regulatory and political push-back against the deal.

This month, his reporting of Chris Christie’s sweet heart deals with political contributor hedge funds has led to the New Jersey pensions backing away from the deals:

Governor Chris Christie’s pension officials on Wednesday signed off on a major divestment of hedge funds — a move that is expected to save taxpayers and retirees tens of millions of dollars in fees that had been flowing to Wall Street. The decision caps an intensifying campaign against the hedge fund investments by groups representing retirees.

 The campaign was prompted by an International Business Times investigative series that first spotlighted the skyrocketing fees.

 At a meeting of the Christie-controlled State Investment Council, pension officials cut in half the amount of state pension money that will be allocated to hedge funds, according to a press release from the New Jersey state AFL-CIO. That $3 billion reduction was part of an overall reduction of pension investments in higher-risk “alternative investments” that generate big fees, but whose returns have in many cases failed to keep pace with low-fee stock index funds. In all, the reduction in hedge fund investments is expected to save more than $120 million in fees next year, according to the labor federation, whose retiree members rely on the pension system.

 ………

 After a decade of public pensions pumping more retiree money into alternative investments, new questions have recently been raised about the fees and returns generated by the strategy. Major pension funds in California and New York have reduced their investments in hedge funds.

Back in 2014, before the national debate over pension fees had intensified, IBT first began reporting on how Christie’s administration had significantly increased the amount of pension money flowing to high-fee alternative investment firms. The two-pronged year-long series explored the politics of pension investments as well as the revenue implications of the investment shift.

 Under Christie, pension investments flowed to politically connected firms whose employees had delivered campaign donations to Christie-linked political groups. IBT also documented how Christie’s political team was in contact with the governor’s top pension adviser. That adviser’s private firm concurrently invested in a fund he had directed public pension money into. The adviser subsequently resigned after the state’s largest labor federation filed an ethics complaint against him.

So, these Gaultian supermen on Wall Street have once again been proved to be, “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers.”

We need to shut down this sort of unproductive rent seeking.

This is Some Well Done, and Well Deserved, Trolling

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Following repeated cuts to the Missouri Public Defender’s office by the Missouri Governor, which has led the state to have the 49th most underfunded office in the nation, the head of the Public Defender’s office has invoked a section of state law to assign the Governor as a defense attorney for an indigent defendant.

It’s a “No Saving Throw” kind of thing under state law:

Fed up with what he says is the governor’s failure to properly fund his overwhelmed office, the state’s lead public defender ordered Gov. Jay Nixon this week to represent a poor person in Cole County this month.

Michael Barrett said he was using a provision of state law that allows him in extraordinary circumstances to delegate legal representation “to any member of the state bar of Missouri.” He’s starting with the state’s highest-profile lawyer: Nixon.

Barrett says the governor has repeatedly declined to give the public defender system the money it requests and is withholding promised funding increases this year.

“Providing counsel to poor people who face incarceration is the obligation of the state. It’s not fair to go after private attorneys who are trying to pay the rent when they had nothing to do with contributing to this,” Barrett said in an interview Wednesday.

Barrett never exercised this power before because he thought it was wrong to place the burden of public cases on private attorneys “who have in no way contributed to the current crisis,” he wrote in a letter to the governor dated Tuesday.

“However, given the extraordinary circumstances that compel me to entertain any and all avenues for relief, it strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it,” Barrett wrote, referring to Nixon, a Democrat who was a four-term attorney general before becoming governor.

………

The Missouri constitution allows the director of the public defender system to assign cases to any lawyer in the state, regardless of whether the lawyer is a public defender, Barrett said.

Just this June, the legislature granted the public defender system a $4.5 million increase, which would’ve helped in hiring 10 more employees and some private attorneys on a contractual basis. The office currently employs more than 370 attorneys. Officials with the public defender’s office had asked for a $23.1 million boost, while Nixon recommended a $1 million increase.

Last month, Barrett and the Missouri State Public Defender Commission filed a lawsuit claiming that Nixon withheld $3.5 million of that $4.5 million increase. Barrett claims Nixon is targeting the public defender system for budget cuts while leaving more money for other programs he likes.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Governor is claiming that this assignment isn’t legal, but the law is pretty explicit here: the head of the Public Defender’s office can involuntarily appoint a bar member as counsel for an indigent defendant.

It’s gotten to the point where the US Department of Justice has expressed concerns that the state is violating defendants’ civil rights, and the governor keeps trying to gut the office.

Nixon deserves what’s happened to him.

A PDF of the letter is after the break:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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In a fit of political pandering, Governor Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order banning sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go while declining a law intended to facilitate prosecution of child rape into law:

Governor Anthony Cuomo, never afraid to take quick and decisive action on the issues facing New York, announced today that all 3,000 of New York’s sex offenders will be prohibited from “downloading, accessing, or otherwise engaging in any internet-enabled gaming activities, including Pokémon Go.”

 “Protecting New York’s children is priority number one and, as technology evolves, we must ensure these advances don’t become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims,” said Cuomo in a statement. “These actions will provide safeguards for the players of these augmented reality games and help take one more tool away from those seeking to do harm to our children.”

 To that end, Cuomo will have the Division of Criminal Justice Services provide a current list of sexual offenders to Niantic Inc., the creator of Pokémon Go, as well providing the same list to Apple and Google. Parole officers will also be trained in how to check and see whether their parolees have been playing any internet-enabled games.

 ………

 Meanwhile, left sitting on Cuomo’s desk at the end of this year’s legislative session was a bill that would have lengthened the statute of limitations on sexual-abuse cases by five years; given officials a six-month window to revisit old cases; and eliminated the difference in how public and private organizations (i.e., the Catholic Church) would be treated when it comes to child-sexual-abuse cases.

The cause of this?  A grandstanding state senator who found that some Pokeman were located within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.

You can find anything within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.

The stupid,  it burns.

Nope. No Racism Here

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When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites.

But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote.

The majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. “When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,” Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. “I didn’t know what to do.”

The board’s aim, a lawsuit later claimed, was to give an edge to white candidates in Sparta’s municipal elections — and that November, a white mayoral candidate won a narrow victory.

“A lot of those people that was challenged probably didn’t vote, even though they weren’t proven to be wrong,” said Marion Warren, a Sparta elections official who documented the purges and raised an alarm with voting-rights advocates. “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime.”

The county attorney, Barry A. Fleming, a Republican state representative, said in an interview that the elections board was only trying to restore order to an electoral process tainted earlier by corruption and incompetence. The lawsuit is overblown, he suggested, because only a fraction of the targeted voters were ultimately scratched from the rolls.

………

But the purge of Sparta voters is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. In Georgia and all or part of 14 other states, the 1965 Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to receive so-called preclearance before changing the way voter registration and elections were conducted.

Clearly the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act was premature, but it was a corrupt and blatantly political ruling, so this is no surprise.

What About the Higher Ups?

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6 low level employees have been charged for allegedly falsifying reports in the Flint, Michigan lead tainted water crisis:

A special investigator for the Michigan Attorney General’s office said six state employees who were criminally charged today hid and manipulated data last summer that showed a change in drinking-water sources was poisoning people here.

Liane Shekter-Smith, Adam Rosenthal and Patrick Cook worked for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality; and Nancy Peeler, Corinne Miller and Robert Scott worked for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services last summer and are charged in the case filed this morning in Flint District court.
………

The Health and Human Services employees “effectively buried” research indicating high lead levels in children’s blood from July through September 2014 could be connected to the switch in water sources and needed further research, Seipenko said.

The epidemiologist researching the tests wasn’t yet finished with her report when Peeler and Scott “worked together to produce a graph of elevated blood levels without applying any statistical method. Peeler, relying on this unscientific graph, drafted and sent (an) unfounded email to MDHHS management (that) inappropriately concluded that the switch of water sources was not the cause of elevated blood levels within the children,” Seipenko said.

Peeler was manager of the Early Childhood Health section of MDHHS, and Scott is acting coordinator and data manager for the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention program at the MDHHS. Miller was director of the Bureau of Disease Control and Prevention at MDHHS, Seipenko said.

………

Smith faces charges of misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty. Cook is charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to engage in misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty. Rosenthal is charged with misconduct office, conspiracy to tamper with evidence or engage in misconduct in office, and tampering with evidence as a public officer engaged in a willful neglect of his duty.

Peeler, Miller and Scott are charged with misconduct in office, conspiracy to commit misconduct in office and willful neglect of duty.

These do not appear to particularly high level employees.

Ignoring these results was clearly a directive made at a more senior level, probably at the level of Governor Rick Snyder’s cabinet, but I see no evidence of a higher level investigation so far.

It’s pretty clear that his office had to be involved in authorizing the cover up.

Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty We Are Free at Last!

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Today, the Windows 10 free upgrade offer and its associated nagware ends. I am so ready to be done with this crap:

Microsoft has offered its free upgrade to Windows 10 for one year to the day now. Although most users interested in the upgrade have probably already taken it, anyone who has been putting off the move to Windows 10 has mere hours left to install the new OS.

The free upgrade to Windows 10 officially ends July 29 11:59 PM UTC-10. That translates to 2:59 AM PDT and 5:59 AM EST July 30. According to a Microsoft representative, all upgrades must be completely finished prior to this time.

BTW, if you are interested, there are a number of law suits suits against Microflaccid’s remarkably persistent and deceptive attempts to force an upgrade on unsuspecting users.

Debbie Wasserman Thrown Under Bus

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Then they backed up the bus, ran her over again, then broke out the steamroller, then got some kerosene and set fire to the remains, and finally sprinkled holy water over the ashes to ensure that she would never rise again.

This Politico article is as nasty a hit job I’ve seen on anyone in the media,

Among other revelations:

  • Ignoring a DNC fund raising need to raise funds for her own campaign from Joe Biden.
  • She also ignored another DNC need at the same meeting to ask Biden to show up to her daughter’s bat Mitzvah.
  •  Described her as, “An increasingly imperious and politically tone-deaf chair who often put her own interests ahead of party functions..”
  • Hassled Obama staffers seats at an event, allegedly for her big donors, and then gave those seats to her family.

Read the rest:  It’s brutal.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz may very well be more loathed by her fellow party members than Ted Cruz is loathed by his.

I cannot help but think that they actually want her to lose the primary to Tim Canova this August.

h/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Not ISIS/ISIL/IS/Whatever

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After the shootings in Munich, everyone seemed intent on claiming that it was ISIS/ISIL/IS/Whatever.

I was dubious because the shooter was of Iranian extraction, and thus probably Shia rather than Sunni, and because it was reported that he was shouting anti-Turkish slurs.

Well, police now think that was inspired by Anders Behring Breivik’s shooting spree in Norway:

The 18-year-old gunman who killed nine people in Munich was obsessed with mass shootings but had no known links to the Islamic State group, German police say.

Written material on such attacks was found in his room, and Munich’s police chief spoke of links to the massacre by Norway’s Anders Behring Breivik.

The gunman, who had dual German-Iranian nationality, later killed himself.

His name has not been officially released but he is being named locally as David Ali Sonboly.

………

Friday evening’s attack at the Olympia shopping mall also left 27 people injured, including children. Ten of them are critically ill, including a 13-year-old boy, police say.

Seven of the dead were teenagers. Three victims were from Kosovo, three from Turkey and one from Greece.

Police say the Munich-born gunman had been in psychiatric care, receiving treatment for depression.

Authorities are also checking reports that he may have been bullied by his peers, Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

………

Munich police chief Hubertus Andrae said there was an “obvious” link between the attack and Friday’s fifth anniversary of Breivik’s attacks in Norway, when he murdered 77 people.

The killer reportedly shouted anti-foreigner slurs during the rampage and yelled “I’m German” at one man who challenged him.

Literature about mass killings was found at his home including a German-language translation of the book Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters.

Mr De Maiziere said the suspect had researched a 2009 school shooting in Germany as well as the Breivik attack.

So it appears not to be terrorism, but what qualifies as run of the mill white male American type violence.

That last sentence is so f%$#ing depressing.

My First Reaction was to Invoke the Wizard of Oz

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Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead

Debbie Wasserman Schultz has resigned as head of the DNC:

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman resigned under fire Sunday, on the eve of a national convention meant to project competence and unity in contrast to the turbulence of the Republicans’ gathering last week.

The disarray threatened to upend Hillary Clinton’s plan to paint the Democrats as the party best prepared to lead a divided and anxious country and herself as the leader who can offer an optimistic alternative to Republican Donald Trump.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida was forced aside by the release of thousands of embarrassing emails among party officials that appeared to show co­ordinated efforts to help Clinton at the expense of her rivals in the Democratic primaries. That contradicted claims by the party and the Clinton campaign that the process was open and fair for her leading challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

The news that the DNC was in the tank for Hillary is not really news, but the fact that we now have incontrovertible proof of it was unexpected.

She’s landed on her feet though, as the Clinton campaign has announced that she, “Will serve as honorary chair of her campaign’s 50-state program to help elect Democrats around the country.”

One thing that we can be certain of now is that DWS will never be the Speaker of the House.

I rather hope that this makes it more likely that Tim Canova defeats her in the primary.

Microflaccid Screws the Pooch

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A court in France has ruled that Windows 10 illegally invades user privacy, as well as being too insecure:

A French regulator has issued Microsoft a formal warning over Windows 10, saying the operating system collects excessive amounts of personal data, ships that information illegally out of the EU, and has lousy security.

The warning comes from the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), an independent data privacy watchdog with the power to levy fines against companies. The CNIL has been investigating Windows 10 since its launch and has now drawn up a damning list of criticisms.

“The CNIL has decided to issue a formal notice to Microsoft Corporation to comply with the Act within three months,” said the group on Wednesday.

………

Chief among the regulator’s concerns is the amount of information Windows 10 slurps up about its users and sends back to Microsoft’s servers. While all recent flavors of Windows send some information back to Redmond, Windows 10 harvests much more and the CNIL considers this intrusive and also not needed to run the OS.

It could also be breaking the law. The collapse of the Safe Harbor agreement last year didn’t stop this flow of data from French users back to the US, and the CNIL is concerned that Microsoft made no attempt to comply with the law. The watchdog estimates that there are at least 10 million Windows users in the Euro nation.

This in addition to buying Nokia’s cell phone business, where they wrote down over 7 billion dollars , and then they sold off the Nokia brand.

And then there is the whole ribbon thing in the more recent versions of Office.

Why is this company still a going concern?

Speaking of Paranoid Megalomaniacs in Turkey

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TURKEY: List of the massive numbers involved in the #TurkeyPurge following failed coup. – @ashishjena94pic.twitter.com/elnmyynoaa

— Conflict News (@Conflicts) July 19, 2016

It’s been three days since the coup attempt, and Erdogon is using it as an excuse to destroy the civil service and make it another one of his private fiefdoms:

Turkey’s post-coup crackdown took a more sinister turn on Tuesday after tens of thousands of teachers were fired and all the country’s university deans were told they faced suspension.

The licences of 21,000 staff working in private schools were revoked, more than 15,000 employees at the education ministry were sacked, and the state-run higher education council demanded the resignation of 1,577 university deans.

The purge is part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s heavy-handed attempt to root out supporters of Fethullah Gülen, the US-based cleric accused of orchestrating the failed revolt, whose movement is accused of infiltrating state institutions.

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 The suspensions followed Monday’s purge targeting other ministries and state institutions.
The employees include 9,000 police, 2,745 judges, 8,777 from the interior ministry 1,500 from the finance ministry, 257 staff working at the prime minister’s office, at least 100 from the National Intelligence Agency MIT, 399 from the family and social affairs ministry and 492 from the religious affairs ministry.

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 There was speculation that Mr Erdogan might try to put in place a state of emergency so as to take full control of all state institutions.

It’s pretty clear that they had a list of people to purge long before the attempted coup was set in motion.

This is not going to end well.

The Coup Fizzles, and Things in Turkey got Worse

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Now the coup has been put down, the crackdown on innocent members of the opposition begins:

Turkey widened a crackdown on suspected supporters of a failed military coup on Sunday, taking the number of people rounded up in the armed forces and judiciary to 6,000, and the government said it was in control of the country and economy.

 President Tayyip Erdogan and the government accused the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, a former ally whom Erdogan accuses of trying to create a “parallel structure” within the courts, police, armed forces and media, of orchestrating the coup.

 Erdogan’s supporters of gathered in front of his Istanbul home to call for the plotters to face the death penalty, which Turkey outlawed in 2004 as part of its efforts to join the European Union.

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 With expectations growing of a heavy clampdown on dissent, European politicians warned Erdogan the coup attempt did not give him a blank cheque to disregard the rule of law, and that he risked isolating himself internationally as he strengthens his position at home.

 Broadcaster NTV cited Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag as saying more arrests were expected.

 By Sunday evening, authorities had rounded up nearly 3,000 suspected military plotters, ranging from top commanders to foot soldiers, and the same number of judges and prosecutors after forces loyal to Erdogan crushed the attempted coup on Saturday.

Arresting 3000 judges and prosecutors?

Tell me that Erdogan is not using this an excuse to further buttress his his grip on power.

It also looks like he’s going to use the events of this past weekend in an attempt to blackmail the US into extraditing a political opponent of his living in exile in Pennsylvania:

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly emboldened after crushing a coup attempt, is testing his country’s key defense relationship by demanding the U.S. turn over a cleric he accuses of inspiring the uprising.

Erdogan on Sunday repeated his challenge to the U.S. to extradite Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in exile in rural Pennsylvania, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry balanced comments about considering such a request with criticizing the Turks for implying the U.S. had involvement in the coup attempt.

“If we’re strategic partners, I’m saying, carry through on your strategic partner’s request,” Erdogan said in Istanbul. “When you wanted a terrorist, we delivered him to you. Now we’re saying deliver this guy who’s on our terrorist list to us.”

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An immediate point of tension in the partnership was resolved Sunday when the U.S. resumed flights out of Incirlik Air Base, a staging point for the fight against Islamic State in both Syria and Iraq, according to Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook. Operations at Incirlik were halted Saturday after the Turkish government closed its airspace to military aircraft and cut off commercial power to the base, which hosts about 1,500 American military personnel and aircraft.

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“You have to begin to be concerned that if the U.S. continues to resist the extradition request and other requirements, would the Turkish government restrict use of Incirlik, would they start impacting our operations against ISIS,” said Heather Conley, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They are a crucial ally — the location is very, very important, but they have been an extremely challenging ally to work with.”

Kerry said Turkey would have to submit a formal request for extradition and prove its accusations. “Give us the evidence, show us the evidence,” he said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

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The chances of the U.S. extraditing Gulen, who has lived in the country for nearly 20 years, are slim, said Brett Bruen, a former official in Obama’s National Security Council and now president of the Global Situation Room consulting firm.

“I don’t see a scenario at the moment at least in which he is extradited to Turkey,” Bruen said. “The evidence that has been presented that he was somehow behind this coup is still not there. And obviously there would be very real concerns about what would befall him if he were turned over to Turkish authorities.”

This has turned into a complete clusterf%$#.