Category: Schadenfreude

James Dobson Forced Out of Focus on the Family

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My view of the conflict between Dobson and the FoF board is, but to quote Henry Kissinger, “too bad they can’t both lose.”

In any case, he’s stepped down from all corporate positions and his radio show, and starting a new radio show separate from the organization.

The cause of the split between appears to be the unwillingness of the board to make his son heir apparent, because they don’t approve of divorce, and Ryan Dobson got one in 2001.

Gee, self-importance masquerading as morality is a bitch, ain’t it?

Republican Family Values

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California State Senator Roy Ashburn (R-18th district) was cited for DUI after leaving a gay bar:

An anti-gay California state senator was placed under arrest for drunk driving after leaving a gay bar. A male passenger was in the vehicle along with the lawmaker was not arrested, reported Sacramento CBS affiliate Channel 13.

State Sen. Roy Ashburn was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol at about 2:00 a.m. on March 3 when his state-issued vehicle was observed being driven erratically. The driver, identified as Ashburn, was taken in and charged for driving under the influence. Channel 13 reported that unidentified sources said the senator had been at Faces, a popular gay nightspot, prior to his arrest.

According to TPM, this guy was big into banning gay marriage.

It Sucks to be Blanche Lincoln Right Now

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The polls say, “Bummer of a birthmark, Blanche.”

Her poll numbers are in the toilet, and she looks unelectable in the general election, and now Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter has announced that he is running against her in the Democratic Primary, and the AFL-CIO has decided to come out against the Senator from Wal-Mart and the Insurance Companies Arkansas to the tune of a $3 million independent expenditure.

And, yes, I’ve added Mr. Halter to my Act Blue Page as well.

This is one of the cases where it’s a win-win.

We have a pseudo-Democrat who will lose anyway, and by taking her out in the primary, we have a chance a real Democrat taking the seat.

Sally Quinn Demoted to Dirty F%$#ing Blogger

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She’s had a regular column, “The Party,” which was basically about throwing parties, in the print edition of the WaPo, but it’s going online only, or, as Gawker so evocatively states it, “Sally Quinn Relegated to WaPo Ghetto.”

Basically, she devoted an entire article to the horror that is a scheduling conflict between two weddings, and it crossed line between accommodating whatever affection that Posties might have her husband, Ex Editor-in-Chief Ben Bradley, and projectile vomit risking revulsion, so she’s gone, hopefully for good. (No link to Sally, you can get the link at the first link, look for, “enormous turd,” but I don’t link to Sally Quinn)

In any case, one wag had fun with it in an online chat with a Wapo columnist:

Burke, Va.: I’m so confused!

Our ex-boss’ wife (HIS third wife) still writes for the company newsletter. Last week, she wrote a column about how her son’s wedding is on the same day as her husband’s granddaughter’s wedding, on opposite coasts, and nobody can figure out why we’re supposed to care. I guess everybody likes the old man so much that everybody’s afraid to tell his wife that her column is absurd and makes the company newsletter look stupid.

Any suggestions?

Lily Garcia: It sounds like the column, although inappropriate, is basically harmless. You could try suggesting topics that you would like to see covered in the newsletter, but you should stop short of proposing that the ex-boss’ wife be excluded.

In any case, this means that the level of discourse in Washington, DC has improved by a small amount.

Microsoft Is Outrourcing Legal Work to India

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I have to admit that this development engenders no small amount of Schadenfreude:

Software giant Microsoft will begin outsourcing general legal work to India after signing a deal with legal process outsourcing (LPO) company CPA Global. The news comes as CPA outlined plans to expand its Indian workforce from 600 to 1,000 by the end of 2011, and hinted at opening another outsourcing centre.

Outsourcing to India: It’s not just for engineers any more.

What I want to see is outsourcing applied to investment bankers and brokers.

Oh, This is Rich

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Bummer of a birth mark, Harold

You know that Harold Ford, chairman of the corporatist squish faux Democratic DLC and failed US Senate candidate in Tennessee is considering a Senate run in New York State.

Well, now it turns out that he’s never filed a New York state tax return, despite the fact that he has been employed at Merrill Lynch since 2007:

Ford claims to have moved to New York three years ago, and says paying “New York taxes” makes him a New Yorker. But his spokeswoman confirms to Gawker that he’s never filed a New York tax return — meaning that he’s never paid New York’s income tax, despite keeping an office and a residence in New York City as a vice chairman of Merrill Lynch since 2007: “He pays New York taxes and will file a New York tax return in April for the first time,” Ford’s spokeswoman Tammy Sun told Gawker. “He will file all necessary personal disclosure and tax forms that candidates are required to file if he chooses to run.” (According to Sun, Ford admitted to the tax dodge yesterday at a press availability in Albany, but we can’t find any news accounts mentioning the remarks.)

Now it appears that there has been some damage control from his PR folks, who are now saying that he will be filing a return for the first time in April, which means that he’s been breaking New York state law, which requires that out of state residents pay taxes on income earned in New York, and so file.

Someone has broken the law, and put his foot in it again.

Note: Tennessee, of course, has no personal income tax.

[on edit] Not completely true: There are no income taxes in Tennessee on wages and salaries, other forms of income, interest and dividends for example, are taxable.

Don’t Let the Door Hit Your Ass on the Way Out, Billy Boy

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So PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) has just fired* Billy Tauzin, because the deal that he cut with the Obama administration, basically a few penniess in promised savings so as to forestall price controls and drug reimportation.

Now that the healthcare plan is in shambles, it’s likely that stuff will be passed piecemeal, and high on that list will be drug reimportation.

Tauzin got his $2 million a year job because he pushed through the Medicare drug benefit, which was basically sloppy anilingus to PhRMA, and the gig was his payoff.

Couldn’t happen to a more evil piece of sh%$.

*Yes, I know that the story says that a, “friend of Mr. Tauzin, speaking on condition of anonymity,” says that he is, “leaving the trade group job voluntarily to pursue other activities,” but seriously, don’t take us for idiots.

In the News of the Unsurprising

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The soon to be ex-wife of South Carolina Governor Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford says that he refused to promise fidelity in his wedding vows:

South Carolina first lady Jenny Sanford recalls how she made the “leap of faith” to marry husband Gov. Mark Sanford even though the groom refused to promise to be faithful, insisting that the clause be removed from their wedding vows.

“It bothered me to some extent, but … we were very young, we were in love,” she said in an exclusive interview with Barbara Walters to air on “20/20” Friday. “I questioned it, but I got past it … along with other doubts that I had.”

Sanford and her marriage were thrust into the national spotlight in June 2009 when her husband admitted that he had been secretly visiting his longtime lover in Argentina instead of hiking the Appalachian Trail, as he had told his staff.

Imagine that.

On the brighter side, I imagine that he learned how to Tango.

Let Me Get This Straight………

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Investors are suing Bank of America, charging that the bank (and I use the term loosely) deceived investors over the terms of bonuses to Merrill Lynch executives prior to the vote to acquire the brokerage.

Well, it appears that much BoA’s defense appears to be that if its investors ignored what they said, and read the financial press, they would have known anyway, but the judge just shot down that argument:

Bank of America Corp. suffered a setback in its defense to civil claims that it misled investors after a judge ruled that it may not introduce at a trial testimony about media reports predicting it would pay bonuses.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued the lender on Aug. 3 claiming it misled investors about bonus payments while buying Merrill Lynch & Co. Bank of America said in a November 2008 proxy statement that Merrill agreed not to pay year-end bonuses when the bank had already agreed to Merrill’s paying as much as $5.8 billion, the SEC claims. A trial is scheduled for March in New York.

As part of its defense, Bank of America has argued that shareholders already knew, as a result of media reports, that Merrill would likely pay billions of dollars in bonuses. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan today barred the bank from offering testimony about such reports because the proxy statement itself told shareholders to ignore them.

“In effect, the bank is arguing that, even though it expressly warned its shareholders to disregard the media, it can now defend itself by asserting that a reasonable shareholder would have disregarded these warnings and, by consulting the media, perceived that the bank’s alleged lies were immaterial,” Rakoff wrote in a six-page opinion. “Even a zealous advocate might perceive that such an argument hints at hypocrisy.”

(emphasis mine)

So your argument is that you were telling a baldfaced lie, and everyone knew that you were lying?

Well, good luck with that.

When your defense against fraud charges is that the newspapers had shown that they were lying sacks of s%$#, I think that you are missing this whole “how to win the case” thing.

Speaking of Michelle Bachmann’s Frothing at the Mouth Lunacy on the Census

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Click for full size



The Crazy, It Burns US!!!!

She has stopped asking people not to fill out the Census over the past few months.

Why is this? Well, perhaps it’s because if Minnesota loses a Congressional district, it’s likely it will be her district that goes the way of those dinosaurs that she does not believe in:

State demographer Tom Gillaspy has been
warning for months that the next census
could result in the loss of one congressional s
eat in Minnesota. In fact, he confessed last
week that, until the recession hit, he was
almost resigned to the probability that
Minnesotans would be allowed to elect only
seven U.S. House members from newly
drawn districts in 2012.

……………

It’s ironic that a Minnesota member of Congress, Republican Michele Bachmann, went so far last summer to declare her intention to only partially complete her census forms, and to suggest reasons for others not to comply with the census law. If Minnesota loses a congressional seat, Bachmann’s populous Sixth District could be carved into pieces. She likely would have to battle another incumbent to hang on to her seat. We’ve noticed that her anticensus rhetoric has lately ceased. We hope she got wise: Census compliance is not only in Minnesota’s best interest, but also her own.

As Eric Kleefeld notes at TPM:

The really fun fact, as I’ve learned from Minnesota experts, is that Bachmann’s district would likely be the first to go if the state lost a seat. The other seats are all fairly regular-shaped, logical districts built around identifiable regions of the state (Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Iron Range, and so on). Bachmann’s district is made of what’s left over after such a process, twisting and turning from a small strip of the Wisconsin border and curving deep into the middle of the state. As such, the obvious course of action if the state loses a seat is to split her district up among its neighbors.

Basically, her district is made up of all those areas left over after they did the first 7, which are made up, in classic “Minnesota Nice” manner to be contiguous and to represent regions accurately and fairly.

I’d say that Karma was a bitch, but that would probably make Brit Hume angry.

London Bankers Discover Taxes in Switzerland Too

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Yes, all those bankers who are trying to move to Geneva to avoid the UK Bonus tax have discovered that Switzerland has a 44% tax rate, and that the posh private schools for their kids are already full:

Geneva, touted as a haven for London bankers facing heavier U.K. taxes, may lure fewer than predicted thanks to a housing shortage, crowded schools and a 44 percent income-tax rate.

Barclays Plc President Robert Diamond this month joined a chorus of financial leaders in arguing that the U.K.’s 50 percent tax on bonuses would drive bankers away from London. The Swiss Private Bankers Association said the “arbitrary” tax will boost the allure of Geneva, whose bankers oversee about 10 percent of the world’s foreign-held private wealth.

“It’s a joke, it’s lobbying,” said Tim Dawson, an analyst at Geneva-based brokerage Helvea AG. “People are dreaming if they think the London investment banking world is going to move. There is more office space in Canary Wharf than in the whole of Switzerland,” he said, referring to London’s second financial district.

I also think that the bankers “misunderestimate” the degree to which people actually want them there, making city centers prohibitively expensive for ordinary people while they make demands for subsidies from lawmakers.

If there is a lesson from the Minaret fiasco in Switzerland, it’s that they don’t like foreigners there, whether they are hard working immigrants from the Middle East, or parasites from London.

Facebook Founder Completely PWN36* By Facebook Privacy Policy

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Bummer of a birth mark, Mr. Zuckerberg

I check Facebook every day or soo, and I feed my blog there, albeit imperfectly, so when the came up with a privacy policy update, I didn’t pay too much attention, until I heard lots of people complaining.

Management there said it was no big deal, but then about 300 personal photos of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were made public to the general public:

In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook’s recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users’ profiles, photos and friends lists available on the web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up.

Kashmir Hill, a blogger for True/Slant, first reported Zuckerberg’s new exposure, noting, “Either Mark Zuckerberg got a whole lot less private or Facebook’s CEO doesn’t understand the company’s new privacy settings.” Under the new privacy regime, user profiles are exposed to the web unless users are proactive about limiting access.

So, what did Morty make public?

  • His wall
  • His photo albums
  • The fact that he is a Taylor Swift fan
  • Graphic (!?!) photos of “The Great Goat Roast of 2009”
  • The time, date, and location of the Facebook corporate holiday party.

Oopsie.

*Owned.

Republican Family Values

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Former Missouri House Speaker Rod Jetton*, a Republican who fought to keep a law criminalizing gay sex in that state, has been charged with felony assault for beating and choking his girlfriend during a sexual encounter.

His defense, it appears is that, “she did not use the agreed on ‘safe word’ to end the activities”, but she is accusing him of having drugged her.

You can find excerpts of the police report here.

*Sounds like a pr0n star name.

Dana Milbank is a Complete Tool

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So, Dana Milbank has one of his Washington Sketch columns in the Kaplan Test Prep Company today, and it’s all about how Max Baucus f%$#ing his employee and then recommending that she be made US Attorney isn’t a big deal because he is, “just too much of a nerd for a sex scandal to stick.”

He then goes on to describe why this should the the strategy of other people involved in sex scandals, including a recent scandal involving a sports figure who is on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.

You see, it’s no news when a sitting Senator sexually harasses an underling while still married, and then tries to get her appointed to a position of trust within the Department of Justice, but some sports figure chasing skirts, that’s a big deal.

Needless to say, if it had been a real Dem, instead of Max Baucus, Milbank would have been all over the scandal like US Magazine, but because it’s one of the “Moderates,” everything is just ducky:

Yet his colleagues jumped to his defense when word got out Friday night — in contrast to the initial reaction to other senatorial sex scandals. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) immediately announced his “full support” for Baucus.

That’s because he’s not giving blow jobs in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, wearing diapers, or paying hush-money and diverting campaign funds to his mistress’s benefit.

Truth be told, I’m inclined to think that what what John Ensign did was worse: He used both the apparatus of the Senate, and the Apparatus of the Republican Party* to benefit his mistress and her family, while Baucus banged a chippie who worked for him and recommended her for a plum position†.

But as to Larry “Wide Stance” Craig, and David “Diaperman” Vitter, these transgressions did not bear on their official duties beyond the hypocrisy angle.

The reason, of course, that Baucus is getting so much support is because there are other Senators out there doing the same thing: i.e. banging staff, not the US Attorney bit, and so the Senate rallies to him, because too many of them have the same vulnerability.

Wanker supreme Dana Milbank rallies to Baucus’ side because he’s an inside the beltway punk, and because he thinks that he’s being witty.

Wanker.

*It’s wrong. I feel schadenfreude because it happened to Republicans, but it’s still wrong.
†Pun intended.

Shadenfreude

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Remember when I talked about the folks at AIG who were threatening to leave because the Pay Czar wants to limit their pay to just $½ million?

Well, one of the most vociferous opponents of the pay limits, AIG General Counsel, Anastasia Kelly, has been informed that her services are no longer required.

Considering her history, that, “before joining the bankrupt firm, was a GC at such reputable organizations as MCI/WorldCon (sic) and Fannie Mae,” I’m not sure why anyone would require her services ever.

Heh.

As I’ve said before: The US government is a majority shareholder in the insurance firm, and as such, it should be making it clear to the board of AIG that they would enforce non-compete agreements to the fullest extent of the law.

Wishing That I Was a Brit

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Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling will be levying a tax on excessive bonuses:

Alistair Darling will try to force a “permanent culture shift” in the City as he announces a one-off punitive super-tax of more than 50% on the bonuses of tens of thousands of bankers as the centrepiece of the pre-budget report.

The chancellor intends his targeted, one-off levy as a clear message that the City has to “start living in the real world” as the financial sector prepares to lavish hefty payouts on its staff.

The new super-tax rate will be aimed at any bonus above a fixed rate, rather than the basic salary of the employee. It is intended to hit many thousands of bankers, but low-paid staff in bank branches will be exempt.

The tax will be set higher than the 50% income tax rate coming in from April for those earning more than £150,000 a year, sources indicate.

Needless to say, the bankers don’t like this, calling the measure, “populist, political and penal.”

I think that they meant the statement as a condemnation, but I found it to be a complement, though I do like the alliteration.

The details are not clear, but I would suggest something on the order of 93% of anything in excess of £400,000.

Dean 1: The Dean 0

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He should be president

So, David Broder, the, “Dean of the Washington press corps”, goes after Harry Reid for having the temerity to challenge his august pronouncements on healthcare reform, and Howard Dean slams him, calling him a sanctimonious “gossip columnist.”

There was an inside the beltway columnist whose head explodes, and Dean handed him his head too, when the guy lies about the CBO iumbers.

Damn, I really that Howard Dean were in his 2nd term right not, rather than Barack Obama being in his 1st term.