Category: Schadenfreude

Ha Ha!

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Right wing hate site Gab just got hacked, big time.

DDOSecrets, who previously had leaked racist and Islamophobic police training materials got almost everything, public posts, private posts, user info, passwords, etc.

These guys really do have spectacularly poor IT skills don’t they?

It’s the revenge of Bobby Droptables all over again

On the bright side, it save lots of aviation fuel.

Black helicopters are notorious fuel guzzlers: 

When Twitter banned Donald Trump and a slew of other far-right users in January, many of them became digital refugees, migrating to sites like Parler and Gab to find a home that wouldn’t moderate their hate speech and disinformation. Days later, Parler was hacked, and then it was dropped by Amazon web hosting, knocking the site offline. Now Gab, which inherited some of Parler’s displaced users, has been badly hacked too. An enormous trove of its contents has been stolen—including what appears to be passwords and private communications.

On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as “JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project” siphoned that data out of Gab’s backend databases in an effort to expose the platform’s largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump’s election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab’s public posts and profiles—with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site—but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. “It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content,” Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. “It’s another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6.”

DDoSecrets says it’s not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers. WIRED viewed a sample of the data, and it does appear to contain Gab users’ individual and group profiles—their descriptions and privacy settings—public and private posts, and passwords. Gab CEO Andrew Torba acknowledged the breach in a brief statement Sunday.

………

According to DDoSecrets’ Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab’s data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the site—a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn’t differentiate between a user’s input and commands in the site’s code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker’s reference to an “Anonymous Revival Project,” they’re not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do “want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists.”

It’s reassuring that all the Nazis so far seem to be Colonel Klink, but we cannot rely on that forever.

Pass the Popcorn

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Without comment, the Supreme Court has rejected Donald Trump’s bid to conceal his tax returns from the Manhattan prosecutor:

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected former president Donald Trump’s last-chance effort to keep his private financial records from the Manhattan district attorney, ending a long and drawn-out legal battle.

After a four-month delay, the court denied Trump’s motion in a one-sentence order with no recorded dissents.

District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has won every stage of the legal fight — including the first round at the Supreme Court — but has yet to receive the records he says are necessary for a grand jury investigation into whether the president’s companies violated state law.

Vance responded to the court decision with a three-word tweet: “The work continues.”

………

Vance’s inquiry is one of two known criminal investigations involving the former president. The other, led by the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, focuses on Trump’s controversial coversations with state officials amid his failed effort to overturn that state’s election result.

Trump has waged an extraordinary battle to keep private his tax records, which every other modern president has released as an expected part of seeking the presidency. The court’s action does not mean Trump’s tax records are to become public — Vance has said they will be protected by grand jury secrecy rules — but is likely to accelerate an investigation that might be Trump’s biggest legal threat.

………

Forensic accounting experts from FTI Consulting are expected to assist prosecutors in assessing whether the Trump Organization manipulated property values for tax breaks, or to obtain favorable loan rates, The Washington Post previously reported.

The investigation is fairly developed, but the tax returns are an integral part of the picture. The Supreme Court order — allowing Vance to execute the subpoena — could mean a lot of work is ahead for investigators as the records are voluminous, spanning eight years.

………

The current fight is a follow-up to a July decision by the high court that the president is not immune from a criminal investigation while he holds office.

………

Vance is seeking eight years of the former president’s tax returns and related documents as part of what was initially an investigation into alleged hush-money payments made ahead of the 2016 election to two women who said they had affairs with Trump years before — claims Trump denies. Investigators have indicated they want to determine whether efforts were made to conceal the payments on tax documents by labeling them as legal expenses.

I’m expecting the investigations to reveal that Trump is basically broke, despite the millions that he managed to extract from the government and government supplicants.

I will love to see him broken like a yearling horse, and I know that he’s going to whine about conspiracies, but, “That’s what I thought you’d say, you dumb f%$#ing horse.“*

*Credit where credit is due, I am quoting comedian John Mullaney.

IP Insanity in One Ironic Twist

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When I was your age, this is how we did memes!


Payback, Bitches!

A concert being live streamed on Twitch had its music replaced with 8-bit folk music because it included music from Metallica.

The interesting thing about this is that it was Metallica playing Metallica, which, considering their actions during the whole Napster affair, is rather amusing:

Long time copyright watchers know that Metallica sullied its reputation with tons of fans when it was the first band to sue the file sharing upstart Napster back in 2000 (and also sued three universities for “not blocking Napster”). The band’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, became an outspoken critic of file sharing and the internet, the early face of super wealthy musicians whining about the internet changing the way they did things, leading to the classic Money Good! Napster Bad! meme.

Over the years, Metallica has tried to do more to “embrace” the internet, but almost every time, fans jump up to remind them about what assholes they were towards the early internet experience.

And that brings us around to Friday evening, when Metallica was set to play a streamed “live” show to kick off BlizzCon (an event for video game company Blizzard). The event was streamed live on Twitch, which has had some copyright problems of late. It appears that as Metallica was playing, and the Twitch Gaming channel was streaming the concert, someone realized that there might be a copyright problem. As first called out by Rod Breslau, the channel inserted 8-bit folks music over Metallica’s live performance to avoid a situation that, uh, Metallica might sue over.

This is sweet, sweet payback, and I expect this to get memed to death.

People Are No Longer Afraid of Rat-Faced Andy

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Democratic members of the New York House and Senate are considering rescinding the Covid powers that they granted Andrew Cuomo in the budget bill following credible allegations that he and his administration covered up nursing home deaths for political advantage.

The fact that they are considering this at all is significant, Cuomo is known for his vindictive nature, and the fact that they are considering going against him means that they think that the time is right to do this.

It may be better to be feared than liked, but at some point, if the fear goes away, and everyone hates you, things can get unpleasant: 

Some Democrats in Albany have floated the legally dubious idea of threatening to rescind Gov. Cuomo’s pandemic powers and issue subpoenas as leverage in upcoming budget negotiations.

Over the weekend, the governor’s fellow Democrats, who control both houses in the Legislature, continued to hold discussions about scaling back Cuomo’s sweeping pandemic powers after a top aide admitted the state paused the release of nursing home death data over concerns it would be politicized by the Trump administration.

Senate Dems met virtually Sunday to consider rescinding the governor’s executive authority or potentially creating a commission that could outright reject executive orders, similar to a 10-member panel used in Connecticut, sources said.

The Legislature already has the ability to overturn any COVID-related executive order via a majority vote.

On Friday, 14 Democratic state senators, including a handful from the city, joined Republicans in backing the idea of taking away Cuomo’s emergency powers before they expire in April.

………

But threatening such actions, especially subpoenas, without intent to follow through in order to influence fiscal talks could backfire big time, insiders said. “It could legally be seen as extortion,” a source said.

Yeah, much in the same way that Marty Walsh’s insisting on a concert promoter using competent workers in Boston could be legally seen as extortion? (see prior post)

………

Barclay and others have spent months demanding subpoenas, hearings or a federal probe into the state’s nursing home policies amid the pandemic.

The Cuomo administration came under renewed fire last week, facing accusations of a coverup and mounting backlash over its failure to release a full count of nursing home deaths for nearly six months.

In a call meant to bridge a growing divide with fellow Dems, the governor’s most trusted confidant, Melissa DeRosa, told lawmakers that officials “froze” last year when the Department of Justice made an inquiry into elder care facilities.

DeRosa said the administration postponed responding to legislative requests and failed to include nursing home residents who died in hospitals in publicly available data because President Trump had turned the matter “into a giant political football.”

The call came two weeks after a report from Attorney General Letitia James estimated that the state was under-counting deaths of nursing home residents by as much as 50%.

Cuomo was not concerned about Trump, he delighted in fighting with him.

This was about his attempting to cast his incompetent and corrupt management of the Covid-19 crisis (It only looked good in comparison to Donald Trump) as a triumph rather than a disaster.

New York State needs to raise taxes on the wealthy, and to end the corrupt environment that Cuomo thrives in.

Those Old Family Ties

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Bummer of a Birth Mark, Jim

One of the stories floating around right now is that Mylan Pharmaceuticals jacked up the price of EpiPens by over 400% over the past few years.

Given the state of the American pharmaceutical industry, we’ve seen something similar from the 3 manufacturers of insulin colluding on price hikes,  it’s not a particularly surprising or unique state of affairs.

What is news however is that Heather Bresch, the company’s CEO, is the daughter of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Mylan is one of the most generous donors to him.

In fact, a former Mylan lobbyists, Michael Garrison, appointed  president of the University of West Virginia by Manchin when he was governor had to resign in disgrace when he bent the rules to give Heather Bresch an unearned MBA.

So now this linkup is hitting the mainstream news:

The growing congressional scrutiny of pharmaceutical giant Mylan over the high cost of EpiPens could prove awkward for Sen. Joe Manchin.

 The West Virginia Democrat’s daughter, Heather Bresch, is chief executive of the company, which appears to have hiked the price of the epinephrine auto-injector by 400 percent since 2007. The device, which is used to treat severe allergic reactions, now costs more than $600 per dose.

 This price increase has become a public relations disaster for Mylan and at least four of Manchin’s Senate colleagues are either pressing the company to reduce the cost of EpiPens, asking it to explain the price increase or requesting federal regulators to investigate the matter. Manchin is not a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has shown the most interest in probing Mylan’s pricing practices, and so far the senator is not discussing the issue.

Manchin has spent his time in the Senate being a Joe Lieberman Democrat, so I have absolutely no sympathy for the fact that he is getting jammed up by this.

About F%$#ing Time

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A federal judge has referred Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to federal prosecutors for a criminal invistagation:

A federal judge on Friday referred Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his second-in-command for criminal prosecution, finding that they ignored and misrepresented to subordinates court orders designed to keep the sheriff’s office from racially profiling Latinos.

In making the referral to the United States attorney’s office for criminal contempt charges, Judge G. Murray Snow of Federal District Court in Phoenix delivered the sharpest rebuke against Mr. Arpaio, who as the long-serving sheriff in Maricopa County made a name for himself as an unrelenting pursuer of undocumented immigrants.

Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan “have a history of obfuscation and subversion of this court’s orders that is as old as this case,” Judge Snow wrote in his order.

Sheriff Arpaio and Mr. Sheridan had also made numerous false statements under oath, Judge Snow wrote, and “there is also probable cause to believe that many if not all of the statements were made in an attempt to obstruct any inquiry into their further wrongdoing or negligence.”

The referral does not mean the sheriff will face criminal charges; it is up to federal prosecutors to decide whether to pursue the case. Still, if the prosecutors do not take the case, the judge could appoint a special prosecutor.

He needs to be tried, and given his record, he needs to held without bail while the case is adjudicated, because it’s clear based on his record that he will do everything within his power to obstruct any investigation of his activities.

If there any justice in the world, he would be kept in his own jail.

Metadata Fail

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California State Assemblyman Adam Gray demanded an expensive and potential paralyzing audit of the California Air Resources Board, in what was a blatant attempt to hamstring the organization.

Environmentalists, and anyone with two brain cells to rub together, suggested that he was doing the bidding of lobbyists.

Mr. Gray denied that he was carrying water for the fossil fuel industry, but it turns out that not only was he metaphorically carrying their water, he was literally carrying their letter.

Metadata from the document showed that it had been drafted by a lobbyist:

………

“I think the environmentalists are going to point you over here and say he’s taking oil money, he’s trying to block the program,” Gray said in an interview. “I’m not trying to block the program. I’m for fighting climate change.”

But in pushing for the audit, Gray got a big assist from the oil industry. The industry’s main lobbyist wrote the request.

Metadata in the Microsoft Word document in the draft request obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows that its author is Eloy Garcia. Garcia is the lead lobbyist for the Western States Petroleum Assn. or WSPA, which represents oil companies in Sacramento.



The letter that Gray and more than a dozen other lawmakers sent to the Joint Legislative Audit Committee on Aug. 4 was word for word the same as Garcia’s draft.

First, Adam Gray is completely, and most deservedly, owned.

Second, how many times does this have to happen before people get a clue? 

Information on removing the metadata is a quick Google search away.

And God Laughs

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Tony Perkins, conservative, bigot, and religious hypocrite, has said on numerous occasions that God sends natural disasters to punish us for not hating on the gay.

Guess whose home was just flooded in an act of God.

Using Mr. Perkin’s logic, it clearly means that he is closeted, because otherwise, his home would not have been flooded:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an organization labeled an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was left homeless by the destructive flooding that has ravaged southern Louisiana this week, killing 11 people and destroying an estimated 40,000 homes.

Perkins, who has claimed that God uses natural disasters such as hurricanes and flooding to punish people for sinning (in particular homosexuals and their supporters), had his own home destroyed by the Lord Almighty. The hate group leader says he was forced to escape his destroyed home by canoe, reports JMG.

Perkins called into his own radio show to talk about the disaster of “biblical proportions” that, according to Perkins, will force his family to live in a camper for the six months it will take to rebuild his home.

I don’t claim to be a pious man, or a spiritual man, or even a good man, so I can freely admit that this development amuses the hell out of me, particularly since this Elmer Gantry wannabe denies anthropogenic climate change, which was the proximate cause of the warming.

Sauce for the Gander

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After decades of merrily hacking into other people’s computers and snooping on people’s emails, it appears that the NSA has been hacked.

A group of hackers are trying to auction off malware that the spy organization has been using to spy on the rest of us:

A mysterious online group calling itself “The Shadow Brokers” is claiming to have penetrated the National Security Agency, stolen some of its malware, and is auctioning off the files to the highest bidder.

The authenticity of the files cannot be confirmed but appear to be legitimate, according to security researchers who have studied their content. Their release comes on the heels of a series of disclosures of emails and documents belonging mostly to Democratic officials, but also to Republicans. Security researchers believe those breaches were perpetrated by agents thought to be acting on behalf of Moscow.

The NSA did not answer Foreign Policy’s questions about the alleged breach on Monday. But if someone has managed to penetrate the American signals intelligence agency and post its code online for the world to see — and purchase — it would constitute a historic black eye for the agency.

………

The files posted over the weekend include two sets of files. The hackers have made one set available for free. The other remains encrypted and is the subject of an online auction, payable in bitcoin, the cryptocurrency. That set includes, according to the so-called Shadow Brokers, “the best files.” If they receive at least 1 million bitcoin — the equivalent of at least $550 million — they will post more documents and make them available for free.

The set of files available for free contains a series of tools for penetrating network gear made by Cisco, Juniper, and other major firms. Targeting such gear, which includes things like routers and firewalls, is a known tactic of Western intelligence agencies like the NSA, and was documented in the Edward Snowden files. Some code words referenced in the material Monday — BANANAGLEE and JETPLOW — match those that have appeared in documents leaked by Snowden. Security researchers analyzing the code posted Monday say it is functional and includes computer codes for carrying out espionage.

If this hack is real, my guess is that they got in through backdoors that the NSA itself insisted on.

Brownback’s Folly

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Turns out Speaker Boehner is indeed enjoying Kansas primary night. Just received this from former staffer! pic.twitter.com/hIzmFt8hn0

— carl hulse (@hillhulse) August 3, 2016

Well, Boehner is happy

Yesterday was primary night in Kansas, and Governor Sam Brownback’s motley crew of Teabagger scum got served:

A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators lost their seats as moderate Republicans made Tuesday’s primary election a referendum on the state’s budget problems and education funding.

Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, of Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. Bruce’s defeat came amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies that appeared to spell trouble for conservatives.

“The way the state has been going, we have so many problems, and we need some changes to be made,” said Stanley Prichard, a 46-year-old manufacturing worker from Hutchinson, who voted for Berger in the Republican primary.

Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state’s most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.

The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state’s fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Browback got a sh%$ load of money a few years from the Koch Brothers to get antediluvian reactionary candidates, and once they were elected, they proceeded to destroy the state.

Their theory was that if they lowered taxes on rich folk to next to nothing, and strip mined government, that prosperity would ensue.

As you can see, it did not work.

BTW, one of the most obnoxious of Teabaggers in Congress, Tim Huelskamp, just got crushed in the primary.

Boehner is having a glass of wine to celebrate because he drinks a lot, and because Huelskamp was the most Teabagger of the Teabagger Caucus in the House of Representatives, and undermined the then Speaker at every turn.

I think that the new members of the state lege are in for a rude awakening if they think that Brownback will see this as anything by an excuse to double down on his failed policies, because in his mind, wing nuttery can never, it can only be failed.

Kansas will be having interesting times, as in the Chinese curse, over the next few years.

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.

I’m Doing a Happy Dance Here

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Roger Ailes has left the building:

In the dark for days, Fox News staffers finally got word on Thursday about the future of their network.

The news was delivered in person by Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old media mogul who started Fox News with Roger Ailes 20 years ago.

It was an unexpected visit, and with stunned employees listening in Fox’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, Mr. Murdoch announced that Mr. Ailes was out as chairman and chief executive. Mr. Murdoch himself would be taking over Fox News in the interim.

Mr. Ailes was not there. Mr. Murdoch had barred him from the building starting on Wednesday, according to one person briefed on the matter. The person said Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, had learned Mr. Ailes was trying to get some of his on-air stars to criticize those who cooperated with investigators looking into accusations of sexual harassment against him.

………

Mr. Murdoch will assume the role of chairman and will be an interim chief executive of the Fox News channel and Fox Business Network until a permanent replacement for Mr. Ailes is found. His interim role is intended to ensure stability during the rest of the presidential race, and to be taken as a signal that the network is not on the verge of a wide-ranging overhaul, said a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Murdoch plans to be “extremely engaged” and had already been attending some news meetings because Mr. Ailes has had health issues recently, the person said.

I think that a lot of this is also driven by the fact that Fox News has horrible demographics, the average age of a viewer is 68, which means that the audience is literally dying off.

To change this, the network needs an extensive rework, and Ailes was clearly not the man for the job.

My guess is that they will stick with the current format and lineup through the elections, and then they start rearranging the deck chairs.

I So Hope that DWS Loses the Primary

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We now have reports that Bernie Sanders will cmapaign against Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in the upcoming Congressional primary:

In an interview with USA Today, Bernie Sanders announced plans for the Sanders Institute and other educational and political organizations to continue the revolution his campaign spawned.

Sanders will also be campaigning for at least 100 progressives around the country—including democrat Tim Canova, Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s primary congressional challenger.

………

With Sanders’ endorsement for Clinton behind him, his next steps leading up to the Democratic National Convention are to maintain a progressive presence within the party. As Wasserman Schultz was spared in negotiations for Sanders’ endorsement, the next best way to maintain a progressive presence is by ensuring she loses her reelection bid to a more progressive alternative like Tim Canova.

Canova has already raised over $2 million in his congressional race against Wasserman Schultz, in large part thanks to contributions from disenfranchised Sanders supporters. His momentum has received backlash from Democrats keen on keeping Wasserman Schultz in Congress.

………

Even though Wasserman Schultz’s Democratic primary is just around the corner—on August 30—she has consistently refused to debate Canova, and has limited her exposure as DNC chair. While Wasserman Schultz has avoided the public eye, Canova has exposed a litany of her policy shortfalls among progressives. The Miami Herald reported that Wasserman Schultz broke down in tears after the Florida AFL-CIO declined to endorse her, due to her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement—which Canova staunchly opposes.

Gee. She has a sad, because a labor union declined to endorse her because she has proved herself implacably hostile to the needs and desires of that union.

This is how politics is supposed to work.

Canova’s support for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau guidelines pushed Wasserman Schultz to flip-flop in her support for payday lenders. He also recently challenged Wasserman Schultz’s vote in favor of the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act, which allows pension and benefit cuts to 400,000 American workers—many of them teamsters and union members.

Gee, supporting loan sharks, the TPP, and gutting union pensions?  I can’t imagine why, “the Florida AFL-CIO declined to endorse her.”

I so hope she is sent packing in the primary.

Schadenfreude, New Labour Edition

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As if the Labour coup could not get any more pear shaped, his opponents are now at Each Other’s throats:

The Labour party has been engulfed by a fresh bout of infighting as the camps of the two potential “unity candidates” set to fight Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership embarked on their own war of words.

On the eve of a pivotal week for the future of the party, one MP supporting Angela Eagle accused rival Owen Smith of using “sneaky tactics” to manoeuvre himself into being the sole challenger.

Meanwhile, a senior MP supporting Smith claimed there was an overwhelming consensus that only one candidate should emerge, and warned that currently supportive MPs would not give Eagle their nomination if she did not swiftly recognise the situation.

“Angela needs to be very careful,” said the source. “It is not a question of who deserves to be leader; it is about the best possible candidate to beat Jeremy.”

The row blew up following Smith’s public declaration in a BBC interview on Friday that Corbyn should be presented with just one challenger. The formal window for MPs to declare their support for a leadership candidate starts on Monday and finishes on Wednesday.

Smith suggested in his interview that either the deputy leader, Labour’s national executive committee or the parliamentary party could devise a process to whittle the two challengers down if they both had the required 51 nominations to go on the ballot paper.

However, sources close to Eagle immediately dismissed that suggestion, pointed out that the candidate who won the fewest nominations became leader last year and that she was “in it to win it”.

One angry MP backing Eagle described Smith’s suggestion as an attempt to “bully Angela into some sort of corner”.

The circular firing squad metaphor app is even more apropos for Labour than it is for the Democratic party.

Your Daily Schadenfreude

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Almost two years ago, I mocked hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s jihad against Herbalife.

The nickel tour was that he went heavily short on Herbalife, and then he aggressively lobbied regulators to shut the company’s business model down.

Ackman’s actions were a primer on how Wall Street types used the political and regulatory processes in an attempt to enrich themselves.

He asserted that Herbalife’s business model was essentially a pyramid scheme, and now the FTC has ruled against some of the supplement manufacturer’s business practices, but the ruling was limited, and Ackman’s short bets will not pay off:

For nearly four years, Herbalife has been locked in a fierce Wall Street battle with billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman. But on Friday the dietary supplements seller scored an enormous victory in this fight.

The Federal Trade Commission said on Friday that it had charged Herbalife with deceiving consumers into believing they could earn substantial money selling diet nutritional supplements, but it did not determine that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme or fraud like Ackman had alleged for years. Herbalife said on Friday it will pay $200 million in a settlement with the FTC. The settlement will force Herbalife to change some of its key business practices, but the regulatory investigation of Herbalife will not end with the type of knock-out blow that Ackman clearly had hoped.

The FTC did make strong accusations against Herbalife, claiming that Herbalife’s compensation structure was unfair because it “rewards distributors for recruiting others to join and purchase products in order to advance in the marketing program, rather than in response to actual retail demand for the product, causing substantial economic injury to many of its distributors.”

………

Still, the FTC settlement looks to be another big setback for Ackman, whose Pershing Square hedge fund is under pressure after suffering large losses over the last 12 months, mostly from a disastrous big bet on Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a company with a stock that has crashed. Pershing Square has a long-running and very large short position in Herbalife.

………

Ackman’s Pershing Square Holdings has already plunged by 19.1% this year after falling by 20.5% in 2015, and Ackman’s assets under management have fallen sharply. Ackman has suggested that he would continue to pursue his crusade against Herbalife even if his effort to get U.S. regulators to shut the company down was unsuccessful. He once said he would go “to the end of the earth” in his battle against the company and became teary eyed on a stage when describing the damage he believed it had done.

………

Michael Johnson, Herbalife’s longtime CEO who has been at the forefront of the company’s battle against Ackman, argued the settlement was a big win. The company also announced that it had reached a $3 million settlement of an investigation conducted by the Attorney General of Illinois that had also hung over the company. “The settlements are an acknowledgment that our business model is sound and underscore our confidence in our ability to move forward successfully, otherwise we would not have agreed to the terms,” Johnson said in a statement.

It’s nice to see a self styled hedgie “geniuses” taken down a few notches.

This is Good News, Not Bad News

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It appears that in response to the Brexit vote, house prices in London have fallen.

This is actually a good thing. Ordinary people have been priced out of London by overpaid parasites from the City of London (investment banking), and foreigners who are using London real estate to as a way to hide and protect their ill gotten gains:

Thousands of London homes have had their prices slashed since the Brexit vote a week ago amid warnings of a slump in the stunned housing market, the Standard reveals today.

An Evening Standard analysis has found a huge spike in nervous home owners cutting their asking prices after the surprise result of the referendum last Friday morning unleashed what was described as “a perfect storm” by one leading investor.

The impact is expected to be most severe in the new luxury development along the river from Vauxhall to Docklands where falls of as much as 40 per cent are feared.

One central London branch manager at one of the capital’s biggest firms said: ”The whole thing is a disaster. The uncertainty will cause the markets to crumble and who knows when that is going to get better.

This is things getting better.

Rich people lose money, and ordinary people may be able to shorten their commute a bit.

F%$# the Teabaggers

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I understand how the Teabagger wing of Republican Party gave us Donald Trump.

I also understand how Trump has done the nearly impossible, which is to make what is arguably the least electable candidate for President since Michael Dukakis the front runner, which must seriously roast Teabagger chestnuts:

………

This, then, is the ultimate outcome from the tea party takeover of the Republican Party by people like Wendy Day. She contributed to Trump’s ascent by blowing up the party and is now upset that it’s not her own candidate Ted Cruz who was the victor.

Cry me a river, Ms. Day.

And welcome to your worst nightmare: President Hillary Clinton.

I under the that is a schadenfreude moment, but what about the rest of us?

The rest of use are going to have to live with the consequences of this:  More war, more sucking up to Wall Street, more neoliberal economics, more privatization of essential government services, and more job destroying trade deals.

Thanks, Teabaggers.

Too True

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Over at The Nation, James Carden exhibits a shocking grasp of the obvious, and notes that Neocons are freaking out over Donald Trump because he represents a reduction in their influence, status, and paychecks, not because they are deeply concerned about the future of the nation:

The past year has been a difficult one for the leaders of the neocon right. First, their campaign to torpedo President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran came to naught. Then their preferred candidate for the Republican nomination, freshman Florida Senator Marco Rubio, ran a lazy and uninspiring campaign and was easily routed by Donald Trump. And now, with Trump about to be crowned king of the Republican castle in Cleveland, the neocons are experiencing something of an existential meltdown over the prospect of a future Trump administration.

Last week, a Politico piece surveyed the broken hearts among the neocon elite, in which they were described as being marooned on “The Lonely Island of Never Trump.” Just how lonely is that island, however, is open to question. If Politico is to be believed, nearly the entire GOP foreign-policy establishment is ready to bolt and join Team Hillary.

………

Kagan, Cohen and Boot quite rightly denounce Trump’s promise to ban Muslim immigrants. Yet their newfound concern for the well-being of Muslims is striking, given that they were among the most vocal supporters of the Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror” and the Iraq debacle which, according to the Nobel Prize–winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has “directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.”

………

Indeed. Are we really supposed to rue the possibility that the armchair warriors who’ve done the yeoman’s work of constructing an intellectual framework for endless foreign interventions and an overweening surveillance state might be excluded from the next administration?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that it isn’t Trump’s policies that are really bothering the neocons. Rather, it is the possibility that, come January 20, 2017, they could be frozen out of the corridors of power for the next four years. But what must really sting is this: Republican voters, given a choice between a neocon revival or Donald J. Trump went resoundingly for the latter. Deep down, I suspect, they know that they have no one to blame for Trump but themselves.

These guys have a hell of a racket:  They are wrong about everything, and the profiteers who benefit from this evil incompetence get them gigs at think tanks, and pay to publish their books.

As Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Cue the Queen Song, and I Don’t Mean Bohemian Rhapsody

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Yesterday, Cruz dropped out, and today, Kasich threw in the towel:

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a moderate voice who tried to portray himself as the adult in the Republican primary field but failed to win any state but his own, ended his long-shot quest for the presidency on Wednesday, cementing Donald J. Trump’s grip on the presidential nomination.

 Mr. Kasich’s departure, a day after Mr. Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary, leaves Mr. Trump as the only candidate remaining in the Republican race. His closest challenger, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, dropped out Tuesday night.

The Republicans have a nominee, and I am tremendously amused.

Then I remember who is leading in the Democratic primary, and I haz a sad.

This Makes it Even Better

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In news unrelated to the Presidential election, former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption:


Sheldon Silver was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday, making the former New York Assembly speaker one of the most powerful politicians in the state to be given time behind bars.

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni, who also ordered Mr. Silver to pay a fine of $1.75 million and forfeit about $5.3 million he reaped from the criminal schemes of which he was convicted, said she hoped the punishment would serve as a deterrent.

“I hope the sentence I impose on you will make other politicians think twice, until their better angels take over,” said Judge Caproni. “Or, if there are no better angels, perhaps the fear of living out ones golden years in an orange jumpsuit will keep them on the straight and narrow.”

In a brief statement before the sentence was announced, Mr. Silver, 72 years old, said he had let down his family, colleagues and constituents.

“I’m truly, truly sorry for that,” said Mr. Silver, who was found guilty in November of honest-services fraud, extortion, and money laundering.

………

Two of his former Albany colleagues are expected to be sentenced later this month.

Former state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, who in December was found guilty of public-corruption charges including conspiracy, bribery and extortion, is scheduled to be sentenced on May 12. Former state Sen. John Sampson, who was found guilty in July of obstruction of justice and making false statements to investigators, is scheduled to be sentenced in Brooklyn federal court May 19.

I’m hoping that this puts enough of a fear of God into Skelos that he flips on Cuomo, because 14 years has gotta be scaring the hell out of him.