Category: Wanker

This is Number 1 on my Schadenfreude hit Parade Today

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You know the story, libertarian boy makes good, doesn’t want to pay taxes, renounces his US citizenship, and is shocked when he is denied an entry visa into the United States:

Roger Ver, a high-profile member of the Bitcoin community who is commonly known as “Bitcoin Jesus,” has been denied a US visa — despite having been born in the country.

Ver is well known in the Bitcoin community as an entrepreneur and angel investor, having funded products including Blockchain, Ripple, and Blockpay. He became known as “Bitcoin Jesus” after giving thousands of coins of the virtual currency away for free. Ver was born in the US, making him a citizen there, but he renounced his citizenship in March — and now he says the government isn’t letting him back in.

As Coindesk is reporting, Ver posted on Twitter that the US government had refused his recent request for a non-immigrant visa, leaving him “effectively locked out of his native USA.”

Ver complains that the decision has forced him to miss speaking appointments at conferences and that the US embassy in Barbados refused to even consider the evidence for his application.

The official reasoning behind Ver’s rejection is that he doesn’t have sufficient “ties” to his country of residency in the Caribbean and has not demonstrated he has “the ties that will compel [him] to return to your home country after your travel to the United States,” according to a picture he tweeted of a letter that appears to be from the embassy.

In short, US officials are worried that Ver might choose to stay in his native country illegally.

I’m sure that he sees himself as a modern lieutenant Philip Nolan, but I think that the rest of us just see him as a self entitled, solipsistic, schmuck.€

It really could not have happened to a more deserving person.

H/t Cthulhu* at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

*No, not the unspeakably malevolent super-being, the contributor to the Stellar Parthenon.†
†OK, I’ve never seen the two of them together, so Cthulhu might actually be the Cthulhu, but the mere fact that he is on a BBS, interacting with humans‡ would seem to mitigate against this.
‡Yes, I know, this is the internet, where no one knows if you are a dog.
€Not really. As anyone with an even passing knowledge, a schmuck has a head, and a turtleneck.

Why are People are Missing the Old The New Republic?

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I really don’t get it.

It was reflexively, and stupidly, counter-intuitive in all the time that I was aware of it, it hasn’t broken a major story in decades, and it has appeared to see its mission as a way for country-club liberals to excuse their own privilige and entitlement. (It’s also been affirmative action for white Ivy Leaguers with degrees in English)

One of the things that its supporters have pointed to is the dense literary writings of the magazine’s now former literary editor Leon Wieseltier.

I never read his stuff.  While I read some (not enough) literature, I have no urge to read people who write about literature.

It just seems to be an exercise in solipsism to me.

But Atrios pointed me to this bit of Graphorrhea that Mr. Wieseltier wrote for the New York Times:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

And I thought that reading a ponderous translation of Immanuel Kant in high schoolwas a tough row to hoe.

It gets worse as it goes on. ……… and on. ……… and on. ……… and on. ……… and on.

I think that if translated to Frankenstein-speak, it translates to, “Paper publications good!  Internet Bad!”, but I can only give a confidence that I actually understood that bit of purple prose with about 27.3%.

Why anyone ever bought a copy of The New Republic in the past 40 years is beyond me.

Seriously.  If this weren’t Leon Wieseltier, I would think that this was a parody of academic writing.

H/T Atrios

This is an Epic Take-Down

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Kirby Delauter, a member of the Frederick County Council, does not like being challenged by the press.

It appears that he particularly dislikes The Frederick News Post, which is why he demanded that they not mention his name.

Hilarity ensued:

Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter

 Frederick News-Post Editorial Board | Posted: Tuesday, January 6, 2015 12:30 am

Knowing Councilman Kirby Delauter as we do, we weren’t surprised that he threatened The Frederick News-Post with a lawsuit because we had, he says — and we’re not making this up — been putting Kirby Delauter’s name in the paper without Kirby Delauter’s authorization. Attorneys would be called, Kirby Delauter said.

 In fact, we spent quite some time laughing about it. Kirby Delauter, an elected official; Kirby Delauter, a public figure? Surely, Kirby Delauter can’t be serious? Kirby Delauter’s making a joke, right?

 Round about then, we wondered, if it’s not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can’t use his name (Kirby Delauter)? Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but “Kirby Delauter” repeated over and over again — Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter? OK, imagine we agreed because of temporary madness or something funny in the water that week, how would we reference “Kirby Delauter” and do our job as journalists without running afoul of our lack of authorization?

 Blanks? Sure, we sometimes use hyphens in the case of expletives. Perhaps we could do that: “K—- D——-.” Or, perhaps, “Councilman [Unauthorized].” We giggled a bit more than we should have when we came up with “the Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter,” which doesn’t seem as funny written down in black and white and includes his name, which defeats the point. Maybe we should just put his initials, “KD,” with an asterisk to a footnote (KD*), or refer to him as GLAT, the acronym for his campaign: “Govern Like A Taxpayer.” We could even make it sound a little hip-hop with a well-placed hyphen: G-Lat. Speaking of, could we get away with “K-Del”? Or we could simply go with the Harry Potter-esque “He Who Shall Not be Named.” (Cue the lightning strike and peal of thunder.)

 Yet we could take the low road down even further and childishly mangle “Kirby Delauter” into references you, the reader, would still understand. “Sherbert Deluder,” say. Or “Derby Kelauter.” “Shirley Delaughter” (and don’t call me Shirley). We found a great automatic online anagrammer that generated all kinds of alternatives and could make it a challenge for our readers to decode each time we have to reference the councilman: “Rebuked artily.” That was a good one. “Bakery diluter” is just silly but does have a ring about it. “Keyed rural bit” was another that caught our eye as somewhat telling, because Kirby Delauter’s pretty keyed up. We’re sure there’s a joke in “Brutelike Yard” somewhere.

………

Actually, the irony here is that when they speak of calling him GLAT or KD, they are (likely inadvertently) making a Jewish joke:  GlatT is a level of Kosher status, and KD means Kosher Dairy, but I’m not sure that anyone got that on the editorial board.

The Fix Was In All Along

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Three weeks ago, Vermont Governor, Peter Shumlin, having failed to secure an absolute majority in the election, throwing the results to the state house, announced that he was scrapping his plans for single payer.

While he claimed that politics had nothing to do with it, a subsequent analysis appears to indicate that he deliberately cast the numbers for single payer in the worst possible light:

Gov. Peter Shumlin could have proposed a financing plan for single payer health care that cost $1 billion less than the one he presented to the public Dec. 17.

Instead, demoralized after a stunning near defeat in the General Election, Shumlin scrapped his long awaited, universal, publicly financed health care plan because he said it would shock Vermont’s fragile economy.

………

But critics say now Vermonters won’t know if single payer could have succeeded in 2015, because after Shumlin decided it wasn’t feasible, he found a way to mitigate the inevitable wave of political backlash and appease his main constituencies: liberal advocates, business leaders, providers, and teacher and state employee unions.

Shumlin had said he would present a menu of options to the Vermont Legislature in the two year run up to the announcement, but instead he presented one plan that Vermonters could not afford.

One of the alternative plans proposed by his health care reform team that was not considered in the final analysis was a much less expensive, $1.6 billion option, that would have offered a universal, publicly financed insurance plan with benefit levels on par with what is available to most Vermonters in the commercial insurance market today, according to documents provided by the Shumlin administration.

“I don’t know exactly when he made that decision, but once it was made, there is no question in my mind that Shumlin pivoted to his roots and his instincts, which are purely political,” said Hamilton Davis, a journalist and longtime observer of Vermont health reform.

“He hung everything he could on it and walked away.”

John Franco, a prominent Burlington attorney who has been involved health care reform for two decades, says that Shumlin purposely chose a plan that covered 94 percent of individuals’ health care costs. Proposing an overly expensive option, Franco says, was a political calculation.

“If you build an airplane out of lead, it’s not going to fly,” Franco said.

………

But buried on the 260th page of the appendices to his report released just before New Year’s Day, is a financing plan that might have been a reasonable starting point for going forward.

This plan would have offered insurance at a level that is equal to the average employer plan now on the market and would have cost $1 billion less than the Cadillac level plan Shumlin rejected.

It appears that he overstated the costs by about $1 billion, which is over $3000 per resident of the state, over $5000 per worker, and that is not including the fact that he, “The Shumlin administration assumed there would be zero administrative savings to the program in year one.”

Why did this happen?

Perhaps because the legislature is voting on who gets the next term of Governor tomorrow, and some of the business and medical interests in the state cut a deal not to lobby for his opponent?

There is a part of me that is hoping that the legislature elects the Republican, because Shumlin has been a portrait in cowardice.

Cuomo and Christie Find a New Way to F%$# the Poor

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As a part of the phony Port Authority plan to the proposed by Cuomo and Christie, they are looking to end overnight PATH service Irks Riders, which would have toe effect of making commuting to work for the night shift in “The City that Never Sleeps” less convenient and more expensive:

………

As if Mr. Parada’s commute were not grueling enough, he and thousands of his fellow riders found out there could be no commute whatsoever in the future. At the end of December, their Legislatures already adjourned, Governors Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey, vetoed a sweeping bill that would have reformed the agency. The governors, who jointly control the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, then unveiled a report of their own calling for changes.

Buried among the proposals was one considering the elimination of service between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. on the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, known as PATH, the train linking Manhattan with nearby cities in New Jersey.

During this time, ridership plummets, with roughly 2,000 crossing the Hudson on weeknights. They account for just under 1 percent of daily passengers, and eliminating service would save the authority $10 million from its $330 million budget, according to the governors’ report.

The idea was universally rejected by those lonely souls crisscrossing the Hudson River in the early morning hours, including the bartenders and clubgoers, the swing-shift construction and postal workers, and the foreign-exchange traders heading in on Frankfurt time.

To them, the overnight PATH is a lifeline, the only one into or out of New York City when all other trains and buses have stopped and taxis, at $50 to $100, are too costly.

I guess that they need to free up some money for do nothing jobs for their political allies.

Ratf%$#s.

This is a Meaningful Description of What is Wrong with Washington, DC Professional Football Franchise

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Sally Jenkins makes a very good point about what is wrong with Washington’s Football team, all while avoiding the use of the clearly racist franchise moniker, though whoever wrote the headline f%$#@ed that up.

The short form of her thesis is that a fish rots from the head, and given the truly pitiful performance of the team since his acquiring the team seems to confirm this thesis.

I will leave you with her last paragraph:

For too long, no one has trusted the basic setup of the organization. So many flatterers and yes men survive while the truth tellers get offed or ignored, and every three or four years everyone gets fired and the club starts from scratch again. Step one for Snyder is to identify some real leaders, not just enablers. And to convince them he’s not out to waste their best efforts and earning years.

She further suggests that, “Snyder would have to listen, really listen, to his staffers and his players. Not to his pets and his stars and top jersey sellers, either, but to those who he has often disregarded and disrespected, the rank and file who show up for work every day and manage to do a professional job in an unprofessional environment.”

I simply do not think that this is in Dan Snyder’s DNA. When he first bought the team, he fired everyone, including secretaries and the like.

Sh%$#ing on the little people who might actually know what is going on has been an essential part of his modus operandi since he took over the team.

He cannot solve the problem, because he is the problem.

If DC fans could stay away from games, not buy merchandise, and decrease his revenue to the point where the debt service would be greater than revenue, which Jenkins suggests as “Plan B”, it might get rid of him, and we might find some resolution regarding the teams ineptitude on and off the field.

Full disclosure: I am a fan of the team, and I have been since 1976.

As if Christie and Cuomo Could not Get any Slimier………

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They both just vetoed reform of the Port Authority which had been passed unanimously by both legislatures.

It appears that they want to retain their patronage prerogatives:

In a joint press release on Saturday night, Governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie unveiled their long-awaited plan for reforming the Port Authority, while at the same time vetoing a Port-reform bill passed unanimously by both the New York and New Jersey state legislatures.

In separate letters sent to the legislatures in their respective states, Cuomo and Christie said that the program recommended by their “Special Panel on the Future of the Port Authority” was superior to the one they passed.

“The governance structure and other accountability measures recommended by the Special Panel will do a better job of improving accountability,” wrote Cuomo.

The governors also agreed to sign a separate bill that would make the bistate authority subject to the states’ freedom of information laws.

………

The bills the governors vetoed would have subjected the Port to standards already imposed on other New York State authorities earlier this century.

More precisely, it would have required the Port Authority’s commissioners to certify in writing that their loyalty is to the authority (versus the governors who appointed them). It would have mandated that the authority write up policies for disposal and acquisition of authority property, establish a whistleblower program, require staff to report suspicions of fraud and corruption to the agency’s inspector general, require all commissioners to file annual financial disclosure statements, and more.

This stuff is governance 101, but they want to put their cronies in unaccountable positions of authority so that they can maintain patronage empires.

Dudes! Haven’t You Heard of the Streisand Effect?!?!?!*

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A 22-year old geek figured out a way to find some cheap airfares, and he set up a website, Skiplagged, which applies the algorithm.

What’s more, his site is free to the public.

Well, Orbitz and United Airlines decided that they had to go medieval on his ass, and roll out the lawyers, and so his site is now getting mainstream coverage, fom places like Fortune Magazine:

United Airlines and Orbitz have teamed up to file suit against a 22-year-old entrepreneur whose airline ticketing startup, Skiplagged, operates according to a thrifty booking ploy known as ‘hidden city’ ticketing.

This means that passengers purchase tickets for indirect flights with the intention to disembark at their layover destinations. Say you want to fly from New York to Chicago, for instance: it could be cheaper to take an indirect flight to Los Angeles and then get off at the Chicago layover.

While hidden city ticketing only works when travelers purchase one-way tickets without any checked baggage, notes CNN, this often represents the cheapest option.

 Yeah, CNN covered it too.

I was unaware of this technique, but I have now bookmarked the site, and I imagine that some of you will too.

Orbitz, United Airlines Sue 22-Year…

*Wherein an attempt to suppress information has the unintended effect of publicizing that information. (Link)

Hotel Telecommunications F%$#ery

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Marriott specifically, who just got fined for jamming personal Wi-Fi hotspots, and is now attempting to get regulatory forbearance:

Microsoft and Google don’t agree on much, but they’ve presented a united front against the hotel industry, which is trying to convince government regulators to give them the option of blocking guests from using personal Wi-Fi hotspots.

The tech companies recently joined the wireless industry’s lobbying group and a handful of other parties in opposing the hotel industry’s petition, which seeks the Federal Communications Commission’s permission to block personal Wi-Fi networks on their properties.

This summer, the American Hospitality & Lodging Association and Marriott International asked the FCC to declare that a hotel operator can use equipment to manage its network even if it “may result in ‘interference with or cause interference’ to a [wireless device] being used by a guest on the operator’s property.”

 Now that many people have cell phones, and don’t pay the usurious fees for phone calls, Marriott wants to jam personal Wi-Fi hotspots so that they can charge equally usurious fees for that:

The Marriott-owned Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center tech staff was using a monitoring system that de-authenticated guests’ personal Wi-Fi hot spots. Meanwhile, the hotel was charging exhibitors and attendees anywhere from $250 to $1,000 for Wi-Fi service, the FCC said.

In October, Marriott settled an FCC complaint about the practice for $600,000 but argued that it hadn’t broken the law and was using technology to protect guests from “rogue wireless hotspots that can cause degraded service, insidious cyber attacks and identity theft.”

A month later, the agency asked for comments on Marriott’s earlier request to find such Wi-Fi blocking legal.

 Like I said, Hotel Telecommunications F%$#ery.

I think that the deadline for comment has passed, but you can read the comments here.

It Goes Without Saying that Rush Limbaugh is a Blithering Idiot

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As evidenced by his recent racist screed about how Idris Elba cannot play James Bond because the actor is black.

Emails revealed that a senior Sony executive was looking to tap Elba to replace Daniel Craig when the latter is done with the role.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh had a bigotrygasm over all of this.

This begs the question:  Why are sponsors supporting this inveterate racist?

To be clear, I would much rather have Elba playing George Smiley than James Bond:  I’ve always found Bond to be a bit one dimensional.

I will say something here:  If  Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal has mooted casting Elba take the role of Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy movie, I would be upset: It’s a profound waste of his not inconsiderable acting talent.

Then again, playing Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy would be a waste of pretty much anyone’s acting talent.

I Finally Have Some Meaningful Thoughts About the Police Shootings in New York this Saturday

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My first thought is that the NRA is a much bigger threat to the safety of police officers than peaceful protesters, civilian review boards, or criticism:

The last year when Ismaaiyl Brinsley—the man who killed two New York City cops on Saturday—should have been able to buy or carry a gun was 2008, when he was convicted of felony shoplifting, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to more felonies after he shot a woman’s car with a stolen handgun. Over his life, he had 19 arrests in Ohio and Georgia.

As a felon, Brinsley was barred under federal law from buying a gun. Had he undergone a background check, he would have failed it and authorities could be notified. Yet the National Rifle Association argues that bad guys will get their hands on guns regardless of the law. The lobby points to violence in states with strong gun laws as evidence of gun control’s ineffectiveness.

In fact, it’s weak gun laws that enable felons, domestic abusers, and the mentally ill to arm themselves. Whereas licensed gun sellers must conduct background checks, unlicensed secondary market sellers face no such requirement in more laissez-faire states.

This is a direct result of the gun show loopholes and other similar exceptions foisted upon us by the ammosexual lobby.

The second thought is that the advocates for police in general, and the PBA in New York City in particular, are demanding that criticism and accountability for the police be non-existent:

I covered New York politics for 15 years, and I saw some awfully tense moments between the police and Democratic politicians. But there has never been anything remotely like the war the cops are waging right now against Mayor Bill de Blasio for the thought crime of saying something that was completely unremarkable and so obviously true that in other contexts we don’t even bat an eye when someone says it. And for that, the mayor has blood on his hands, as Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association head Pat Lynch said Saturday evening after the hideous assassinations of two NYPD officers?

Let’s rewind the tape here. On Dec. 3, in the wake of the Staten Island grand jury’s refusal to indict in the case of the police homicide of Eric Garner, de Blasio gave a press conference at a Staten Island church. He spoke of the need to heal and so on, the usual politician’s rhetoric, and then he uttered these words:

This is profoundly personal for me. I was at the White House the other day, and the president of the United States turned to me, and he met Dante a few months ago, and he said that Dante reminded him of what he looked like as a teenager. And he said, I know you see this crisis through a very personal lens. I said to him I did. Because Chirlane and I have had to talk to Dante for years, about the dangers he may face. A good young man, a law-abiding young man, who would never think to do anything wrong, and yet, because of a history that still hangs over us, the dangers he may face—we’ve had to literally train him, as families have all over this city for decades, in how to take special care in any encounter he has with the police officers who are there to protect him.

Dante de Blasio, as you surely know, is a mixed-race young man of 16 who looks black and sports a large, ’70s-style afro. Does anyone seriously think that his father should not have told him what he did? Come on. We all know the odds (actually, we don’t, more on which later). We hear every prominent black man in America who has a son and who decides to talk about this publicly—football players and actors and others—say exactly the same thing. We’ve heard it hundreds of times. Are these men lying? Are they paranoid weirdos? Of course they aren’t. They are fathers, describing to the rest of us what I thought was a widely acknowledged reality.

I understand that any management-labor dialogue is necessarily fraught, but this is literally a prescription for a police state, and Pat Lynch should be condemned.

What’s more, this attitude is likely to make police officers less safe.

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, the Torture Loving, Incompetent, and Always Wrong Poster Child for CIA Lack of Accountability and Misuse of Secrecy

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She appears to be the Forrest Gump of CIA.

She refused to share data with the FBI about the 911 hijackers, she was instrumental in setting up the torture progam and lobbied for its excesses, and she lied repeatedly to Congress:

A top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA was a key architect of the agency’s defense of its detention and “enhanced interrogation” program for suspected terrorists, developing oft-repeated talking points that misrepresented and overstated its effectiveness, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report released last week.

The report singles out the female expert as a key apologist for the program, stating that she repeatedly told her superiors and others — including members of Congress — that the “torture” was working and producing useful intelligence, when it was not. She wrote the “template on which future justifications for the CIA program and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were based,” it said.

The expert also participated in “enhanced interrogations” of self-professed 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.

The expert is no stranger to controversy. She was criticized after 9/11 terrorist attacks for countenancing a subordinate’s refusal to share the names of two of the hijackers with the FBI prior to the terror attacks.

But instead of being sanctioned, she was promoted.

The expert was not identified by name in the unclassified 528-page summary of the report, but U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity confirmed that her name was redacted at least three dozen times in an effort to avoid publicly identifying her. In fact, much of the four-month battle between Senate Democrats and the CIA about redactions centered on protecting the identity of the woman, an analyst and later “deputy chief” of the unit devoted to catching or killing Osama bin Laden, according to U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations.

NBC News is withholding her name at the request of the CIA, which cited a climate of fear and retaliation in the wake of the release of the committee’s report in asking that her anonymity be protected.

Yeah, well, her identity is already a matter of public record, so f%$# that last bit:

NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous.

The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency.

The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.

The executive summary of the torture report released by the Senate last week provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately misled Congress about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News reported that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as “a top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA.”

It turns out that it’s not just people like Glenn Greenwald who condemn her, so do a number of her colleagues at the CIA

The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.

Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”

(emphasis mine)

She also has a f%$#ing wiki page, which makes her about as out as Valerie Plame.

Or as John Cook notes, “It should come as no surprise that a secret organization with no accountability promotes incompetents—but the CIA is actively encouraging the careers of the most aggressively error-prone employees it has.”

Note that she also authorized the kidnapping and torture of an innocent man, and tortured the completely bogus story about Al Qaeda cells involving black Muslims in Montana.  (No, this is not The Onion, she actually tortured this fairy tale out of KSM, and believed it).

Excessive secrecy and lack of accountability within our state security apparatus is a threat to our security.

What the Rude one Said

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Note to Cops: If You’re Gonna Be So Thin-Skinned, You Should Stop Killing People:

That’s Andrew Hawkins, a wide receiver for the Cleveland Browns. He wore that shirt while warming up for his team’s game against the Cincinnati Bengals on Sunay. As you can read, it calls for justice in the deaths of Tamir Rice, the 12 year-old who was shot to death by a Cleveland cop for holding a toy gun, and John Crawford, who was shot to death by a cop outside Dayton, Ohio, for the crime of holding a BB gun he had picked up while shopping in a Walmart. Both were killed within seconds of the arrival of the police, with no attempt to ascertain what was occurring. They are both awful situations that call for serious soul-searching by the police in Ohio, to hold the officers accountable in some way, to improve training so that such tragedies don’t happen again, to perhaps confront the racism that seems to heighten the violence in these situations. That would all be meaningful and sensitive.

But it’s so much easier to go batsh%$ and attack Hawkins.

Yeah, like teenaged girls who just saw that bitch Tanya wearing that purple dress on Instagram when she knew perfectly well that Alicia was gonna wear the same one to the dance (god, Tanya, you don’t even look good in purple), the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association stomped its feet and demanded an apology: “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law. They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.” You gotta love the implied threat there: “Mighty nice stadium you have here. Be a shame if we let your animal fans run wild.”

Read the rest of the Rude Pundit’s essay.

One Thing Worse than Being a Whiny Bitch is Being a Whiny Bitch with Permission to Shoot People

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The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, New York City’s largest police union, on Friday called on cops to keep Mayor Bill de Blasio away from police officers’ funerals.

The union published a notice on its website urging officers to keep de Blasio or City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito away, the New York Daily News reported on Friday.

“DON’T LET THEM INSULT YOUR SACRIFICE!” the notice reads.

Officers can download a form to request that de Blasio and Mark-Viverito not attend their funerals “in the event that you are killed in the line of duty.”

“Due to Mayor de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice,” the form reads.

and

A Cleveland police union has demanded that the Cleveland Browns football team apologize for a player who wore a T-shirt before Sunday’s game protesting the police shootings of two black people.

Browns wide receiver Andrew Hawkins wore a shirt reading “Justice for Tamir Rice And John Crawford III” during pre-game warmups. Rice, who was just 12 years old, died last month after a Cleveland police officer shot him when he mistook the boy’s toy gun for a real weapon. Crawford, 22, was shot dead by police in August at an area Wal-Mart while he was holding an air rifle.

Cleveland Police Patrolman Union President Jeff Follmer sent local TV station WEWS a statement after Sunday’s game that called for an apology from the NFL team. “It’s pretty pathetic when athletes think they know the law,” the statement read, as quoted by WEWS. “They should stick to what they know best on the field. The Cleveland Police protect and serve the Browns stadium and the Browns organization owes us an apology.

Seriously.  If a member of the police force cannot deal with the rather anodyne statements about controversial use of force by the department, they need to find another line of work.

I would suggest that they apply to be professional  Klein Bottles, because with their heads so far up their asses, there would be very little adjustment.

Whiny Loser of the Day

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Mary Landrieu, of course.

I understand that she is upset that she is about to be turfed out of office.

It’s a reasonable feeling.

But if the DSCC were to steal the British Crown Jewels, and pawn them for money to help her campaign, she would still lose, and even if she were to win, the Republicans would still have control of the Senate.

Even so, they let you have your stupid vote on the Keystone bitumen pipeline, so you could kiss oil company ass one last time.

Get over yourself, and start lining up that cushy K Street lobbying job.

The DSCC has done way more for you than you deserve.

AT&T Rescinds Ransom Letter

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Remember AT&T’s threat that it would curtail broadband rollout if network neutrality were implemented?

Well that threat is is  now inoperative:

AT&T now says it isn’t really going to halt a huge fiber investment because of net neutrality despite its CEO recently claiming the company would do just that.

Don’t celebrate yet—AT&T is making no promises to build anywhere.

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told investors on November 12 that “We can’t go out and invest that kind of money deploying fiber to 100 cities not knowing under what rules those investments will be governed.” Stephenson was referring to an April announcement in which AT&T said it would “expand its ultra-fast fiber network to up to 100 candidate cities and municipalities nationwide, including 21 new major metropolitan areas.”

Because of uncertainty about net neutrality rules, Stephenson said at the investor event this month that it would be better to “pause” instead of proceeding with the 100-city investment. Construction in all 100 cities was never guaranteed to begin with, as it was contingent on municipal cooperation with AT&T.

I’m not surprised that they’ve blinked.

Even the FCC wasn’t buying this as a credible threat.

Demonstrating Why Matt Taibbi is the Only Credible Big Name Financial Reporter………

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Case in point, perhaps the highest profile financial reporter in the United States, the New York Times‘ Andrew Ross Sorkin, who has gotten the vapors over Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street:

Wall Street stenographer Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times complains this morning that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is making it harder for Wall Street veterans to take on government jobs overseeing the financial industry, calling the former Harvard law professor and longtime industry critic “misinformed” in her opposition to investment banker Antonio Weiss’ nomination to a key Treasury Department post.

Weiss, President Barack Obama’s nominee to be under secretary of Treasury for domestic finance, is currently head of global investment banking at Lazard, which advised Burger King on its merger with Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons — a so-called inversion that will help Burger King avoid taxes. Warren cited Lazard’s work on inversions in explaining her opposition to Weiss’ nomination, but Sorkin contends that her concerns are “misplaced.” Sure, tax avoidance may have been “a consideration” in the BK-Tim Hortons deal, Sorkin concedes, but they weren’t the “primary factor.” At any rate, Weiss was “simply as one of several advisers” of the merger — hardly its mastermind.

Sorkin — who has criticized some inversions in the past — apparently finds no fault with the Obama administration seeking to enlist Weiss even as it pledges to crack down on corporate tax avoidance schemes.

While the inversion issue formed the crux of Sorkin’s substantive defense of Weiss, Warren has also pointed to the nominee’s financial industry background as a broad concern in itself.

Sorkin has been thoroughly captured by the financial industry, and he cannot be trusted to report on wrongdoing in the financial industry.

It could be argued that his role never was to reporting on wrongdoing, but instead his job is to document the official actions of the banking sector.

He reports on things like mergers, interviews CEOs, etc.

Of course, if that IS is real role, he is not a journalist. He is a stenographer.

Troll

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Ted “Tailgunner” Cruz is at again, suggesting that Barack Obama appoint Joe Lieberman as the next Secretary of Defense.

Cruz is just f%$#ing with Democrats now.

Personally, I would troll back, and leak that John McCain was under consideration, which would serve a number of purposes:

  • It would scare the hell out of John McCain, because he would have to defend his own decisions in the real world, as opposed to simply complaining about what the other guys are doing.
  • It would shut up that whiny bitch Lindsey Graham, because he does not take a dump without McCain’s approval.
  • It would set up a special election in Arizona, which would place limits on Republican Party f%$#ery. (Impeachment, government shutdown, etc.).
  • It would confound the Republican leadership.

Based on Obama’s decision to keep the war going in Afghanistan, it is very clear that the civilian leadership in his administration gets its marching orders from the military, rather than the other way around, so the SecDef really does not matter anyway.