The first screenshot of a Windows 7 Blue screen of death.
Thank you MicroFlaccid
Category: Stupid
Stupid and Damaging Electioneering
In Israel, the Central Elections Committee has banned the two major Arab parties, Balad and United Arab List-Ta’al, from standing in the next election.
It appears that this pops up periodically, and the Israeli Supreme Court shoots it down while the ink is still wet.
This is just amazingly stupid. It’s electioneering at the expense of country.
The Science of Spineless Ashattery Shows Major Advance
Reid and Durbin complete their climbdown from their unsteady moral high ground, and accept that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s appointment of Roland Burris is in order, and they will seat him.
Well, at least it’s over.
Just When You Think that Bush and His Evil Minions™ Can’t Get Any More Petty…..
Remember that Obama wanted to start living in Blair House on January 1, as opposed to January 15, because his two children needed to start school?
Remember how the Bushies said that they couldn’t because it was already booked.
It turns out that it was a lie. There was no one booked to stay there, and they hurriedly invited John Howard, Australia’s former Prime Minister for one night so that Bush could bestow upon him that final mark of shame, a Medal of Freedom.
Note that Blair house has 119 rooms and 35 bathrooms, so they might never have even seen each other.
They really are a group of very small people.
Gone Native
While I’m ranting about Harry Reid, I should note that his statement that Ted Stevens should not go to jail for what amounts to accepting bribes is repulsive.
Not only did Stevens betray his duty to his constituents, but he has been truly vile person as a Senator, a bully and an opportunist, and 40 years of his being there does nothing to change this.
Circular Firing Squad: Blago/Burris Edition
This is just embarrassing.
Harry Reid has no spine at all, and Obama is not coming out well in this either.
We are now seeing reports that they are trying to cut a deal to let him take his seat as a Senator, and now we have reports that the Obama team is pressuring Senate leadership to seat Burris and end this rather bizarre bit of theater.
This is just stupid.
Harry Reid: Bite My Shiny Metal Ass
It seems that he is is afraid of his own shadow, because now he is going on about the risks of “overreaching”.
The American people don’t give a damn about overreaching right now. They care about results, and the Republicans will do everything that they can to prevent results, so when he says, “essential for President-elect Obama and congressional Democrats to work closely with Republicans in the new Congress,” he is simply giving Republicans a club to hit him with.
Obama Decides to Try to Kowtow to Republicans
Well, it now appears that Barack Obama is looking at about $300 billion of the stimulus package being taxcuts.
Why? Because he wants to get more than 80 votes in the Senate.
This is delusional, and it is wrong. The Republicans don’t care about making government work for the people, and if it doesn’t work, he will get the blame anyway.
Anything worth passing will not get Republican votes. Obama need only remember that Social Security passed without a single Republican vote….Not one.
I agree with Josh Marshall when he says, “Can someone help me come up with an argument for why the Obama stimulus plan isn’t turning out to be a painful joke?“
The Shrill One, Paul Krugman, makes the best point on his blog:
Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they’ll demand 100%. Then they’ll start the thing about how you can’t cut taxes on people who don’t pay taxes (with only income taxes counting, of course) and demand that the plan focus on the affluent. Then they’ll demand cuts in corporate taxes. And Mitch McConnell is already saying that state and local governments should get loans, not aid — which would undermine that part of the plan, too.
He follows up with another good point in his column, that Republicans are already, “setting up roadblocks to stimulus legislation while posing as the champions of careful Congressional deliberation,” and then he follows up with the point that action needs to be taken quickly, and Republicans have no interest in taking action at all.
They believe that action in and of itself is evil.
Hilzoy notes, tax cuts give among the smallest GDP bang for the buck:
Well, that was Fast
Silvio Berlusconi dis something that George W. Bush could only dream of, he partially privatized the Italian social security system.
Well, the “beneficiaries”, of the policy, the roughly 1.2 million people who made the switch to privately managed accounts, are now screaming like defrauded Italians, (which they are) because their accounts have gone south with the markets, and the management fees have taken most of what is left, and now they want their bailout.
How many times does this have to happen until people realize that taking a safety net, and making it a revenue stream for a broker is a bad thing?
The Stupidest Thing Written …….. On December 19, 2008
It might be a the stupidest thing ever written on other days, but the internet is a vast place, so the the suggestion that increasing broadband internet access will lead to fascism may not be the stupidest thing ever written, but it is the stupidest thing that I’ve read in a long time.
It appears that Andrew Keen (who else, seriously, just wiki him) is alarmed at the fact that part of Barack Obama’s stimulus package will be directed toward expanding broadband access across the United States, and it might be, “Inadvertently laying the foundations for a return to fascism, the political catastrophe of the 1930’s.“
You see, the according to Mr. Keen:
The 1930s fascists were expert at using all the most technologically sophisticated communications technologies—the cinema, radio, newspapers, advertising—to spew their destructive, hate-filled message. What they excelled at was removing the the traditional middlemen like religion, media, and politics, and using these modern technologies of mass communications to speak with reassuring familiarity to the disorientated masses.
There are a couple of problems here:
- They did not control these media until after they came to power.
- The middlemen dominated the cinema, radio, newspapers, and advertising, then, as they do now, it was that they supported the fascists, because they thought that they might prevent the Bolsheviks from coming to power.
If you read the rest, I’m sure that you can find more.
Time to Dump Reid?
Truth be told, I’ve had thoughts about dumping the Democratic Party Congressional leadership regularly, every waking minute in the case of Steny Hoyer, but I’m beginning to think that Reid may do a passable job of maintaining order in the Democratic caucus, he is is simply hopeless when dealing with opponents of that caucus.
In l’affaire Joe (Lieberman), he collapsed like a bunch of brussel sprouts too overcooked for consumption at a British boarding school, and now he is mishandling the seating of both the Burris (Blagojevich) and Al Franken.
First, we now have his “stand on principle,” followed by statements yesterday that negotiation was possible.
Then we have the reports that he’s having the Senate Parliamentarian reject Burris’s credentials for lack of a Secretary of State signature, which might be inspired, except for the fact, as Majikthise notes, the governor has a stack of papers pre-signed by the SoS for convenience, and may have used one, and that the Illinois Secretary of State has explicitly said that his signature is not required.
Follow this up with a generous dose of credible reports that Reid lobbied Blagojevich against appointing a black man to replace Obama. (Yes, I know, he didn’t, lobby against a black person as Senator, just all the possible black politicians in the state who might have the stature to do this. It’s a distinction without a difference.)
Finally, we have his tactics backfiring against Al Franken, with the Republicans promising a filibuster against seating the Senator-Elect from Minnesota using his arguments.
Also note that any delay in seating either of them makes it more difficult to break a filibuster: 98 Senators means 59 votes (all the Dems + Lieberman + 2 Republicans), 99 Senators means 60 votes, (all the Dems + Lieberman + 2 Republicans), and 100 Senators means 60 votes ((all the Dems + Lieberman + only 1 Republican) to get cloture.
Seriously, I’m beginning to think that he’s moonlighting as Senate Majority Leader, and that his day job is as the coach of the Washington Generals.
When Upper Management Should Be Fired
Here we have a story where Macy’s, Gannett and the New York Times are facing problems servicing their debt.
Why do they have the debt? Because they borrowed money for stock buybacks so as to bump the price of their shares. (The New York times also blew the money on a shiny new headquarters)
They borrowed money for a stock buyback?
I can understand diverting profits to do so, it is an activity similar to paying dividends, but borrowing money to buy back stock?
Seriously, everyone in senior management who touched this decision needs to be fired.
Fire Michael Griffin
Seriously, the current NASA administrator’s activities with regard to the transition are insubordination.
We now have reports that he is now pimping out his wife to support his continued tenure at NASA by having her send out an email begging people to sign an online petition supporting him.
It gets even better, as it appears that Griffin spent $57,000 to print and bind copies of his speeches, and then sending copies to Obama.
Note that this is in addition to his refusing to cooperate with the Obama transition team.
Of course, even if Michael Griffin weren’t nuts, the fact is that he is doing a lousy job of managing the next generation of NASA missions and vehicles, particularly his beloved Ares I and Ares V launchers, which show every indications of escalating costs and technical problems (like shaking the astronauts to death during launch, which was resolved with a performance hit because of the additional weight).
There are increasing calls for NASA to use the Orion Capsule on an existing launcher, though, in all fairness a study just reported that the early analysis indicates that man-rating a Atlas V or Delta IV would be more expensive than the Ares.
Personally, I’m inclined to doubt this, because the costs of man-rating these systems is a known quantity, while the Ares is still being developed, and costs are likely to escalate.
Also, Griffin’s refusal to provide data on Ares to the transition team (see the refusing to cooperate link) raises concerns that the study was based on data that was cherry picked by Griffin and NASA.
What a Twofer from the WaPo Editorial Page
So today, on the last day of the year, they give us Amity Shlaes and Ruth Marcus.
Let’s start with the skinny on Ms. Shlaes: she is simply the beneficiary of wingnut welfare. After graduating with a bachelors in English, she proceeds to spout the most predictable right wing economic theory imaginable, and following her marriage to the right wing founder the New York Sun, gets herself columns, and becomes a senior fellow at the CFR. As Matthew Yglesias notes:
I have a really, really, really hard time imagining the CFR doing something comparable for a liberal with so little in the way of relevant qualifications or track-record outside an ideological cocoon.
That being said, some of the beneficiaries are not outright stupid, and Amity Shlaes is either naturally or deliberately so.
Because in her WaPo OP/ED, she continues with riffing on her thesis, pulled from lord knows where, that the the 1937 recession was a result of rich people tucking their money back in their mattresses.
Not even Milton Friedman believed that. He blamed then Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles for tightening credit requirements.
The stupid, it burns us.
That being said, Amity Shlaes is in this instance not the columnist most deserving of opprobrium today, that honor belongs to Ruth Marcus, who does not merely set herself up as an advocate for stupidity and ignorance, but instead advocates for the aggressive protection of evil.
After getting what I am sure is hundreds of outraged emails for her last justification of letting the architects of a torturer regime go free, she thinks that she step up to the plate again 11 days later.
How, some readers asked, could future law-breaking be prevented if past misdeeds go unpunished?
First, criminal prosecution isn’t the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence. To the extent that they weigh the potential penalties for their actions, government officials worry as much about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees. Criminal prosecution and conviction requires such a high level of proof of conscious wrongdoing that the likelihood of those other punishments is much greater.
Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. “The Terror Presidency,” former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith’s account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.
This is because there is already a culture of impunity among Republicans in Washington, DC, and it’s been there ever since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before even an indictment was handed down.
These people knew that George W. Bush would pardon them, like he pardoned Libby, because he was protecting his own neck.
The cycle of impunity, which appears to extend only to Republicans, needs to stop.
Third, punishment is not the only way to prevent wrongdoing. If someone is caught breaking into your house, by all means, press charges. But you might also want to consider installing an alarm system or buying stronger locks. Responsible congressional oversight, an essential tool for checking executive branch excesses, was lacking for much of the Bush administration.
I’m sure that the guy with the electrodes attached to his genitals is happy that you are considering closing that barn door after the arsonist has set fire to the cow.
There was no good will here. There were no honest mistakes. Waterboarding is torture, and has been considered so for hundreds of years, what’s more, the people with experience in the field have been saying consistently that torture does not work.
Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were torturing not because there was a ticking bomb, there wasn’t, and not because they were desperate for information, because it wasn’t getting good intel, they were torturing because it made them feel like they were taking it to the terrorists.
They authorized torture because it made them feel good, and they continued it after they were shown that it did not work because it made them feel good, this is a classic definition of sadism, and absent some jail time, the sadism will be institutionalized.*
*No intention to condemn the S&M crowd. Where informed consent is present, the moral equation is different.
Your Defense Procurement Dollars at Work
The USAF has announced a “restructuring” of the Transformational Satellite Communications System which will delay the launch of the first satellite from 2013 to 2019.
It’s supposed to replace MILSTAR, and it is suppose to have 100 times the bandwidth, and from what I know of the “systems of systems” that is supposed to be the new networked military, this capability is very much a part of it.
And now it’s been delayed 6 years.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Pardongate is Coming Early This Year
GW Bush and GOP donor Robert Toussie earlier this year
George W. Bush released 19 pardons, including one for Mr. Isaac Robert Toussie, a crooked real estate developer who victimized minority first time home buyers.
When the details came out, and it was revealed that his father, Robert Toussie, had contributed heavily to the Republican National Committee (RNC), Bush decided to reverse the pardon.
No bit surprise there. It’s embarrassed having been caught selling a pardon, and it makes it very difficult for the ‘Phants to challenge Obama’s AG nominee, Eric Holder, on the Mark Rich pardon.
The interesting thing is that Bush may not have the power to reverse the pardon, maintaining that it had not been “delivered” because the, “Pardon Attorney had yet to “execute and deliver grants of clemency to the named individuals.”
According to the Pardon Power Blog, this may not be true, as “The Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA) called each grantee (or his counsel) via telephone and told him that he’d been pardoned by the President,” so the pardons may have already been legally delivered and accepted, and that “receiving the president’s warrant and sending notifications to the petitioners is purely ‘a ministerial act of notification.’“
So, once again, we are hip deep in a complete f$#@-up courtesy of Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Three Heads, All of Them Firmly Planted Up Their Ass
I am referring to, of course, Cerberus Capital Management LLC, which is now showing signs of distress.
It appears that their plan to buy Chrysler for some beans, and then flip it for a profit has run into some snags, so the good folks named after the 3-headed dog that guards the gates of hell are experiencing some cash flow issues.
So, they are
placing limits on redemptions their hedge fund, because they had been forcing them to liquidate assets at bargain basement prices to generate the cash.
Additionally, one of the big roadblocks in the now completed transition of GMAC into a bank holding company was the feeling that bond holders were being asked to take a haircut while Cerberus wasn’t.
While that has now been resolved, it is unclear what, if anything Cerberus put into the transition.
Additionally, it now appears that they are attempting to cut a deal that will allow them to simply walk away from Chrysler.
There are increasing indications that Cerberus would like to simply dump Chrysler on its creditors, because with flipping an increasing distant option, they simply want to flee.
OK, The Caroline Kennedy Senate Bid Has Jumped the Shark
Fundamentally, there is a difference between a celebrity running for office, and a celebrity being appointed to office.
It’s even more extreme when said celebrity has little in the way of personal accomplishments, and is being considered simply because of who her father was, and the fact that she is a FOB (friend of Barack).
But now, Caroline Kennedy is refusing to make financial disclosures unless she is offered the appointment:
If she were applying to be, say, an undersecretary of education in Barack Obama’s new administration, Caroline Kennedy would have to fill out a 63-item confidential questionnaire disclosing potentially embarrassing text messages and diary entries, the immigration status of her household staff, even copies of every résumé she used in the last 10 years.
If she were running for election to the Senate, Ms. Kennedy would have to file a 10-part, publicly available report disclosing her financial assets, credit card debts, mortgages, book deals and the sources of any payments greater than $5,000 in the last three years.
But Ms. Kennedy, who has asked Gov. David A. Paterson to appoint her to succeed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton — and who helped oversee the vetting process for Mr. Obama’s possible running mates — is declining to provide a variety of basic data, including companies she has a stake in and whether she has ever been charged with a crime.
Ms. Kennedy declined on Monday to reply to those and other questions posed by The New York Times about any potential ethical, legal and financial entanglements. Through a spokesman, she said she would not disclose that kind of information unless and until she becomes a senator.
“If Governor Paterson were to choose Caroline, she would, of course, comply with all disclosure requirements,” said the spokesman, Stefan Friedman.
Caroline Kennedy has led an intensely private life by the standard of a Kennedy, and has generally eschewed the limelight, and I’m beginning to wonder if she’s trying to throw the appointment derby, and that she is in only because the family is pressuring her to do so.
If that’s the case, it would better to be honest with her family. If that is not the case, this is insanely reckless and stupid.
If she is not willing to make these disclosures prior to a selection, particularly given Governor Patterson’s concerns that have popped up among his own staff regarding proper vetting, then she is not ready for any public office.
But what she is doing now is just nuts.
How the Heck Do They Screw This Up So Badly
Let’s be clear about this: while it is clear that Ted Stevens is guilty of accepting bribes, he was only convicted of the easier-to-prove failure to report gifts.
In the process of prosecuting this case, the prosecution mad basic, and what appear to me (IANAL) to be very elementary errors in things like discovery and errors in the indictment, and now we have a whistle blower claiming irregularities in terms of witness contacts:
- A member of the prosecution accepted “multiple things of value” from a “cooperating source” (most likely former Veco CEO Bill Allen, his name shows up in the redacted complaint)
- An “inappropriate scheme” was created to relocate a witness.
I’m wondering if someone on the prosecution team was trying to throw the case. Bush, and Bush before him, and Reagan before him, have done their level best to politicize the DoJ, and this could be the fruit.
I find simple incompetence to be an inadequate discussion explanation.
Music Industry to Challenge ISP Common Carrier Status
One of the basics of law, in the US at least, is that ISPs are viewed as common carriers, which means that, much like phone companies, they are not responsible for activity that takes place on their networks.
Much like the phone company is not responsible for people who, for example, plan a bank robbery over their network, so the ISPs are not responsible if these same people were to do so using email or VOIP.
Well, the good folks at the RIAA* have come up with a way to put an end to this legal arrangement, which has served telecommunications for over 100 years now.
Basically, they have decided to abandon their strategy of suing grandmothers for multimillion dollar lawsuits based on dubious data, and instead, they are asking ISPs to take responsibility for the actions that people take through their networks, and threaten them and disconnect them, based on the same bogus data.:
Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider’s customers making music available online for others to take.
Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
So, they are getting ISPs to agree to take legal responsibility for this, and exposing these same ISPs to legal jeopardy from their customers when they get this wrong.
This is, as Matthew Yglesias frequently notes, a consequence of a lack of understanding of what IP in general, and copyright in particular are actually about.
The purpose of IP is not about the creation of property, nor the guarantee of profits, its purpose is one of public interest. To quote the pertinent section of the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
(emphasis mine)
Or, as Yglesias puts it:
But boosting album sales is not a legitimate public policy objective. Nor is boosting record company profits. Nor, even tough musicians themselves are a much more sympathetic claimant than record company shareholders, is boosting musician incomes. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the interests of consumers. I’ve never seen anybody attempt to argue that people aren’t forming new bands or recording new songs anymore. Nor have I seen anybody attempt to argue that it’s more difficult today to find new music to listen to than it was ten or twenty years ago. In fact, the reverse is the case. The very trends toward digitization and file-copying have made music much more widely available than it was in the past.
Of course, the folks always trot out this graph showing declining album sales, but, as the other Matthew notes, selling albums is not the business of the US government.
Additionally, this is not a graph of album sales, but a graph of album shipments, and the record companies have improved inventory system over the past decade, using software to predict sales, so they ship fewer albums to stores, and get fewer returns.
As if we did not already know that they were lying sacks of sh%$, they are attempting to use new efficiencies in distribution to create the illusion that “pirates” are “destroying their industry”.
*And by, “good folks at the RIAA,” I mean, “bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”