I was talking to my son, and told him that Monsanto just got more evil. He said that it was not possible, and I told him that Monsanto has hired the mercenary outfit Blackwater to track anti GMO activists.

My son acknowledged his error, and admitted that the agricultural biotechnology could get more evil:

Over the past several years, entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The Nation. Blackwater’s work for corporations and government agencies was contracted using two companies owned by Blackwater’s owner and founder, Erik Prince: Total Intelligence Solutions and the Terrorism Research Center (TRC). Prince is listed as the chairman of both companies in internal company documents, which show how the web of companies functions as a highly coordinated operation. Officials from Total Intelligence, TRC and Blackwater (which now calls itself Xe Services) did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this article.

One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm.

Governmental recipients of intelligence services and counterterrorism training from Prince’s companies include the Kingdom of Jordan, the Canadian military and the Netherlands police, as well as several US military bases, including Fort Bragg, home of the elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and Fort Huachuca, where military interrogators are trained, according to the documents. In addition, Blackwater worked through the companies for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the US European Command.

………

Through Total Intelligence and the Terrorism Research Center, Blackwater also did business with a range of multinational corporations. According to internal Total Intelligence communications, biotech giant Monsanto—the world’s largest supplier of genetically modified seeds—hired the firm in 2008–09. The relationship between the two companies appears to have been solidified in January 2008 when Total Intelligence chair Cofer Black traveled to Zurich to meet with Kevin Wilson, Monsanto’s security manager for global issues.

After the meeting in Zurich, Black sent an e-mail to other Blackwater executives, including to Prince and Prado at their Blackwater e-mail addresses. Black wrote that Wilson “understands that we can span collection from internet, to reach out, to boots on the ground on legit basis protecting the Monsanto [brand] name…. Ahead of the curve info and insight/heads up is what he is looking for.” Black added that Total Intelligence “would develop into acting as intel arm of Monsanto.” Black also noted that Monsanto was concerned about animal rights activists and that they discussed how Blackwater “could have our person(s) actually join [activist] group(s) legally.” Black wrote that initial payments to Total Intelligence would be paid out of Monsanto’s “generous protection budget” but would eventually become a line item in the company’s annual budget. He estimated the potential payments to Total Intelligence at between $100,000 and $500,000. According to documents, Monsanto paid Total Intelligence $127,000 in 2008 and $105,000 in 2009.

Reached by telephone and asked about the meeting with Black in Zurich, Monsanto’s Wilson initially said, “I’m not going to discuss it with you.” In a subsequent e-mail to The Nation, Wilson confirmed he met Black in Zurich and that Monsanto hired Total Intelligence in 2008 and worked with the company until early 2010. He denied that he and Black discussed infiltrating animal rights groups, stating “there was no such discussion.” He claimed that Total Intelligence only provided Monsanto “with reports about the activities of groups or individuals that could pose a risk to company personnel or operations around the world which were developed by monitoring local media reports and other publicly available information. The subject matter ranged from information regarding terrorist incidents in Asia or kidnappings in Central America to scanning the content of activist blogs and websites.” Wilson asserted that Black told him Total Intelligence was “a completely separate entity from Blackwater.”

Seriously, this just buggers the mind.

For their next product, Soylent Green!

I was driving down the road on I-795, and a red pickup truck a few car lengths ahead of me had its driver’s side front wheel come off.

The truck continued down the road, trailing sparks from the break disk on the pavement.

Thankfully, the driver managed to control the truck, and get off onto the right shoulder.

The wheel continued to roll down the road, and careened off the center median Jersey barrier, and wheel bounced across three lanes, and also went off the right shoulder.

Thankfully the wheel did not hit anyone either, though it came within 10 feet of me and another driver.

I then called 911, changed my underwear, and went off to a scheduled appointment with my chiropractor.

As to the rest of Baltimore,  there was a train derailment and explosion in Rosedale:

A freight train smacked into a truck carrying garbage and careened off the tracks in Rosedale Tuesday afternoon, triggering an explosion felt throughout the region and sending up a plume of black smoke visible for miles.

Authorities identified the driver of the truck as John Alban Jr., a retired Baltimore County firefighter who owns a waste collection company near the scene of the crash. The Essex man was listed in serious condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center Tuesday night, a hospital spokeswoman said. No other serious injuries were reported.

Officials shut down surrounding roads for several hours, slowing traffic through the region. The roads were reopened by Tuesday night, and a spokeswoman for the State Highway Administration said the morning commute should not be affected.

Michael “Vince” Brown, the operations manager at a business near the crash site, was sitting in his office at about 2 p.m. Tuesday when it began to “rumble and shake.”

“I screamed at my employees, ‘Everyone get in their cars and get out of here now,’” Brown said. “We were on Lake Drive, and I asked if everyone was there, and as soon as I said that, the train blew up. It blew me against my car.”

Authorities have advised people in a two block radius to leave the area because of possible toxic fumes.

When Robert Gibbs was asked about a Maureen Dowd article criticizing Obama, he replied that he did not read her regularly, because she had been writing the same article for the past 8 years:

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Gibbs was asked if he happened to read Dowd’s latest column, in which she called Obama “a sad sack” who could use a little bit more John F. Kennedy.

“I don’t normally read Maureen,” Gibbs said. “I don’t largely because it’s sort of largely the same column for the last, like, eight years.”

That’s going to leave a mark.

This graphic pretty much covers it.

H/t AmericaBlog.

The New York Times has revealed that they delivered big sacks of cash to Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

President Hamid Karzai acknowledged Monday that the Central Intelligence Agency has been dropping off bags of cash at his office for a decade, saying the money was used for “various purposes” and expressing gratitude to the United States for making the payments.

Mr. Karzai described the sums delivered by the C.I.A. as a “small amount,” though he offered few other details. But former and current advisers of the Afghan leader have said the C.I.A. cash deliveries have totaled tens of millions of dollars over the past decade and have been used to pay off warlords, lawmakers and others whose support the Afghan leader depends upon.

The payments are not universally supported in the United States government. American diplomats and soldiers expressed dismay on Monday about the C.I.A.’s cash deliveries, which some said fueled corruption. They spoke privately because the C.I.A. effort is classified.

Others were not so restrained. “We’ve all suspected it,” said Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and a critic of the war effort in Afghanistan. “But for President Karzai to admit it out loud brings us into a bizarro world.”

Mr. Karzai’s comments, made at a news conference in Helsinki, Finland, where he is traveling, were not without precedent. When it emerged in 2010 that one of his top aides was taking bags of cash from Iran, Mr. Karzai readily confirmed those reports and expressed gratitude for the money. Iran cut off its payments last year after Afghanistan signed a strategic partnership deal with the United States over Iran’s objections.

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

I’m so not surprised that this was the guy that George W. Bush and his evil minions^™ chose to run the country.

They wanted someone whom they could buy.

Unfortunately, they also found someone who doesn’t stay bought.

For some reason, my cell phone app did not post the image.

Our other cat, Meatball (or Mousetrap, she does not answer to either) is freaking out.

I think that this little fluff balls scares her.

Do not drink anything while watching this. I will not be responsible for the purchase of screen wipes.

Following a firestorm of protest the Department of Defense is backing off of their plans to have a drone medal which would outrank the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart:

The military has stopped production of a new medal for remote warfare troops as it considers complaints from veterans and lawmakers over the award, a government official said Tuesday.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a review of the Distinguished Warfare Medal, which was to be awarded to troops who operate drones and use other technological skills to fight America’s wars from afar. Announcement of the review is expected at a Pentagon news conference later Tuesday.

Lawmakers and veterans groups have complained that although troops can get the new medal for work far from the battlefield, it has been ranked above medals for those who served on the front line in harm’s way, such as the Purple Heart given to wounded troops.

If the review agrees with complaints about the medal, it would likely have to be renamed and new medals manufactured, the government official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

You know, with half a brain would have figures out that it would unleash a sh%$ storm.

Whoever came up with this idea should be peeling potatoes for the next few months.

No, I am not talking about how they handled their own banking crisis back in the 1990s, I am talking about how they delivered the Gripen fighter on time and on budget:

Aug. 10, 1628: Vasa, first of a new class of ships intended to change the balance of power in Nordic waters, left her Stockholm yard for the first time. As she left the lee of the city, she heeled sharply, flooded and sank. The shipwrights blamed the sailors for demanding too many guns.

This is related to the news that full-scale development of the JAS 39E version of the Saab Gripen will cost 13.1 billion kronor ($2.1 billion) over five years. That is about 1 billion kronor less than Saab ‘s last major effort, the JAS 39C/D.

The precursor to the JAS 39E, the Gripen Demo program, has just been completed for 60% of its planned budget, company flight test director Ola Rignell told a conference audience at the Aero India show in Bengaluru. And if the JAS 39E program follows the established pattern, it will be executed under fixed-price contracts.

Clearly, this must be stopped. If this behavior was to become universal, it would result in soaring unemployment among executive vice presidents. Armageddocalypse!

………

Sweden was developing multinational programs, teaming with the U.S. and Britain on engines and avionics, while rivals were busting their budgets in pursuit of autarky. From swept wings to real supersonic speed, and automated interception to pulse-Doppler radar, Sweden took third place behind the superpowers, and led the world in networked operations.

Another ingredient in the secret sauce is a small, low-profile group of people who neither bear arms nor cut metal. Not tomtens, the little creatures who guard the farm when everyone is asleep, but the Swedish defense materiel administration, the FMV—which traces its ancestry directly to the Royal Military Board that King Gustavus Adolphus established after the loss of the Vasa .

The FMV is a civilian agency that reports to the Swedish government. The defense ministry and armed forces are its customer, not its boss. In turn, FMV is the industry’s customer.

………

FMV’s job is not to get the biggest and fastest kit for the services but to make sure that stuff is delivered on time and does what it says on the tin. It is the broker between industry and the military user, ensuring that requirements are achievable with manageable risks, and monitoring industry ‘s performance.

That is why only Sweden, out of a dozen nations writing fighter requirements in 1980-85, decided that the most important goal was lower operating cost .

Fixed-price is simply how things are done. Says an FMV history of the Gripen (contractors may wish to avert their eyes):

In this large project . . . it was obvious to FMV that it would be very hard for the companies to pay the money back to FMV in case of failure.

The contractors would do WHAT? Indeed, Saab did so when the Gripen C/D program came in under budget , writing the FMV a check for the underrun.

This system will be put to the test again on the JAS 39E, because the minefield of integration and software is the core of the program.

What is new is that the Saab system that ties the avionics together is based on Arinc 651 partition standards that keep mission systems separate from flight-critical functions on the same processors.

To be clear, the Swedes have an option not available to the US defense industry, which is they can credibly threaten to shut down the whole program, and the whole industry, and buy foreign arms.

That being said, they have started their programs with a focus on cost, both acquisition and operational, and they have delivered capabilities that are similar to those of rival programs (here I would say the Typhoon and Rafale) more quickly and more cheaply.

So, for some reason, we cannot follow the Swedish model in either defense of finance, despite the obvious advantages of these strategies.

(Via Phoenix)

Flying out for my Dad’s 80^th birthday party.

Flying back Sunday.

I decided to leave my laptop at home, so my posting will be very light (I’ve posted some timeless stuff to show up later).

Posted via mobile.

The Swedish Air Force has ordered 60 of the new Gripens, (paid subscription required) with the first to be delivered in 2018.

It will be interesting to see how it plays in the world market.

It’s light weight and low operational costs, along with Saab’s decision to partition between mission systems and flight-critical functions, which should simplify upgrades, should make it attractive to budget conscious nations.

The IRS is investigating the political Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS to see if they violated tax code:

Big dark-money groups like the Karl Rove-advised Crossroads GPS promised the IRS they would have “limited” involvement in politics—in order to protect their nonprofit tax-exempt status—yet went on to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the 2010 and 2012 federal elections. Now several tax policy experts, including a former high-ranking IRS official who ran the division overseeing nonprofits, say the IRS must bring the hammer down on these shadowy nonprofits or risk looking weak and useless.

“The government’s going to have to investigate them and prosecute them,” says Marcus Owens, who ran the IRS’s tax-exempt division for a decade and is now a lawyer in private practice. “In order to maintain the integrity of the process, they’re going to be forced to take action.”

………

The most high-profile nonprofit to tell the IRS one thing and seemingly do another is Crossroads GPS, the powerful group cofounded by Karl Rove. In a 41-page application, dated September 3, 2010, Crossroads told the IRS it would spend only a “limited” amount of money on influencing elections. Crossroads is different from the two groups mentioned above in a crucial way: The IRS has yet to approve its tax-exempt application, which means its 2010 application is confidential. Yet ProPublica obtained it and exposed the gap between what Crossroads said in September 2010 and what it went on to do.

Despite telling the IRS it would spend a “limited” amount of money on politics, Crossroads unloaded nearly $16 million in dark money on political advertising during the 2010 campaign and more than $70 million to influence the presidential and congressional contests in 2012.

………

Hill says she doubts whether the IRS has the “political will” to go after political nonprofit groups, which spent well over $400 million on the 2012 elections and often have direct ties to top Democratic and Republican lawmakers. Yet what’s at stake, Hill adds, is nothing less than the very integrity of the tax law. “We have tax laws on the books—the question now is, does the IRS intend to enforce the law?” she asks. “Or are we all just going to pretend that the laws are going to be enforced?”

I’m inclined to believe Frances Hill when she doubts that the IRS has the political will to enforce the law. 

The IRS cannot do this without support from the Department of Justice and from the White House, because there will be a storm of coordinated faux-outrage from the right wing punditry.

Based on prior history, it is highly unlikely that the White House will have the IRS’s back when this happens.

So, some wags put out a petition to, “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016“.

Since this bit of comedic gold has gotten more then 25,000 signatures, the white house has issued a response:

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

• The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
• The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
• Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

I am actually a bit surprised by their response.

I would have assumed that the White House would have insisted that “blowing up planets” was a necessary executive prerogative in line with his functions of Commander-in-Chief.

But it turns out that they didn’t even wait for any actual budget deal. Here’s Marco Rubio yesterday (via Ezra Klein):

The first part is, of course, simply a lie: numerous reports tell us that McConnell did in fact make precisely that demand. And let’s remember this when Rubio makes his run for the White House: we already know that he’s an unprincipled liar. But anyway, you see how it will go — and why the whole notion of settling matters fiscal with a Grand Bargain was always crazy. You can’t make big deals with a totally untrustworthy negotiating partner.

It does not make sense to negotiate with terrorists, but that meant nothing to Democrats, who went 10:1 for the bill, while the Republicans went nearly 2:1 against.

They will be seeing ads from ‘Phants about this within weeks.

To paraphrase a Roman general whose name I forget about the Germanic tribes, Republicans are completely trustworthy only for so long as you have your boot on their neck.

Particularly in the House, it should have been made clear that this would only pass if the Republicans delivered at least 150 votes.

You don’t just pass the bill, you shame them.

If you want to cut a deal with these folks, you

Gas, Solid, and Cat:

link

Yes, I am aware of plasma as the 4^th state of matter as well.

The EU is looking at what amounts to a compulsory licensing regime for orphan copyrighted works:

The European Parliament has agreed to bless draft proposals on orphan works that are similar to a compulsory purchase order with minimal compensation.

It’s essentially an argument about using other people’s stuff without their permission.

In May last year, the European Commission floated proposals to allow the “non-commercial” use of works for which the author can’t immediately be found, so long as they did a quick Google search first.

The UK’s Parliament shot down similar proposals in 2010. But the European Parliament yesterday announced its support for the EC’s draft, which includes the Get Out of Jail Free search requirement. It only obliges the user to pay the creator if they show up, and punitive damages won’t be available. The draft is awaiting formal approval.

This is a very good thing.

Under the current copyright regime, neither the works of Shakespeare nor Herman Melville’s masterwork Moby Dick would be generally available or even generally known.

Rights issues would have prevented the publication of the first folio (The Bard died without issue), and Moby Dick saw mass printing because it was out of copyright, and there was a revival of interest in Melville’s work following the posthumous publication of Billy Budd.

Neither of these works would have been generally available without the public domain, and this sort of compulsory licensing is a good alternative.  (It is likely that the first folio would have been allowed to rot away, as are thousands of old films are at this moment)

Copyright is not about property, or is it about guaranteeing a revenue stream.  It is a law designed to promulgate the public interest by encouraging the creation of original art.

While this proposal may complicate licensing, there is no evidence that it will result in any significant reduction in the actual production of new works.

This might need some tweaking, but given the absolutist efforts of the content distributors, who will vociferously object to anything even vaguely resembling the public domain, or the right to fair use, an effort must made to pull the needle back to center, which requires overreach in the initial stages.

You may have heard it hyped as the, “Insourcing Boom:

For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it.

The very scale of the place seemed to underscore its irrelevance. Six factory buildings, each one the size of a large suburban shopping mall, line up neatly in a row. The parking lot in front of them measures a mile long and has its own traffic lights, built to control the chaos that once accompanied shift change. But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday. The vast majority of the lot’s spaces were empty; the traffic lights looked forlorn.

………

Yet this year, something curious and hopeful has begun to happen, something that cannot be explained merely by the ebbing of the Great Recession, and with it the cyclical return of recently laid-off workers. On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.

On March 20, just 39 days later, Appliance Park opened a second new assembly line, this one in Building 5, to make new high-tech French-door refrigerators. The top-end model can sense the size of the container you place beneath its purified-water spigot, and shuts the spigot off automatically when the container is full. These refrigerators are the latest versions of a style that for years has been made in Mexico.

Another assembly line is under construction in Building 3, to make a new stainless-steel dishwasher starting in early 2013. Building 1 is getting an assembly line to make the trendy front-loading washers and matching dryers Americans are enamored of; GE has never before made those in the United States. And Appliance Park already has new plastics-manufacturing facilities to make parts for these appliances, including simple items like the plastic-coated wire racks that go in the dishwashers.

Rejoice! Rejoice! America is back.

Well, not so much:

American unions are changing their priorities. Appliance Park’s union was so fractious in the ’70s and ’80s that the place was known as “Strike City.” That same union agreed to a two-tier wage scale in 2005—and today, 70 percent of the jobs there are on the lower tier, which starts at just over $13.50 an hour, almost $8 less than what the starting wage used to be.

U.S. labor productivity has continued its long march upward, meaning that labor costs have become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total cost of finished goods. You simply can’t save much money chasing wages anymore.

So, these guys, guys who are doing skilled manufacturing work where they interact with the engineers designers refining the design (read the whole article), are making about 20% over the 1969 minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, or about 40% less than the minimum wage adjusted for current wage levels.

This is not the return of the middle class manufacturing job, it’s about America becoming a low wage country. We are kind of the anti-Germany.

Even the hactacular Adam Davidson, who generally find ways to shill for the 1%, recognizes the fact that the employers are demanding higher and higher skill levels for less and less pay:

Eric Isbister, the C.E.O. of GenMet, a metal-fabricating manufacturer outside Milwaukee, told me that he would hire as many skilled workers as show up at his door. Last year, he received 1,051 applications and found only 25 people who were qualified. He hired all of them, but soon had to fire 15. Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister, after all, doesn’t abide by strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10 an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an hour after several years of good performance. From what I understand, a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.

The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages. As a result, the United States may soon have a hard time competing in the global economy. The average age of a highly skilled factory worker in the U.S. is now 56. “That’s average,” says Hal Sirkin, the lead author of the study. “That means there’s a lot who are in their 60s. They’re going to retire soon.” And there are not enough trainees in the pipeline, he said, to replace them.

(emphasis mine)

Modern employers are not willing to train, not willing to pay, and underpay relative to lower management at McDonald’s, and they are surprised that they cannot find people willing to bend over and say, “Thank you sir, may I have another.”

Shocker that.

BTW, the decidedly non-hactacular Felix Salmon riffs on this matter as well.

Holy Crap Adam Davidson doesn’t pimp for the employers for once.

So, some neighborhoods in New York were set up as completely private. Their streets were private, and everything was behind fences.

Well, after hurricane Sandy, they are asking for a bailout:

Sea Gate looks the same as many storm-scattered waterfront communities do. Home after home torn apart by the ocean. Streets filled with sand. Shattered sidewalks and clogged sewers. A sea wall, which had already been inadequate to the task of safeguarding residents, reduced to rubble.

Ordinarily, New York City or other governmental entities might take over the tasks of restoring a middle-class neighborhood like this. But Sea Gate, with its 850 homes on Coney Island’s western tip, is not an ordinary neighborhood. It is a 113-year-old private, gated community, where the razor-wire-topped fences and armed security checkpoints that keep outsiders from its streets, beaches and parks serve as a constant reminder that the residents of this community have chosen to live somewhat apart.

Once the gilded retreat of the Vanderbilt family, Sea Gate, like other gated communities in New York, preserved its exclusivity with the promise that the residents would assume the costs of community upkeep, maintaining their own streets, parks and sewer systems and even fielding the distinct Sea Gate Police Department.

The special status endured, through occasional controversy and political efforts to open the streets to the public, because of the community’s self-sufficiency.

But the damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy to Sea Gate, in Brooklyn, and another gated community, Breezy Point, in Queens, was so monumental that residents who are already struggling to figure out how they will pay to rebuild their homes say they cannot afford to pay the additional cost of repairing communal infrastructure. So neighborhoods that have long held the rest of the city at arm’s length now seek the financial embrace of the city, state and federal governments.

This is not public infrastructure, it’s private infrastructure.

They don’t have streets, they have a communal driveway. If they wanted it protected, they should have had insurance.

If they want public help for their private property, then the public needs PUBLIC access to those streets.

The city has already bulldozed sand off the streets and vacuumed sand out of the storm drains, and until their public spaces are once again public, that should be it.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

US Representative, medial doctor, and tea-baggers Scott DesJarlais, is a Republican who ran on family values.

It’s not been revealed that he encouraged his wife and a lover to have abortions (yes, plural), and slept with his patients:

A decade before calling himself “a consistent supporter of pro-life values,” Tennessee physician and Republican U.S. Rep. Scott DesJarlais supported his ex-wife’s decision to get two abortions before their marriage, according to the congressman’s sworn testimony during his divorce trial.

Obtained by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the couple’s 2001 trial transcript also confirms DesJarlais had sexual relationships with at least two patients, three coworkers and a drug representative while he was chief of staff at Grandview Medical Center in Jasper, Tenn. During one affair with a female patient, DesJarlais prescribed her drugs, gave her an $875 watch and bought her a plane ticket to Las Vegas, records show.

DesJarlais spokesman Robert Jameson did not respond to requests for comment. The attorney for the congressman’s ex-wife said that at this point she does not have any comments to issue on her ex-husband’s testimony.

The transcript corroborates accounts given to the Times Free Press in October by one of the patients who had a sexual relationship with DesJarlais. The newspaper continues to grant her anonymity, along with all the women due to the nature of the testimony.

DesJarlais, a family-values conservative who rode 2010’s tea party wave to Washington, testified his ex-wife’s earlier abortion stemmed from medical concerns.

“… [She] was on an experimental drug called Lupron and was not supposed to have gotten pregnant. There were potential risks. It was a therapeutic,” he said.

DesJarlais backed a second abortion after she returned from a military stint in Saudi Arabia a few years before they married in 1995.

Except for the whole f%$#ing your patients thing (a violation of medical ethics), as a liberal, I support his right to practice his lifestyle.  He has the right to be a pig felching scumbag.

Interestingly enough, Scott DesJarlais thinks that the government should prevent people from practicing his lifestyle.

As Stephen Colbert notes, “Republican Congressman Scott DesJarlais stands adamantly against abortion except when it endangers the political life of the father.”

H/t Andrew Rosenthal for the vid.

The Honorable Martin O’Malley, governor of the state of Maryland:

He said President Barack Obama’s re-election was a “pretty strong signal” to Republicans that voters want them to drop what he described as “obstructionist” positions on issues such as immigration.

On the fiscal cliff, he said, “I am hopeful that [Republicans] see that writing on the wall and will want to do [a deal] sooner rather than later in order to shed their sort of Tea Party obstructionist stench.”

(emphasis mine)

I shook his hand, and exchanged about a dozen words with him at Hanukkah House (It’s a Baltimore thing) in 2003, and I thought that he was going to be President one day.

The fact that he’s bringing it, I can’t imagine another Democrat with national profile using the word, “Stench” to describe his opponents.

We need more of this.

In fact, I want him to choose Alan Grayson as his running mate. (Not gonna happen)