Category: Legislation

Governor Ratf%$# Just Got Served

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Yesterday, he Maryland legislature overrode 5 of Governor Hogan’s vetoes:

The Maryland General Assembly on Thursday overturned five of Gov. Larry Hogan’s 2015 vetoes, turning the bills into law and proving that the Democratic-controlled legislature can enforce its will despite opposition from a popular Republican chief executive.

The resurrected measures dealt with public marijuana smoking and pot paraphernalia; police seizures of criminal assets; taxation of online hotel-booking services; and funding to renovate an arts center in Annapolis.

Overturning a veto requires the approval of three-fifths of the 141-member House of Delegates and the 47-member Senate. Both chambers completed the process for the five measures Thursday.

………

The Senate postponed action on Hogan’s veto of a bill that would grant voting rights to felons who are on parole or probation, pushing the vote to Feb. 5 so that a vacant seat can be filled.

Miller said this week that the vote of the new senator could be critical. The voting-rights bill passed the Senate last year with 29 votes, exactly the number needed to override Hogan’s veto.

I really hope that they expand voting rights.

Removing voting rights from felons is an evil relic of Jim Crow.

And Now, Even the Rich People are Throwing Rahm Emanuel Under the Bus

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Since emails came out revealing the Rahm Emanuel administrations aggressive efforts to manage and suppress information on the Laquan McDonald shooting, Rahm’s old friends, basically rich corrupt people from whom he has raised money from over the years, have been avoiding him like the plague.

One of his very good friends, they have vacationed together and Rauner was a former client of Emanuel’s, was wingnut, gazillionaire, and now Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner how has announced that he would sign a bill allowing for a recall vote for the Chicago Mayor:

Fresh from a Saharan Desert holiday where he says he and his family rode camels and slept in tents, Gov. Bruce Rauner did nothing Monday to quell the shifting sands beneath Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

 Rauner told reporters he would sign a bill allowing Chicago voters to recall their mayor from office if it reaches his desk.

 The governor also said he was “very disappointed” in Emanuel and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez over their handling of Chicago police misconduct cases.

 ………

 Asked about state Rep. La Shawn Ford’s legislation that would allow Chicago voters to attempt recall the mayor, Rauner said he hasn’t studied the bill but based on what he’s been told about it, “I would sign that bill.”

 The governor went on to say that he would also be “broadly supportive of the recall concept in general for all elected officials in the state. … That would be the best bill to pass.”

6 months ago, I would not have predicted the degree to which his power base, once thought to be unassailable, to have collapsed like this.

It’s gone from a crazy guy on the street corner rant to an implosion in a very short time.

Additionally, it appears that people appointed after the sh%$ hit the fan have absolutely no interest whatsoever in having his back:

The new chief of the agency that looks into shootings by Chicago police officers says she wants to hear out an investigator who was fired by her predecessor last July after refusing orders to change findings that the cops were at fault in several cases.

Sharon Fairley, acting chief administrator of the Independent Police Review Authority, last month reached out to the investigator, Lorenzo Davis, a former Chicago police commander.

“I’d like to hear about his side of what happened,” Fairley said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “I look forward to that conversation and I think that that will be happening soon.”

Davis’s lawyer, Torreya Hamilton, said an attorney with the city’s Law Department called two weeks ago to set up the meeting. Hamilton said Davis, who is suing the city for wrongful termination, is eager to meet with Fairley. The sides have not yet set a time and place.

Fairley, a former federal prosecutor appointed a month ago by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, said she also wants to examine the work that got Davis fired.


………



WBEZ revealed Davis’s termination and his resistance to orders by IPRA superiors that he change findings about at least a dozen incidents, all shootings or alleged excessive-force cases.

Davis said Monday evening he would welcome Fairley’s review of his findings. “I’d like to be present when she does it,” he said. “It’s better to review a report with the person who wrote it.”

………

Fairley’s predecessor, Scott M. Ando, was forced out as IPRA’s chief administrator after heading the agency since 2013. Ando, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, filled several key IPRA posts with former sworn law-enforcement officers, including two other former DEA agents, a WBEZ investigation found.

Fairley did not directly criticize Ando’s hiring but said the agency needs “stronger independence.”

“I was a prosecutor for eight years, where my job was to collect evidence and then make the call,” said Fairley, who worked at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago. “That’s what I’m planning on doing here.”

Fairley also insisted she is independent from Emanuel despite a pile of email messages that show coordination between his aides and IPRA in recent years.

“Yes, I’m in communication with the mayor’s office,” Fairley said. “They’ve been very helpful in helping me get situated here but they have not tried to direct my activities or tell me what to do. I don’t have any pressure on me from the mayor to conduct an investigation any particular way.”

Fairley serves at the pleasure of Rahm Emanuel.

The fact that she is subtly dismissive of the Mayor’s office is significant.

I’m hoping that Rahm ends up recalled, and in jail, and it actually looks like these outcomes are no longer outside of the range of possibility.

Well, It’s a Start

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In order to fund health benefits for 911 first responders, the fees for H1B visas have been doubled, and the software houses in India who abuse the program are unamused:

The United States is set to pass a bill named the “9/11 Health and Compensation Act” and Indian IT companies are mad as hell about it.

The bill delivers funding to compensate those whose lives were impacted by the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York. To keep those dollars flowing, the Bill has changed the amount businesses must pay to secure an H1-B or L1 visa to bring workers into the USA.

Indian IT companies use those visas a lot, to bring people from India to work in the USA. Use of such visas has become an issue in the US presidential election, as some candidates seek to curb use of the permit in order to promote employment of local workers. Critics of H1-B visas also argue that they are used to keep wages low, as by bringing in foreign workers it becomes possible to give them a modest pay bump to cope with the cost of living in the US without paying them the same wage as permanent residents or citizens.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the H1-B, Congress will on Friday double the cost of using one to US$4,000, with the increase funnelled into funds for the victims of 9/11.

India’s large IT concerns, which are among the heaviest users of H1-Bs, are livid because the fee increase will push up their costs. So livid that when Barack Obama called Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to thank him for help negotiating the Paris climate change agreement, Modi pointedly “shared with President the concerns of the Indian IT industry and professionals on the proposed legislation in the U.S. Congress relating to H1B and L1 visas.”

The H1B program is about letting people in who cannot be found in the US.

The Indian IT firms, as well as large IT firms in the US, use it to cut their labor costs, both by hiring cheap slave labor, and by pushing down wages for domestic workers.

I think that this fee should be closer to $40,000 than it is to $4,000.

Companies should never save money by bringing in H1B and L1 visas.

As to Tata and Infosys and the rest of the Indian software firms, they can take the implicit subsidy to their business model that comes from the H1B program and shove it up their ass.

This is Repugnant

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It appears that the Danes have have become the Donald Trumps of Europe:

Denmark vows to strip refugees of their valuables to help pay for the cost of resettlement. Weddings rings are off limits.

As if refugees needed yet another reason not to want to resettle in Denmark after the country placed “Don’t come here” ads in Arabic newspapers over the summer, now the country warns it will strip immigrants of their valuables.

The latest anti-refugee sentiment came closer to reality on Sunday when Denmark’s parliament debated a measure that would allow border police to strip incoming refugees of all valuables and cash worth over €300 to help offset costs of resettlement, according to Swedish STV television.

After some discussion, the Danish government apparently decided that refugees could keep their wedding rings, cellphones, and laptops in the measure that will eventually go up for a vote. At least one Danish parliamentarian reportedly insisted that wedding rings with a diamond over a certain carat weight should also be confiscated.

Sören Pind, Denmark’s immigration minister, told Danish television that the plan was the only way the country could afford to house the refugees seeking asylum. “I’m talking about a situation in which there are personal items of significant value but no sentimental worth,” Pind told the television station. “I’m talking about a situation in which a man comes along with a case full of diamonds and asks for protection in Denmark. That’s only fair.”

Fair, perhaps, in that strange world in which theft is OK. The measure, whether it eventually passes or not, raises the question of whether certain European countries really think it is OK to repeat the Nazi approach to immigration, during which the confiscation of valuables was the practice.

I’m with the Danish journalist who said, “Having armed men indiscriminately seize refugees’ personal belongings doesn’t strike me as the best representation of a free society.”

But wait there’s more:

Denmark has promised that any of the 13,000 asylum seekers who are eventually granted a right to stay will be forced to live in segregated tent camps erected in two tent cities and that they will defy European standards and triple the normal waiting period for family reunification as a further deterrent.

So, stealing their stuff, and putting them in internment camps.

This?  From the Danes?

What do they think they are?  Germans?

Can Someone Please Hang Him from the Empire State Building by His Underwear?

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Martin Shkreli is at it again:

After dropping $2 million on a Wu-Tang Clan album, the pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has found a new project: making an essential treatment unaffordable for poor immigrants from Latin America.

Shkreli, otherwise known as “pharma bro,” gained notoriety earlier this year when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, increased the price of a drug used to treat AIDS patients from around $13.50 to $750. He’s now the CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, which recently announced its plans to submit benznidazole, a treatment for Chagas disease purchased earlier this month, for Food and Drug Administration approval next year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 300,000 people in the United States have the deadly disease. Most of them are immigrants from Latin America, where as many as 8 million people are infected.

………

Right now, doctors in the U.S. obtain benznidazole free of charge through the CDC. According to Rachel Cohen, the regional executive director of the Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative in North America, the drug sells in Latin America for somewhere between $60 and $100 for each course of treatment. Both of these would change the moment the FDA approved benznidazole from any company—and Shkreli, in particular, seems determined to price this drug out of reach of the people who need it. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, KaloBios wrote that it expects to price the Chagas drug similarly to antivirals for Hepatitis C, which can cost almost $100,000 for a single course of treatment in the United States.

………

The CDC currently purchases benznidazole from a Brazilian company. They used to send less than a dozen treatments a year to physicians across the country, according to Susan Montgomery, who leads the epidemiology team at the CDC’s Parasitic Diseases Branch. But after blood banks started testing people for Chagas in 2007, that number spiked.

In theory, FDA approval for benznidazole would make it more accessible to patients: Right now, because benznidazole isn’t approved, a patient who needs the drug has to be enrolled in a clinical trial in order to receive it from the CDC. In practice, though, the current plans for pricing will negate any good that could come from removing the drug’s “experimental” label.

………

Recently, the FDA added Chagas to a special program for neglected diseases. If a pharmaceutical company submits a drug for a disease on the program’s list, the FDA gives the company a “priority review voucher.” That voucher lets companies bring another drug to the FDA for expedited review, usually around six months between submitting the application and receiving a decision (a process that usually takes years. The hope is that the program will incentivize companies to invest in new treatments for neglected diseases that afflict the poorest regions of the world. But companies aren’t required to come up with new drugs to get those fast-track vouchers. The drugs only have to be new to the FDA. (Companies can also sell those vouchers for big money—last August, for example, United Therapeutics sold its voucher for $350 million.)

Last month, Doctors Without Borders, joined by a number of other public-health organizations, asked the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to amend this voucher program. The groups argued that companies should be eligible only if they actually invest in researching and developing new treatments for neglected diseases, and that they should be required to submit a strategy for how they would keep the drugs accessible for patients.

“If this price hike were to happen, it would be a complete disaster for Chagas patients in the United States,” Cohen said. “People affected by this disease in the United States are poor, are marginalized, have very limited access to health care to begin with. It would be catastrophic.”

2 years ago, on the occasion of actor Jack Klugman’s death, I noted that one of the things that he was lauded for was lobbying for the Orphan Drug Act of 1983.

I took issue, and said that the effect of the act was to manufacture non-patent monopolies that primarily served to raise the cost of drugs through rent-seeking behavior.

The IP restrictions and incentives that are a part of the US medication development regime are killing and impoverishing us.

How about price controls and compulsory licensing?  That sounds good.

It’s Back

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After having their plans to thwarted by activists, CISA is back:

US librarians have joined with a host of civil liberties groups to condemn a cybersecurity bill now passing through Congress they claim will be both “unhelpful” and “dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties”.

The American Library Association, the world’s oldest and largest library affiliation, has joined with 18 other groups including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and FreedomWorks to issue a letter to the White House and Congress urging lawmakers to oppose the final version of a bill they claim will dramatically expand government surveillance while failing to tackle cyber-attacks.

Politicians from both sides of the House have been pushing for stronger cybersecurity measures in the wake of the Paris attacks and the recent San Bernardino shooting.

Republican House speaker Paul Ryan has been leading the charge to push through legislation and reconcile two bills, the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA) and the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement with the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (Cisa), a controversial bill that passed a Senate vote in October.

The speed with which Ryan is trying to push through a compromise has worried privacy activists. “We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager at digital rights advocate Access, said in a recent email to supporters. “They’ve been negotiating in secret and came up with a Frankenstein bill – that has some of the worst parts from both the House and the Senate versions.”

  • According to the letter’s signatories, the proposed “conference” legislation would:
  • Create a loophole that would allow the president to remove the Department of Homeland Security, a civilian agency, as the lead government entity managing information sharing.
  • Reduce privacy protections for Americans’ personal information.
  • Overexpand the term “cyber threat” to facilitate the prosecution of crimes unrelated to cybersecurity.
  • Expand already broad liability protection for information disclosure.
  • Pre-empt state, local or tribal disclosure laws on any cyber-threat information shared by or with a state, tribal or local government.
  • Eliminate a directive to ensure data integrity.

They are going to keep trying until we put a stake through the heart of the surveillance industrial complex.

The Stupid, It Burns Us!!!!!!

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The good people of Woodland, North Carolina have defeated a solar power plant in their community, because they don’t want it sucking the sunlight away from the crops.

No, I am not joking:

The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don’t want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off the kids. “All the young people are going to move out,” warned Bobby Mann, a local resident concerned about the future of his burg. Worse, Mann said, the solar panels would suck up all the energy from the Sun.

Another resident—a retired science teacher, no less—expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would block photosynthesis, and prevent nearby plants from growing. Jane Mann then went on to add that there seemed to have been a lot of cancer deaths in the area, and that no one could tell her solar panels didn’t cause cancer. “I want information,” Mann said. “Enough is enough.”

These comments were reported not in The Onion, but rather by the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald. They came during a Woodland Town Council meeting in which Strata Solar Company sought to rezone an area northeast of the town, off of US Highway 258, to build a solar farm. The council not only rejected the proposal, it went a step further, voting for a complete moratorium on solar farms.

To quote the movie Billie Madison, “What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

That is Going to Leave a Mark………

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Tervor Noah had a very special guest on The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been obstructing a bill to pay for the health coverage for the first responders at the Twin Towers because he wants to hold it hostage to a change in oil export policy.

Jon Stewart came out of retirement, and appeared as a guest.

He also went down to Congress to harangue what were clearly uncomfortable Senators and Representatives.

Watch the whole thing, particularly the round table toward the end.

It sucks to be Mitch McConnell on even the best of days, this makes it suck even more.

Because Comedy Central vids autoplay on some platforms, I have put the video after the break

Tha Bankster’s Lose One

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In the highway bill, congress has significantly reduced dividends paid by the Federal Reserve to banks:

Big banks will lose a portion of a multibillion-dollar government handout they’ve enjoyed for over 100 years, thanks to a compromise highway bill released Tuesday. One estimate pegged the loss to the banks at $8 billion to $9 billion over a 10-year time frame.

 The bill, as it emerged from a House-Senate conference committee, pays for roads, bridges, and mass transit projects in part by reducing what is currently a 6 percent annual dividend on stock that the big banks buy to become members of the Federal Reserve system.

 Fed membership offers many perks, from access to processing payments to cheap borrowing. But the dividend could be the sweetest gift, because banks cannot ever lose money on the stock; they’re even paid out if their regional Fed bank disbands.

 Despite the total lack of risk, member banks have received the 6 percent dividend payout every year since 1913.

 So for example, JPMorgan Chase, which has held stock since then, has made back its investment six times over without risking any loss. And if the bank stock was in place before 1942, that dividend payment is tax-free.

 Originally — that is, 100 years ago — the Fed offered the dividend to entice banks into the new Federal Reserve system. But nationally chartered banks are today required by law to become members, and all banks must abide by the standards of membership. So the dividend is just a vestigial sweetener that never went away, pumping billions of dollars in public money to the banks for no discernible reason.

………

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, seeing no better option, stuck a version of it in the Senate highway bill. The provision called for cutting the dividend from 6 percent to 1.5 percent, eliminating $17 billion in big-bank subsidy over a 10-year period. It passed.

The banks freaked out, aided by Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who warned of unnamed “unintended consequences.” Through a well-worn lobbying strategy, they managed to get the House of Representatives to remove the dividend cut and replace it with a raid on the Fed’s capital surplus account, which is used to cover losses on the balance sheet.

In other words, Yellen and the Fed quietly preferred flushing their own surplus account over denying banks their full entitlement.

But when the final bill was released Tuesday, the dividend reduction remained in there, albeit with some modifications.

The reduction now applies only to banks with over $10 billion in assets, compared to the $1 billion threshold in the original bill. Instead of cutting the dividend to 1.5 percent, the rate will now match the interest rate of the highest-yield 10-year Treasury note at the point that the dividend is due. For context, the high yield at the last Treasury auction was 2.304 percent.

There are, however, some more giveaways to the banksters in the bill, including an attempt to exempt even more mortgage lenders from Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight.

Cui Bono?

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As Bear who Swims observes, it turns out that the latest “bipartisan” efforts to reform criminal justice have been hijacked by a Koch brothers attempt to make it next to impossible to prosecute white colar crimes:

For more than a year, a rare coalition of liberal groups and libertarian-minded conservatives has joined the Obama administration in pushing for the most significant liberalization of America’s criminal justice laws since the beginning of the drug war. That effort has had perhaps no ally more important than Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by a pair of brothers who are well-known conservative billionaires. Now, as Congress works to turn those goals into legislation, that joint effort is facing its most significant test — over a House bill that Koch Industries says would make the criminal justice system fairer, but that the Justice Department says would make it significantly harder to prosecute corporate polluters, producers of tainted food and other white-collar criminals. The tension among the unlikely allies emerged over the last week as the House Judiciary Committee, with bipartisan support, approved a package of bills intended to simplify the criminal code and reduce unnecessarily severe sentences.

………

One of those bills — which has been supported by Koch Industries, libertarians and business groups — would make wholesale changes to certain federal criminal laws, requiring prosecutors to prove that suspects “knew, or had reason to believe, the conduct was unlawful,” and did not simply unknowingly violate the law.

Many laws already carry such a requirement — known as “mens rea” — but Congress left it out of many others, and libertarian groups say that has made it too easy to unknowingly violate obscure laws. Some environmentalists argue, however, that the real motive of Charles Koch, the philanthropist and the company chairman, in supporting the legislation is to block federal regulators from pursuing potential criminal actions against his family’s network of industrial and energy companies, a charge the company denies.

………


The proposed standard, Justice Department officials said, might have prevented guilty pleas in a variety of cases, such as the charges filed in 2013 against Jensen Farms of Colorado for failing to adequately clean cantaloupe, resulting in an outbreak of food-borne illness that was cited as a factor in at least 33 deaths. It also might have prevented the plea in the 2012 charges against the owner of a pharmacy who sold mislabeled, super-potent painkillers blamed in three deaths.

The same powers, officials said, have allowed the government to pursue charges against major corporations, like the 2011 conviction of Guidant, the giant medical device company, for failing to report safety problems with defibrillators, used to restart heartbeats.

………

Mark V. Holden, general counsel and senior vice president at Koch Industries, acknowledged in an interview this week that the company’s efforts to pursue revisions in federal criminal law were inspired in part by a criminal case filed 15 years ago against Koch Industries claiming that it covered up releases of hazardous air pollution at a Texas oil refinery. Those charges resulted in a guilty plea by the company and a $20 million penalty.

That case, Mr. Holden said, demonstrated that the Justice Department too often pursues criminal cases even when the accused had no criminal intent. The company itself discovered the problems and notified the authorities, he said, meaning the company did not knowingly violate the law.

Yeah, right.

Koch industries did nothing wrong.

If you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida for you.

I was wondering when the other shoe would drop.

I kind of figured that there would be a Republican turd in the punch bowl.

Traitors

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And no, I am not talking about treason against the United States, which is, as I have noted before, very specifically defined in the Constitution, the only crime so defined.

Rather, I am suggesting that the House vote to exclude Syrian refugees is treason against the whole of humanity, which necessary has a less specific definition:

Responding to increased fears of terrorism in the United States following the Paris attacks, the House of Representatives passed a Republican-backed bill Thursday that would temporarily freeze Syrian and Iraqi refugees’ entry into the United States and revamp the vetting process. The bill passed 289 to 137, with near-unanimous support from Republicans and 47 Democrats backing the measure.

………

The bill “would immediately shut down resettlement of refugees from the Syria and Iraq region,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) said Wednesday. “This rash reaction ignores the fact that all of the Paris attackers identified thus far are either French or Belgian, and that many terrorist threats are homegrown.” A Syrian passport was discovered by the body of one of the Paris attackers, but French officials said soon afterward that it was a forgery.

The bill does not explicitly halt admission of Syrian refugees, a response that some Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), called for this week. But it does require additional vetting of refugees by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, without specifying the procedures. Implementing the bill “would cause a pause” in the admission of refugees, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters.

It would also increase the FBI’s role in the screening process and require the secretary of homeland security, the FBI director, and the director of national intelligence to personally certify to Congress that each individual refugee is “not a threat” to the United States.

I’m sure that someone out there is going to talk about the reality of politics, but most of these districts are safe enough that the only way that a caught on camera eating babies.

When I make quick look at the list, a few names stick out;

  • Patrick Murphy, who was a Republican bankster until he wanted to run for Congress, and is now the establishment’s choice to run for Florida Senate.
  • Steve Israel, former Blue Dog who has been single minded in attempting to restore that caucus.
  • Marcy Kaptur, who defeated Dennis Kucinich in the primary after they were redistricted together.
  • Dan Lipinski, who inherited the seat from his father, and is the most reactionary Democrat in Congress.

There are a couple of Reps on this list who are not complete tools, like Louise Slaughter, but it doesn’t matter.

This vote is that bad.

After the break is a list of the Dems who voted for this.

  • Pete Aguilar (CA-31)
  • Brad Ashford (NE-02)
  • Ami Bera (CA-07)
  • Sanford Bishop (GA-02)
  • Julia Brownley (CA-26)
  • Cheri Bustos (IL-17)
  • John Carney (DE-AL)
  • Gerry Connolly (VA-11)
  • Jim Cooper (TN-05)
  • Jim Costa (CA-16)
  • Joe Courtney (CT-02)
  • Henry Cuellar (TX-28)
  • John Delaney (MD-06)
  • Lloyd Doggett (TX-35)
  • Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02)
  • John Garamendi (CA-03)
  • Gwen Graham (FL-02)
  • Gene Green (TX-29)
  • Janice Hahn (CA-44)
  • Jim Himes (CT-04)
  • Steve Israel (NY-03)
  • Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
  • Bill Keating (MA-09)
  • Ron Kind (WI-03)
  • Annie Kuster (NH-02)
  • Jim Langevin (RI-02)
  • Dan Lipinski (IL-03)
  • Dave Loebsack (IA-02)
  • Stephen Lynch (MA-08)
  • Sean Maloney (NY-18)
  • Patrick Murphy (FL-18)
  • Rick Nolan (MN-08)
  • Donald Norcross (NJ-01)
  • Scott Peters (CA-52)
  • Collin Peterson (MN-07)
  • Jared Polis (CO-02)
  • Kathleen Rice (NY-04)
  • Raul Ruiz (CA-36)
  • Tim Ryan (OH-13)
  • Kurt Schrader (OR-05)
  • David Scott (GA-13)
  • Terri Sewell (AL-07)
  • Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-09)
  • Louise Slaughter (NY-25)
  • Marc Veasey (TX-33)
  • Filemon Vela (TX-34)
  • Tim Walz (MN-01)

TransCanada Loses Again

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They just gave up on a lawsuit in Nebraska over their attempt to assert extraordinary eminent domain rights:

TransCanada announced on Tuesday that the company will pull out of the lawsuit filed by over 100 Nebraska landowners challenging their right to use eminent domain to seize land for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Facing mounting legal expenses and a likely loss in court, the company will instead go through the Public Service Commission (PSC) review process it had originally hoped to avoid.

“We believe that going through the PSC process is the clearest path to achieving route certainty for the Keystone XL Project in Nebraska. It ultimately saves time, reduces conflict with those who oppose the project and sets clear rules for approval of the route,” said a representative of the company in a statement.

The PSC process will take at least a year, and cannot move forward if and when President Obama rejects the federal permit for the pipeline.

………

“TransCanada realizes that LB 1161 is unconstitutional,” added Art Tanderup, a farmer whose land is on the proposed pipeline route. “This is a victory for landowners standing up to prevent a foreign corporation from taking their land for corporate greed through eminent domain. TransCanada pushed LB1161 through the legislature to avoid using the Public Service Commission procedure that they now want to follow. We believe that the PSC will not allow Keystone XL to be placed in the Sand Hills or over the Ogallala Aquifer but are confident President Obama will reject the pipeline before the PSC even has a chance to conduct a review.”

So, TransCanada, the company that ignores regulations, and leans on lawmakers to exempt them from regulations, and then has their pipelines blow up, has decided that their latest attempt to subvert the regulatory prices isn’t going to work.

They lose, and the rest of us win.

I can live with that.

John Boehner Just Issued a Big F%$# You to the Teabaggers

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I guess that it’s one way to have some fun as he is heading out the door:

House Speaker John Boehner said Sunday that there will be “no” government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding, and signaled plans to pass the Senate stop-gap funding bill with help from Democrats.

“I expect my Democratic colleagues want to keep the government open as much as I do,” Boehner, R-Ohio, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

The interview was Boehner’s first since announcing his resignation Friday.

The announcement came as Republican leaders spar over how to handle a series of budget extension proposals to keep the federal government operating past Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. Moderates within the House GOP caucus had been pushing for any plan that will avoid a shutdown while more conservative members had vowed to strip funding from Planned Parenthood programs at any cost.

If Boehner was still trying to remain speaker, he would not have done this.

Never underestimate the the power of someone who has given his last f%$#.

Zombie Ideas

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The New York Times editorial board notices that Republicans are trying to privatize IRS tax collection yet again:

Buried in the Senate-passed version of the big highway bill is a provision that would require the Treasury secretary to use private debt collectors to collect unpaid back taxes.

The provision, added to the bill by Republican leaders, is ostensibly intended to help pay for highways. But it’s a bad idea that should be kept out of the House version of the bill and out of any final compromise version.

Private tax collection was tried in the 1990s and in the 2000s. Both times it lost money. It increases the cost of handling complaints and appeals at the Internal Revenue Service, and it is far less efficient than simply increasing the collection budget of the I.R.S.

Worse, it fosters taxpayer abuse. The debts involved are ones that the I.R.S. has not been able to collect, in part because the taxpayers are too hard-pressed to pay up. A private company is probably not going to have better luck unless it uses abusive tactics.

And yet, private tax collection is an idea that keeps resurfacing. Why? One reason is that it would be a cash cow for the four companies likely to win tax-collection contracts, two in New York, one in California and one in Iowa.

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, has argued in the past that using federal money to pay private companies for tax collection would create jobs at those companies. But it would be better to increase the I.R.S. budget to create middle-class public-sector jobs in professional tax collection than to throw money at low-paying private-sector contractors who cannot do the job as well.

 Thank you Senator Schumer for whoring for your debt collector campaign contributors.

This sh%$ is just evil.

34

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34 Democrats have now said that they will oppose any Republican attempt to override the nuclear deal with Iran, which means that they cannot override a promised veto:

Just before the Senate left town for its August break, a dozen or so undecided Democrats met in the Capitol with senior diplomats from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia who delivered a blunt, joint message: Their nuclear agreement with Iran was the best they could expect. The five world powers had no intention of returning to the negotiating table.

“They basically said unanimously this is as good a deal as you could get and we are moving ahead with it,” recalled Senator Chris Coons, the Delaware Democrat who lent crucial support to the deal this week despite some reservations. “They were clear and strong that we will not join you in re-imposing sanctions.”

For many if not most Democrats, it was that message that ultimately solidified their decisions, leading to President Obama on Wednesday securing enough votes to put the agreement in place over fierce and united Republican opposition. One after another, lawmakers pointed to the warnings from foreign leaders that their own sanctions against Iran would be lifted regardless of what the United States did.

It is the proverbial, “Big f%$#ing deal.”

The reality is that this is as good a deal as can be expected, and if it gets reversed, our allies will not return to the sanctions regime, so it is basically a done deal, but I still expect a Terri Schiavo type political clusterf%$# for the organization formally known as “The Party of Lincoln.”

Russia Declares Blatant CIA Front Organization to Be “Undesirable”

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Russia has now officially declared that the National Endowment for Democracy is an undesirable organization, which limits their actions, and the actions of organizations that they fund, in that country:

Vladimir Putin! Now you’ve really done it. You have had the temerity to declare our National Endowment for Democracy (NED), America’s most important Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to be “undesirable.” Where will this end? Don’t you respect our right, as a US Government-financed NGO, to meddle in internal Russian affairs? After all, we are the most important NGO of the world’s Sole Superpower. We can go wherever we want and do whatever we like. We are truly upset!

This is the clear reaction of Washington to the decision by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office on July 28 to declare the activities of the US National Endowment for Democracy as “undesirable in the territory of Russia.” The official statement stated that, “the National Endowment for Democracy used Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations under its control to take part in campaigns aimed at denying the legitimacy of results of Russian elections; organize political actions designed to influence the authorities’ decisions and discredit the service in the Russian Armed Forces.” It further elaborated, “In pursuit of these goals, the fund allocated about 2.5 million US dollars to Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations in 2013-2015.”

Vladimir Putin! Now you’ve really done it. You have had the temerity to declare our National Endowment for Democracy (NED), America’s most important Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to be “undesirable.” Where will this end? Don’t you respect our right, as a US Government-financed NGO, to meddle in internal Russian affairs? After all, we are the most important NGO of the world’s Sole Superpower. We can go wherever we want and do whatever we like. We are truly upset!

This is the clear reaction of Washington to the decision by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office on July 28 to declare the activities of the US National Endowment for Democracy as “undesirable in the territory of Russia.” The official statement stated that, “the National Endowment for Democracy used Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations under its control to take part in campaigns aimed at denying the legitimacy of results of Russian elections; organize political actions designed to influence the authorities’ decisions and discredit the service in the Russian Armed Forces.” It further elaborated, “In pursuit of these goals, the fund allocated about 2.5 million US dollars to Russian commercial and non-commercial organizations in 2013-2015.”

Under Russia’s law on Undesirable NGOs, adopted by the Duma or parliament and signed into law by President Putin this May, any foreign or international non-governmental organization could become “undesirable” if it threatened the foundations of Russia’s constitutional order, the country’s defense capability and the security of the Russian state.

Significantly, in a statement regarding the decision, Russia’s Foreign Ministry named Carl Gershman, the neo-conservative who has been president since NED was founded in 1983. They noted that Gershman said – absolutely openly – that the NED organization was intended to be a beautiful facade for distributing funds among opposition circles in foreign countries. That suggests they have done their homework very well before banning the NED.

………

The NED, along with Freedom House, has been at the center of all major US State Department-financed ‘color revolutions’ in the world since 2000 when it was used to topple Milosevic in Serbia. The NED was created during the Reagan Administration to function as a de facto CIA, privatized so as to allow more freedom of action. Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, said in a Washington Post interview in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

………

The majority of the historic figures linked to clandestine CIA actions have at some time been members of the Board of Directors or the Administrative Council of the NED, including Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Henry Cisneros, and Elliot Abrams. The Chairman of the NED Board of Directors in 2008 was Vin Weber, campaign fundraiser for George W. Bush in 2000. Gershman, head of the NED since its creation to the present, worked closely with Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams and Frank Gaffney. Gershman was in a sense ‘present at the creation’ of the political-intelligence faction known as neo-conservativism.

On September 26, 2013, weeks before Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich announced he would join Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union rather than the less appealing EU “associate membership”, Gershman wrote an OpEd to the Washington Post where he called Ukraine “the biggest prize,” explaining that pulling it into the Western camp could contribute to the ultimate defeat of Russian President Putin. Gershman wrote, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents. Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

In other words, NED is a US government-financed entity that intends to topple Russia’s elected President because he displeases the folks in the Washington neo-con war faction.

Notably, at the same time as Russia is banning NED under its new Undesirable NGO law, China has just signed into law its Overseas NGO Management Law to restrict foreign NGO’s there. Last October, the same National Endowment for Democracy financed the Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution protests and the NED is financing Uygur separatists in China’s Xinjiang Province, cross-roads of all major Chinese oil and gas pipelines from Russia and Kazakhstan.

The NED, Freedom House, and their ilk are bad for a number of reasons:

  • These government funded organizations are structured with their primary goal of removing activities promulgated by the state security apparatus from Congressional oversight.  This has been the case since (at least) William Casey took over the CIA with the goal of exempting it from all budget constraints and oversight in 1981.
  • It has the effect of tarring all NGOs with the stigma of involvement with the CIA and its ilk.
  • It makes it too easy for the CIA to overthrow and destabilize foreign governments, which almost always ends up biting us in the butt.

District Attorneys in California Have One Fewer Way to Let Killer Cops Walk

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California has just passed a law that forbids the use of secret grand juries to investigate police involved shootings:

Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation Tuesday making California the first state in the nation to ban the use of grand juries to decide whether police officers should face criminal charges when they kill people in the line of duty.

The ban, which will go into effect next year, comes after grand juries in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York, made controversial decisions in secret hearings last year not to bring charges against officers who killed unarmed black men, sparking protests across the country. Calls for transparency also have come amid national concerns about disparate treatment of blacks and other racial minorities when encounters with cops turned deadly in Baltimore, Cincinnati and South Carolina.

“What the governor’s decision says is, he gets it — the people don’t want secrecy when it comes to officer-involved shootings,” said retired judge and former San Jose independent police auditor LaDoris Cordell, the first African-American appointed as a judge in Northern California and a key supporter of the bill. “We’re not trying to get more officers indicted. We’re saying, ‘Whatever you decide, do it in the open.'”

What we have seen recently is that there are a lot of DA’s out there who use grand juries to justify not pursuing bad cops.

Now those DA’s will no longer have plausible deniability.

Now it will go to a preliminary hearing, with a judge, and where defense counsel can contest the facts and the law, in public.

It’s not creating a state level prosecutor who’s only job is investigating and prosecuting police shootings, but it’s better than the status quo.

Judge to Idaho “Ag Gag” Law: Drop Dead

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The law, which criminalizes whistleblowing on farm and the agriculture industry has been overturned on free speech grounds:

A federal judge has lifted a controversial ban on undercover surveillance inside Idaho’s factory farms, delivering a significant victory to animal rights’ activists.

Judge B Lynn Winmill ruled on Monday that the state’s so-called “ag gag” law violated the constitutional right to free speech.

“An agricultural facility’s operations that affect food and worker safety are not exclusively a private matter,” said the judge. “Food and worker safety are matters of public concern.”

The agriculture industry’s political allies passed the law last year after an undercover investigator with the advocacy group Mercy for Animals used a hidden camera to expose cruelty and neglect at Bettencourt Dairies, Idaho’s largest dairy factory farm.

The 2012 exposé documented workers beating, kicking and shocking cows, twisting their tails and dragging them with chains attached to their necks.

………

The state’s $2.5bn dairy industry said the sting was an attempt to hurt businesses and rallied legislators in the state capitol to pass a law making it a crime to film inside agricultural facilities. Governor CL “Butch” Otter signed it.

………

Judge Winmill agreed. He said the law violated the first amendment and the equal protection clause because it was motivated in substantial part by animus towards animal welfare groups.

“The effect of the statute will be to suppress speech by undercover investigators and whistleblowers concerning topics of great public importance: the safety of the public food supply, the safety of agricultural workers, the treatment and health of farm animals, and the impact of business activities on the environment.”

Existing laws against trespass, fraud, theft and defamation sufficed to protect the dairy industry from wrongful intrusion, he said. “These types of laws serve the property and privacy interests … but without infringing on free speech rights.”

A well deserved smack-down, but I would also argue that the law violated the constitutional injunction against bills of attainder, as well as the 14ᵗʰ amendment’s injunction against unequal treatment under the law, and this law is specifically formulated to favor just one business activity.

Of course, judges, real ones, not folks like Scalia, Alito and Thomas, try to keep their rulings as narrow as possible, so I understand why the opinion was written that way.

Of course, my opinion is offered with the caveat that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

IP Restrictions Run Amok

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The state of Georgia has characterized the act of posting its laws online as “terrorism”, clearly this is absurd:

Government officials have threatened “rogue archivist” Carl Malamud with legal action many times for his efforts to make public government documents widely available for free, but the state of Georgia has set a new standard for fighting this ridiculous battle: It’s suing Malamud for infringing its copyright of state laws by — horrors — publishing them online.

The state’s lawsuit, filed last week in Atlanta federal court, accuses Malamud of piracy — and worse, of “a form of ‘terrorism.'” His offense: Through his website, public.resource.org, he provides members of the public access to a searchable and downloadable scan of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated — that is, the entire body of state law. The state wants a court order forcing Malamud to stop.

Georgia and Malamud have been waging this battle for a couple of years, or ever since Malamud sent thumb drives bearing the scans to the speaker of the state House of Representatives in 2013. A cease-and-desist order, which Malamud rebuffed, came virtually by return mail.

This isn’t the first such battle Malamud has waged. For roughly two decades he’s been working to make public laws, codes and court documents, well, public. At almost every turn he’s been fought by government agencies that prefer to extract a fee from taxpayers for access, even though, as Malamud points out, the public pays for the work in the first place, via taxes.

………

The state’s own lawsuit acknowledges that the annotations are “valuable analysis and guidance regarding … state law.” And the core of its case isn’t that the annotations shouldn’t be broadly accessible, only that the state doesn’t want to pay the cost itself. LexisNexis shoulders the cost and in return gets the right to charge users, earning a profit.

If LexisNexis can’t recoup those costs because Malamud is providing a free alternative, the lawsuit asserts, the state “will be required to either stop publishing the annotations altogether or pay … using tax dollars.”

Well, yes. Isn’t that what taxes are for?

This is not something that the the state of Georgia should be playing anyone for this.

The state government has to have a copy of the laws and official interpretations in electronic form with annotations as a part of conducting business.

They don’t need to have LexisNexis extracting tolls from the citizenry to make this public.

The costs here are negligible to non-existent, and the assertion of copyright is absurd.

This is Just F%$#ing Evil

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And, of course, the targets of such an action are the poor, the mentally ill, and minorities, so the fact that the Senate version of the transportation bill will includes a measure that will cut off social security benefits to everyone who has an outstanding warrant:

The large transportation funding bill moving through the Senate would end Social Security benefits for 200,000 people who have an outstanding felony arrest warrant—but have never been convicted by a court, or have a warrant for violating probation or parole, according to disability rights advocates tracking the legislation.

………

“There are two key issues here,” said T.J. Sutcliffe, income and housing policy director for The Arc, a national disability rights organization. “One is that the Social Security Trust Fund should not be used for unrelated purposes, no matter how important. And the other is Congress is considering cutting off benefits to 200,000 people who rely on Social Security and SSI [disability] benefits, who, in the case of arrest warrants have never been convicted.”

The proposal surfaced in the Senate on Tuesday in a package of amendments (page 949, Section 52303) being added to a transportation bill. The House’s version of the bill only would have extended funds for several months, while the Senate is looking at a six-year proposal—which becomes a vehicle for many other languishing bills.

Slightly different versions of a bill to punish people with outstanding felony warrants, or warrants for violating probation or parole, were introduced in both chambers. Disability and low-income advocates were quick to criticize the proposals, saying that they will punish people who rely on Social Security with little law enforcement benefit.

“It would not help law enforcement secure the arrest of people they are seeking for serious crimes,” explained Justice In Aging. “Law enforcement is already notified of the whereabouts of every person with a warrant for a felony or an alleged violation of probation or parole who turns up in the Social Security Administration (SSA) databases.”

The anti-poverty law group listed 10 reasons why the proposal was unduly punitive and would have very draconian consequences:

  • “Those most likely to lose benefits are generally those most in need.
  • A significant number of people will become homeless when they lose their benefits.
  • Some people have had benefits cut off while residing in nursing homes.
  • A very high percentage of those who will lose their benefits are people with intellectual disabilities or mental illness.
  • An unusually high percentage of those who lose benefits are African-Americans.
  • Many will lose Medicare outpatient (Part B) coverage because of inability to pay the quarterly premium.
  • Eliminating what may be their only source of income does not help resolve these issues.
  • Many people never know that a warrant has been issued for them as warrants are often not served on the individual.
  • These warrants are often not easily resolved since many of those who lose benefits live far from the issuing jurisdiction.
  • SSA will have increased administrative costs for processing appeals and requests for waiver of recovery of overpayments.

“A majority of those affected who are receiving benefits based on disability fall into these categories,” it said. “Large numbers of those who will lose benefits had warrants routinely issued when they were unable to pay a fine or court fee or probation supervision fee.”

OK, it’s not, “Just F%$#ing Stupid”, it’s evil AND stupid.

What the hell is wrong with these people?