Category: Stupid

This is a Truly Epic Rant

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In fact, this rant about US missteps on Syria is good enough that I forgive the blogger’s use of the Comic Sans font:

I have decided to voice my opinions on what the situations are in re the MENA area both abroad and in the US concerning Syria and Turkey. More tomorrow on Iraq. These are simply my opinions, feel free to disregard them and come up with your own:

– Petraeus wants John Allen’s wretched job? Give it him. As I understand what happened, Allen found it to be impossible to argue successfully with the WH’s collection of “those whose brains were destroyed in the process of obtaining a Ph.D in poly sci ” led by the country’s community organizer in chief. Let us see if Petraeus will do better. IMO Petraeus is a phony of the sort that David Hackworth used to describe as a “perfumed prince,” in my words, a Byzantine courtier type whose fame was generated in a largely self orchestrated media campaign. Let us see if this “Great Captain” can unravel this skein of wormlike threads that he helped create. Perhaps Broadway Joe Scarborough will turn and burn with him?

………

It goes on from there, and it is truly a thing of beauty.

I also think that it is an accurate assessment, and it shows why the President of the United States cannot blithely accept the counsel of  Council of Foreign Relations types, who subscribe to the “Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics,” which states that so long as the US maintains it will, it can accomplish whatever it wants.

It didn’t work in the Bush administration, and it won’t work now.

Get a Brain, Morans

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Some inbred white bigots who don’t know how to use a spell checker have decided that enough is enough, so they took to flying pro confederate banners over various monuments:

Community activists and historic preservationists got help from an unusual source to draw attention to their protest Saturday of statues of Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue during the first day of training for the UCI Road World Championships.

 A small plane carrying a banner with a Confederate battle flag and the phrase “Confederate heros matter” circled above Monument Avenue, where the protest had gathered at the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

 The Virginia Flaggers, who took credit for the banner on their Facebook page, said the misspelling of “heroes” was “Pilot error. We sent the right spelling. We think the point was still made.”

 “This is the first time he’s ever messed up,” Grayson Jennings, a spokesman for the Virginia Flaggers, said of the pilot in an interview. “I don’t think half the people even knew he messed up.”

(emphasis mine)

Trust me, people know.

This is going to end up a major meme, kind of like this pic:

The stupid, it burns us.

Maybe Ron Paul Should Hit Marco Rubio with a Folding Chair at the next Debate

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Looks to me like a sucker punch

Because if Rubio’s staff is going WWE Raw on Paul’s Staff, responding in kind might be well advised:

Video footage appears to show a top official for the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio punching the national political director of a rival candidate, Rand Paul.

The incident is alleged to have occurred during a conference on a Michigan island on Thursday night.

In a Facebook post early on Friday morning, John Yob, a Michigan-based political consultant who serves as national political director for the Paul campaign, said Rubio’s deputy campaign manager, Rich Beeson, punched him in a downtown bar on Mackinac Island.

“I ran into a guy named Rich Beeson, who frankly I didn’t even know who it was at first because he isn’t relevant in our political world,” Yob said.

“He literally physically assaulted me by punching me in the face. The state police are looking for him. I have it on video from multiple angles. This will play out in the national media in the next few hours.”

Shannon Banner, spokesperson for Michigan state police, told the Guardian it was not involved in the investigation, which is being handled by the Mackinac Island police department.

“It wasn’t a brawl,” the Mackinac Island police chief, Brett Riccinto, told the Guardian on Friday. “If anything, it was a shove. Literally, it was a shove. This thing has been blown way, way, way out of proportion.”

Riccinto, however, said a complaint had been made for assault, and it had been forwarded to the prosecutor to decide if charges would be filed. He confirmed the alleged incident occurred at Horn’s Gaslight Bar & Restaurant.

It really is the silly season in Republican politics.

Quote of the Day

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“I’d rather go to Iraq than work for Carly Fiorina again,” said one high-level former campaign staffer, who asked not to be identified, citing disclosure restrictions in his contract.

Carly Fiorina, who’s net worth is something north of $50 million, stiffed her campaign workers in her 2010 Senate (Demon Sheep) campaign.

BTW, not getting paid by a political candidate is something that happens now and again, the amount of outright hatred expressed rivals that of long time Hewlett Packard employees.

It’s not about getting stiffed. She must have been absolute hell to work for.

Think about this: Donald f%$#ing Trump doesn’t have employees ratting him out like this, and neither does Hillary Clinton, and if any of her former employees were willing to right a tell all, they would get a seven figure advance. (Even more if they were willing to mention “Benghazi.” )

 It really is remarkable how people like her (I mean high powered executives, not Republicans in this case) keep failing up the business food chain.

H/t Digby at Salon for the quote.

And yet Another Element of the US State Security Apparatus Goes Rogue

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It appears that the DEA specifically targeted the Evo Morales government in Bolivia in what appears to be something very close to an attempted coup:

The United States has secretly indicted top officials connected to the government of Bolivian President Evo Morales for their alleged involvement in a cocaine trafficking scheme. The indictments, secured in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting called “Operation Naked King,” have not been previously reported.

Morales, a former leader of Bolivia’s coca growers union, has long been at loggerheads with the DEA. In 2008, Morales expelled the agency from the country and embarked on his own strategy of combatting drug trafficking, acknowledging the traditional uses of coca in Bolivian culture and working cooperatively with coca growers to regulate some legal activity and to promote alternative development elsewhere. Morales’ plan has been effective at reducing cultivation, according to the United Nations.

But that doesn’t mean the DEA accepted its eviction quietly. In fact, the agency went after members of Morales’ administration in an apparent effort to undermine his leadership.

The sealed indictments, revealed last week in a lawsuit filed by long-time DEA informant Carlos Toro, target Walter Álvarez, a top Bolivian air force official; the late Raul García, father of Vice President Álvaro García Linera; Faustino Giménez, an Argentine citizen and Bolivian resident who is said to be close to the vice president; and Katy Alcoreza, described as an intelligence agent for Morales. Toro said in the court document that he played an integral role in securing the indictments as part of the DEA’s undercover investigation into the alleged Bolivian cocaine trafficking ring, which the agency ran out of its office in Asuncion, Paraguay.

………

The U.S. government and the DEA made no secret of their displeasure when their longtime nemesis, Morales, was elected. “If radicals continue to hijack the indigenous movement, we could find ourselves faced with a narcostate that supports the uncontrolled cultivation of coca,” General James T. Hill, a U.S. army commander with the Southern Command, told the House Armed Services Committee in March 2004, referring to Morales’ movement.

“I don’t think there’s an attractive or viable future by becoming a narcostate,” John Walters, then the Bush administration’s drug czar, told The New York Times the next year, when it appeared Morales was on his way to victory.

Morales used the accusations to his political benefit. “They accuse me of everything,” Morales said at a campaign rally, according to the same Times article. “They say Evo is a drug trafficker, that Evo is a narcoterrorist. They don’t know how to defend their position, so they attack us.”

………

By 2014, the Times was writing about Bolivia’s renaissance:

Tucked away in the shadow of its more populous and more prosperous neighbors, tiny, impoverished Bolivia, once a perennial economic basket case, has suddenly become a different kind of exception — this time in a good way.

Its economy grew an estimated 6.5 percent last year, among the strongest rates in the region. Inflation has been kept in check. The budget is balanced, and once-crippling government debt has been slashed. And the country has a rainy-day fund of foreign reserves so large for its relatively small economy that it could be the envy of nearly every other country in the world. The Times article notes that extreme poverty under Morales has plummeted, despite — or, more likely, because of — his refusal to follow the path the U.S. has urged.

………

In the face of U.S. denunciations that Bolivia would become a narcostate under Morales, the country has instead managed to reduce coca leaf cultivation, especially over the past five years. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, total production of dried coca leaf fell 11 percent from 2013 to 2014, and has fallen by an average of nearly 10 percent each year since 2011. Interdiction efforts targeting coca cultivation have also dropped precipitously since the DEA’s dismissal in 2008, though confiscations of cocaine continued to rise until 2013, when they dropped off significantly. In 2014, confiscations of processed cocaine hydrochloride returned to previous levels, though interdiction of coca leaves and cocaine base remained low.

“[Drug trafficking] must be fought — we are convinced of that — and we are doing so more effectively and more wisely,” Morales told Al Jazeera in a 2014 interview. “When the United States was in control of counternarcotics, the US governments used drug trafficking for purely geopolitical purposes …. The US uses drug trafficking and terrorism for political control …. We have nationalised the fight against drug trafficking.”

In 2009, Hillary Clinton warned of Morales and the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s “fear mongering” in written testimony during her secretary of state confirmation hearings. Yet Morales’ fears, it turns out, weren’t rooted in mere paranoia. The DEA was, in fact, out to get him.

The revelation of Operation Naked King goes to show that Bolivian leaders’ paranoia was well justified, said Kathryn Ledebur, who runs the Andean Information Network based in Bolivia. “US authorities frequently dismiss Bolivian government denunciations about the DEA and US intervention as absurd speculation, but these revelations show what is common knowledge on the ground — there has long been an alarming lack of oversight of DEA operations in Latin America, including recurring mission creep and a violation of agreements with host countries,” she wrote in an email.

What is going on here is very simple: A coup attempt by the DEA, and they are trying to take this government down not because their policies are a failure, but because their policies are a success.

If other governments follow their example, bad things will happen:   the DEA will face a situation where their most important path to career advancement an visibility, f%$#ing around with other sovereign nations, will be curtailed.

At some point, lead to reductions in budget and manpower at the agency, so clearly Evo Morales must be overthrown, because, to quote Mel Brooks, “Holy underwear! Sheriff murdered! Innocent women and children blown to bits! We have to protect our phoney baloney jobs here, gentlemen! We must do something about this immediately! Immediately! Immediately! Harrumph! Harrumph! Harrumph!”

This is not surprising.  After all, one of the first major foreign initiatives of the Obama administration was to tacitly support a coup against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras.

Haven’t we f%$#ed up Latin America enough since 1823?

Running Education in Like a Business Means Overpaying Managers Who Loot the Institution

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The Governor of Iowa, selected a new president for the University of Iowa, the state’s flagship education institution, and it turns out that has no educational experience, and he has lied flagrantly on his resume:

But UI may not seem like such an attractive alternative these days. As the Yes Men performed at the press conference, the Iowa Board of Regents was in the final stages of selecting the next UI president. In a very unusual arrangement, the regents chose not to renew previous president Sally Mason’s contract two years ago; since then, she had been working “at will” on a day-to-day basis. If some observers worried that this arrangement would render her a tool of the regents, those fears were confirmed when Mason endorsed an ill-conceived regents funding plan that would significantly cut UI’s budget, infuriating many on campus.

Now, Mason is out: Eight days after the Yes Men’s visit, the Iowa Board of Regents unanimously voted former IBM and Boston Market executive Bruce Harreld as UI’s next president, despite Harreld having no university administrative background. He did work as an adjunct senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, but that’s the extent of his college workplace experience.

On the résumé Harreld submitted to the regents, he listed his current job as the managing principal for the Colorado-based Executing Strategy, LLC. This company “confidentially (advises) several public, private and military organizations on leadership, organic growth and strategic renewal.” However, that business doesn’t exist. The Colorado secretary of state has no record of a company of that name.

On Sept. 1, during a public forum that was part of Harreld’s on-campus interview and visit, I asked Harreld to explain this discrepancy. He replied that Executing Strategy was a company name he previously used and that he accidentally listed it in his current work history.

“Shame on me,” Harreld said. “I too quickly pulled it from out of my head and put it on the résumé. There is no Colorado corporation. I live in Colorado. That’s my post office box.”

His résumé also neglected to list the co-authors on his publications, attributing them solely to Harreld. The only part of his résumé that didn’t contain a glaring error was Page 3, which consisted almost entirely of personal information such as “Four adult children who all have advanced degrees” and “Elder, Presbyterian Church.” Given Harreld’s business background, one would think he would have taken more care with his résumé when applying to be the president of a major university.

Harreld’s public forum did not go well, to put it mildly. His rambling 35-minute presentation contained little more than vague generalizations and repeated catchphrases such as taking UI from “great to greater.” At times he rolled his eyes and looked exasperated while facing questions from students, staff, and faculty. When a UI staff member asked him what initiatives he might have planned to improve workplace morale, he replied, “I don’t know that I have any. Now what? Staff? I dunno. … What more would you like me to say?” Harreld then ended this exchange with an abrupt, “No, I’m done. OK? If you don’t mind.”

Is there anyone out there who believes that this guy was hired for anything but political payback?

This guy is going to be a complete clusterf%$#?

So Not a Surprise

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It appears that a single minded focus on testing at the expense of education doesn’t even work on other fill in the bubble tests like the SAT:

New statistics show that average SAT scores countrywide have dropped to their lowest level since the college admissions exam was redesigned in 2005, continuing a 10-year trend that education advocates say illustrates the failures of test-driven schooling.

According to the College Board, which reported the statistics on Thursday, the average SAT score for the class of 2015 was 1490 out of a possible 2400, with points declining on all three sections of the test—reading, math, and writing.

That raises an alarm for the The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), an education advocacy group, which said the latest SAT numbers highlight the failings of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and other standards-based scholastic achievement measures.

Bob Schaeffer, FairTest public education director, said in response to the latest statistics, “Test-and-punish policies, such as ‘No Child Left Behind’ have clearly failed to improve college readiness or narrow racial gaps, as measured by the SAT,” adding that other standardized admissions exams like the ACT and the National Assessment for Education Progress show similar trends. 

 I would note that Obama, and His Evil Minions™, in particularly the perfidious Arne Duncan, have been even more aggressive in pushing relentless testing and corporatized education and breaking the teachers unions than their predecessors, so don’t expect this study to make any difference in policy.

A Very Good Point on Obamacare

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The folks at Naked Capitalism have never been big fans of the PPACA, because they feel that it has far too many sops to the evildoers in the US healthcare system, in particular the insurance companies. (I agree)

Now Lambert Strether makes what is an obvious point, that the “Cadillac Tax” on high value healthcare plans are pretty clearly a tactic developed to union bust:


I haven’t written about much about ObamaCare’s “Cadillac Tax” mostly because it seemed (as we shall see) such an obvious union-busting measure that there wouldn’t be much of interest to say. However, a recent Kaiser briefing on how many employers will be affected by it has generated a lot of coverage, and, as it turns out, the Cadillac tax — not that anybody could have predicted this — turns out to be insanely complex, based on a crazypants neo-liberal economic assumption, and will screw over a lot more working people than originally thought. (There’s actually some pressure on the Hill for reform or repeal, and not just by the usual suspects, but I won’t cover the politics of it here).

………

And if the unions can’t deliver wages, and now they can’t deliver benefits — or prevent existing benefits from being taken away — what exactly do they deliver? So who is to determine what is “generous”? Workers, or pencil-necked< neo-liberal economists? Who never mention whether CEO health insurance — or top 20% health insurance, for that matter — is “too generous”? That said, let’s turn to the crapification. From the Kaiser briefing:

The potential of facing an HCPT assessment as soon as 2018 is encouraging employers to assess their current health benefits and consider cost reductions to avoid triggering the tax. Some employers announced that they made changes in 2014 in anticipation of the HCPT, and more are likely to do so as the implementation date gets closer. By making modifications now, employers can phase-in changes to avoid a bigger disruption later on.

………

So, a race to the bottom that starts out affecting “overly generous” health insurance, and ends up affecting more and more of the rest of us. Typical. I doubt this can be fixed by Congress this year or next, since the Democrats will not be able to admit that Obama has ever made a mistake in any aspect of his sorry administration, and Republicans have no choice but to throw red meat to their base by trying to repeal it all together. Pass the popcorn.

This is not a bug.  It’s a feature.

If you were come up with a way to get the truth for any people behind Obamacare, whether Obama, Gruber, or whoever, they all would say that they want to eliminate employer sponsored health insurance by making various claims about how having open insurance markets and “skin in the game” will make healthcare more efficient.  (All the available evidence shows otherwise)

Obama has been (at best) lukewarm on unions, with no effort to push card-check, his hiring of union-busting heiress Penny Pritzker, his aggressive support of union-busting mayor Rahm Emanuel, his tepid opposition to “Right to Work” legislation proposals put forward in many states, etc.

There are way too many people among Obama’s “Chicago School” policy advisers who see an Ayn Rand inspired dystopia as a model for a good society.  (As an aside, it turned out that even Ayn Rand could not live in the world which she hoped to create.)

Our country is looking more and more like the USSR circa 1987.

James O’Keefe Jumps the Shark

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I am referring to the evil James O’Keefe, of ACORN infamy, and not my friend who spends a lot of time at the Massachusetts Pirate Party herding cats.

In his latest “sting” he had one of His Evil Minions™ buy a T-Shirt for a Canadian tourist:

………

The re­port­ers (in­clud­ing me) ap­peared con­fused about how they got to the press con­fer­ence hos­ted at the Na­tion­al Press Club. Present at the press con­fer­ence were five to 10 video cam­er­as, along with a room of 30 or so re­port­ers, all ob­li­vi­ous to the fact that we had been snookered in­to an­oth­er sup­posedly sa­la­cious re­lease from O’Keefe’s or­gan­iz­a­tion.

Clin­ton staffers have already been put on alert for hijinks from O’Keefe’s con­ser­vat­ive group, which gained no­tori­ety around the ACORN scan­dal, and put out a video last week show­ing a Clin­ton cam­paign staffer en­cour­aging a “vo­lun­teer” to ask Iow­ans if they are Clin­ton sup­port­ers be­fore re­gis­ter­ing them to vote.

“We have journ­al­ists across the coun­try in­vest­ig­at­ing in­side the cam­paign. Not just this cam­paign,” O’Keefe said on Tues­day.

On Tues­day, the group teased its second re­lease as “a power­ful new un­der­cov­er video con­firm­ing that cor­rup­tion has per­meated Hil­lary Clin­ton’s cam­paign at the highest levels.” The video pur­ports to show Molly Bark­er, the dir­ect­or of mar­ket­ing for Clin­ton’s cam­paign, ac­cept­ing a cam­paign dona­tion from a for­eign na­tion­al. Sounds pretty bad, right?

Then you find out that the “for­eign na­tion­al” is a Ca­na­dian wo­man who was simply try­ing to buy a T-shirt at Clin­ton’s kick­off rally, and that Pro­ject Ver­itas Ac­tion’s own “journ­al­ist” ac­ted as an in­ter­me­di­ary straw buy­er to make the trans­ac­tion, tak­ing the Ca­na­dian wo­man’s money to pur­chase the shirt for her.

In the video, the Ca­na­dian vis­it­or (who, O’Keefe says, Pro­ject Ver­itas Ac­tion did not find the name for) says, “Can I give her the money? She’s Amer­ic­an. Can she buy it for me?”

“She could make a dona­tion,” Bark­er says.

“Can you buy it for me?” the Ca­na­dian wo­man asks the Pro­ject Ver­itas Ac­tion op­er­at­ive.

“Sure, I’ll buy it,” the Pro­ject Ver­itas Ac­tion op­er­at­ive says. “So Ca­na­dians can’t buy them, but Amer­ic­ans can buy it for them?”

………

Pro­ject Ver­itas Ac­tion is com­fort­able con­duct­ing its op­er­a­tions un­der eth­ic­ally du­bi­ous cir­cum­stances. The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Dana Mil­bank got at that in an ex­change dur­ing the press con­fer­ence with the group’s leg­al ex­pert, Ben­jamin Barr.

Mil­bank: “I’m no ex­pert on cam­paign fin­ance law, but was that leg­al for your per­son to take that cash?”

Barr: “It’s a tech­nic­al vi­ol­a­tion of the law. It’s akin to jay­walk­ing for cam­paign fin­ance. This is a low-dol­lar threshold con­tri­bu­tion. There’s no re­port­ing is­sues at play. It’s less than $200. So at most it would be a small civil pen­alty that’s a few hun­dred dol­lars. But what we’re really wor­ried about is the Hil­lary cam­paign that has taken in a wide ar­ray of con­tri­bu­tions. Once you ag­greg­ate bey­ond $2,000, then you’re with­in the crim­in­al sanc­tions.”

Mil­bank: So you vi­ol­ated the law as well?

Barr: Yes.


………

“Is this a joke?” The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi asked later in the Q&A. “This feels like a prank.”

“Is this a joke,” O’Keefe re­peated. “Well, the Clin­ton cam­paign doesn’t think it’s a joke, be­cause they’re talk­ing to The Wash­ing­ton Post about it. And we sent the let­ter to the Clin­ton cam­paign, so no, this is not a joke.”

Not only does O’Keefe have the gump­tion to of­fer to en­trap a polit­ic­al cam­paign to the tune of $40, his group is now seek­ing re­dress for its own straw pur­chase.

“The Clin­ton cam­paign should re­turn their il­leg­al con­tri­bu­tion. I don’t see oth­er rem­ed­ies. That’s the only rem­edy that we’re seek­ing,” O’Keefe said at the press con­fer­ence.

………

To quote Charles Baudelaire, “The dev­il’s finest trick is to per­suade you that he does not ex­ist.” O’Keefe has the op­pos­ite in­ten­tions. His finest trick is to per­suade you that he does still ex­ist, and is worth listen­ing to.

Even the Washington Post, which has never found a Clinton scandal that it would not eagerly pimp, has determined that there is no “there” there.

A Canadian tourist wanted a t-shirt, and a member of O’Keefe’s “Wretched hive of scum and villainy” took pity on her and bought it for her, and somehow it’s a big Clinton scandal?

Dude, you have had your 15 minutes of fame.

Get a real job, and stop living in your parents basement.

Remember the Loon Who Wanted the Government to Assassinate Law Professors Who He Disagreed With?

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A law professor who published an inflammatory article urging attacks on law professors and “Islamic holy sites” and who has been dogged by accusations of misrepresenting his academic and military credentials has resigned from the US Military Academy at West Point, the Guardian has confirmed.

US military academy official William Bradford argues that attacks on scholars’ home offices and media outlets – along with Islamic holy sites – are legitimate

Although West Point hired William C Bradford on 1 August, a spokesman said the prestigious undergraduate institution where the US army educates its future officers parted ways with the controversial academic on Sunday, the day after the Guardian published an article highlighting Bradford’s proposals to treat US scholars as “enemy combatants”.

“Dr William Bradford resigned on Sunday,” army lieutenant colonel Christopher Kasker, a West Point spokesman, told the Guardian on Monday. Bradford had taught five lessons for cadets in a common-core law course, from 17 to 27 August.

The West Point resignation marks the most recent academic departure for the controversial Bradford, following a decade’s worth of apparent exaggeration of his service record and academic career.

It remains unclear how thoroughly West Point vetted Bradford before hiring him.

………

Bradford has had a checkered academic career. In 2004, he quit a job teaching at the Indiana University School of Law after allegations emerged that he had exaggerated his military service, portraying himself inaccurately as a Gulf War veteran, an infantryman and a recipient of the prestigious Silver Star, an award for gallantry in action.

The army provided Bradford’s releasable service history to the Guardian on Monday. Bradford was commissioned into the army as a second lieutenant – the same rank West Point cadets hold upon commissioning – in 1995 and served the majority of his six-year service in military intelligence in the army reserve. He neither deployed nor earned any awards.

In 2005, the Guardian has learned, Bradford took a visiting professorship at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, teaching property law. A former student who wished to remain anonymous said Bradford’s behavior included “doing push-ups in class [and] making students stand and give answers in a military-like manner”.

Bradford, the former student said, ended up leaving his class – and ultimately the college – without grading the final exam.

Seriously?  This guy was employed at West Point?

Whoever is responsible for his hiring put “Wingnut Welfare” over both academic integrity as well the good order and discipline in the armed forces.

They need to be fired, and whatever security clearance that they might have needs to be replaced by a Cap’n Crunch decoder ring.

Why Does this Guy Teach at West Point?

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William Bradford, an assistant professor at West Point is calling for the assassination anyone who opposes his view of the world, as well as the law schools where they work.

Additionally, he wants Islamic holy sites bombed, just because:

An assistant professor in the law department of the US Military Academy at West Point has argued that legal scholars critical of the war on terrorism represent a “treasonous” fifth column that should be attacked as enemy combatants.

 In a lengthy academic paper, the professor, William C Bradford, proposes to threaten “Islamic holy sites” as part of a war against undifferentiated Islamic radicalism. That war ought to be prosecuted vigorously, he wrote, “even if it means great destruction, innumerable enemy casualties, and civilian collateral damage”.

 Other “lawful targets” for the US military in its war on terrorism, Bradford argues, include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” – all civilian areas, but places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist.

 “Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism,” Bradford wrote.

 West Point is the revered undergraduate institution north of New York City where the US army educates its future officer corps. It prides itself on the rigor of its curriculum. Representatives from the school said Bradford had only begun his employment there on 1 August.

………

In the paper, Bradford identifies himself as an “associate professor of law, national security and strategy, National Defense University”, seemingly his previous job before West Point. But a representative of the National Defense University said Bradford was a contractor at the prestigious Defense Department-run institution, “never an NDU employee nor an NDU professor”.

It appears not to be the first time Bradford misrepresented his credentials. He resigned from Indiana University’s law school in 2005 after his military record showed he had exaggerated his service. (Among his paper’s criticisms of supposedly treasonous lawyers is “intellectual dishonesty”.)

Why is this guy not asking if we want fries with that for a living?

Why is he working at West Point?

Why was he a contractor at the National Defense University before that?

This is particularly troubling when one considers that his record before both of these jobs was clouded by credible allegations that he had consistently lied about his life story.

Why does this guy continue to get jobs in the national security establishment?

Today in IP Insanity

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The city of Inglewood, California attempted to use copyright to prevent people from posting videos of their city council meetings.

Thankfully, thee judge called bullsh%$ on the town’s arguments:

Joseph Teixeira doesn’t like Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts, so he makes Youtube videos featuring City Council meeting footage.

The Mayor and Council decided to silence their critic by paying to register the videos of their city meetings with the US Copyright Office, then spending $50,000 in taxpayer money to retain a lawyer to sue Teixeira for copyright infringement.

The court was unimpressed with Inglewood’s leaders: it ruled that the council meetings weren’t copyrightable; that councils can’t make money from public records; and that the videos — in the event that they used anything copyrighted — were fair use. Now they face the possibility that Teixeira will recover fees for his pro bono counsel — more tax dollars flushed away in an illegal bid to prevent a critic from speaking.

Then there’s the Streisand Effect: in bringing this action, the City of Inglewood increased traffic to Teixeira’s videos by five hundred percent.

(emphasis original)

It’s nice that the judge slapped them down firmly.

Increasingly, IP is used to censor criticism and to privatize the public space, and it is a bad thing.

Get a F%$#ing Grip

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I was reading Talking Points Memo, and came across a very overwrought article titled, “Christie And Cruz Hammer Cancer-Stricken Jimmy Carter On The Trail.”

Seriously. This is a bit much.

Cancer or no cancer, it is OK to criticize a former President’s policies.

There is nothing wrong, for example, with my saying that I was stunned to discover that Jeb Bush was the stupid Bush brother, and it is fine to say this regardless of the health status Jeb, or George W., or George H.W. or any of the Bush Crime Family™.

They disagree with the foreign policies of the Carter administration, I do too, but on the opposite side of the issue: They felt that Carter was too unwilling to use military force, while I consider Jimmy Carter to be a war criminal for the evil that he inflicted on Afghanistan.

The validity of these viewpoints has nothing to do with his health.

If they were making jokes about his cancer, I could see a cause for outrage, but this is a different kettle of fish.

What Danielle Brian and Pete Sepp Said

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Specifically, they said that, “To Safeguard the Military, Congress Must Protect Whistleblowers:

This year the Department of Defense requested $585.3 billion from taxpayers, but it is no secret that Pentagon spending is rife with waste, fraud and abuse.

As Congress considers raising the debt ceiling yet again this fall, it’s essential for taxpayers to know that this money will be spent responsibly and that leaders are setting budgetary priorities instead of rubber-stamping wish lists.

Necessary oversight depends upon the ability of those on the front lines to blow the whistle on waste and mismanagement of funds without fear of reprisal. However these courageous military whistleblowers are endangered, not by some far-flung enemy, but by their own superiors.

The Department of Defense is the only federal agency unable to pass a single audit since the government began the practice over 20 years ago. Congress’s watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has identified more than 1,000 recommendations for reforms to save taxpayer dollars that the Department of Defense has yet to implement.

………

The former Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction told the Center for Public Integrity that he largely credits tips from whistleblowers for his ability to uncover crimes on overseas government contracts in Iraq. However, most of those whistleblowers were not willing to be identified in court documents due to their fear of retaliation.

Military whistleblowers are vital to managing our enormous investment in the Pentagon. Even more important, they are key to protecting our national security and the lives of our service members.

However, these brave Americans face a unique set of challenges when they come forward to report fraud, waste, abuse and illegality within the armed services. Congress addressed many of the most significant shortfalls for civilian whistleblowers when it passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act in 2012. But the safeguards for members of the military to exercise their constitutional rights remain hopelessly antiquated.

One expert told a Senate committee last month that such provisions remain “the lowest common denominator in the U.S. code for accountability.”

The Pentagon is arguably the worst run bureaucracy in in the Federal government, and it desperately needs to be fixed.

I am not sure here whether “Fixed” means mended, or if it means spayed or neutered, but either would be an improvement.

Oh, Sh%$………

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Down in Korea, they are playing a game called stupid human tricks with artillery:

South and North Korea traded artillery fire across their heavily militariZed border on Thursday, in a rare exchange that left no casualties but pushed already elevated cross-border tensions to dangerously high levels.

North Korea followed up with an ultimatum sent via military hotline that gave the South 48 hours to dismantle loudspeakers blasting propaganda messages across the border or face further military action.

The South’s defense ministry dismissed the threat and said the broadcasts would continue.

Direct exchanges of fire across the inter-Korean land border are extremely rare, mainly, analysts say, because both sides recognize the risk for a sudden and potentially disastrous escalation between two countries that technically remain at war.

………

In a detailed press briefing later in the day, the South’s defense ministry said the nuclear-armed North initially fired a single artillery round over the border shortly before 4:00pm (0700 GMT).

Minutes later it fired several more in the rough direction of one of the South’s loudspeaker units, but the shells fell short on the South’s side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) — a four kilometer-wide buffer area straddling the actual frontier line.

The South Korean military retaliated by firing “dozens of rounds of 155mm shells” which the ministry said were also aimed to land in the North’s section of the DMZ.

Seriously? You broadcasting propaganda across the border?

Everyone in that peninsula is f%$#ing nuts!

Meet the Clampetts

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Cue the Banjos

Down in Oklahoma, some bigot declared that their gun shop was a “Muslim Free Zone”, the 1964 Civil Rights Act be damned.

This brought in the usual suspects who dedicated themselves to “protecting” the establishment.

One of these products of generations of first cousins marrying dropped his gun and shot himself:

The Muskogee County sheriff said a member of the group guarding an Oktaha gun shop accidentally shot himself Tuesday.

Sheriff Charles Pearson said the man dropped his gun and a bullet hit him in the arm. The sheriff did not identify the man or offer any other details about what happened.

 The group of armed citizens and veterans is standing guard outside the Save Yourself Survival and Tactical Gear store after the owners said they received death threats from all over the world for putting up a sign saying Muslims weren’t welcome.

“I saw several of those gentlemen out there yesterday,” Pearson said. “The way they were holding their weapons, with the fingers on the triggers, you can tell a couple of these gentlemen have no idea about weapons safety. It’s like the Clampetts have come to town,” Sheriff Pearson told muskogeenow.com.

According to the Supreme Court, there is a fundamental right to own firearms.

We also have a fundamental right to eat Ghost Peppers, which have a heat rating of over eight hundred thousand Scovilles.

Just because you have a right to do this does not make it right, though.

This gentleman should not own a gun, because he is too stupid to own a gun.

What Is Depressing Is That This Isn’t Even the Craziest Thing Said by a Republican This Week

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The craziest Mother f%$#er in the Republican Presidential contest ……… No, the other one, ……… No, the other one, ……… No, not Donald Trump.

OK, it’s Ben Carson, alright?

Well, the other day, he was talking immigration, and he suggested that we should use missile strikes to secure the border against illegal immigration:

Another day. Someone else surges near the top of the polls. Another nutball comes to the border and loses his mind. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present your current second-place contestant in the Republican presidential derby.

On Wednesday morning, Carson responded to a question about whether he would be open to the possibility of drone strikes on American soil to secure the border. “The take home point is this. We have excellent military leaders,” he said. “We need to employ their expertise because this is a war we are fighting. That’s the bottom line.”

Look out, El Paso. Sometimes, mistakes are made. Sorry about that junior high that used to be there.

It’s batsh%$ insane, it’s needlessly cruel, and it is is a relentlessly bigoted demonization of the other, but it’s not as bad as deliberately accusing mothers of poisoning their children for free rent.