Category: Wanker

Oh, God, Not This Jerk!

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Harold Ford, of the deeply corrupt Ford political clan in Tennesee is being groomed to challenge Kristen Gillibrand in the New York State Democratic Senate primary:

Encouraged by a group of influential New York Democrats, Harold Ford Jr., the former congressman from Tennessee, is weighing a bid to unseat Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand in this fall’s Democratic primary, according to three people who have spoken with him.

Mr. Ford, 39, who moved to New York three years ago, has told friends that he will decide whether to run in the next 45 days. The discussions between Mr. Ford and top Democratic donors reflect the dissatisfaction of some prominent party members with Ms. Gillibrand, who has yet to win over key constituencies, especially in New York City.

Let’s be clear what they mean when they say, “especially in New York City”: they mean that they think that they might have a chance because Harold Ford is black.

Since losing his race for the Senate in 2006, Ford has been a mouthpiece for the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) what is going on here is that the powers that be in New York, well, the DINO ones, have been “disappointed” in Gillibrand, because, as she has moved from a very conservative congressional district to a rather liberal state as her constituency, her positions have changed:

Some of the donors who have urged Mr. Ford to consider a run expressed alarm as Ms. Gillibrand, who as a congresswoman represented a conservative upstate district, has abandoned some of her previous positions on issues like gun control and immigration as she prepares to run statewide. Several executives interested in a Ford candidacy said that Ms. Gillibrand’s positions echoed Mr. Schumer’s and that the state needed a second independent voice in the Senate.

What they are saying here is that they don’t want a real Democrat here, they want a corporate whore, and that is what Harold Ford is.

Most of the opposition to Gillibrand in the New York Democratic party comes from people who think that she is too conservative for the party and for the state, but the people mentioned here, like “Financier Steven Rattner,” who ran the auto bailout until an influence buying scandal forced him out.

I’m not a fan of Gillibrand, but Harold Ford? What they hell are they thinking?

Speaking of Michelle Bachmann’s Frothing at the Mouth Lunacy on the Census

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Click for full size



The Crazy, It Burns US!!!!

She has stopped asking people not to fill out the Census over the past few months.

Why is this? Well, perhaps it’s because if Minnesota loses a Congressional district, it’s likely it will be her district that goes the way of those dinosaurs that she does not believe in:

State demographer Tom Gillaspy has been
warning for months that the next census
could result in the loss of one congressional s
eat in Minnesota. In fact, he confessed last
week that, until the recession hit, he was
almost resigned to the probability that
Minnesotans would be allowed to elect only
seven U.S. House members from newly
drawn districts in 2012.

……………

It’s ironic that a Minnesota member of Congress, Republican Michele Bachmann, went so far last summer to declare her intention to only partially complete her census forms, and to suggest reasons for others not to comply with the census law. If Minnesota loses a congressional seat, Bachmann’s populous Sixth District could be carved into pieces. She likely would have to battle another incumbent to hang on to her seat. We’ve noticed that her anticensus rhetoric has lately ceased. We hope she got wise: Census compliance is not only in Minnesota’s best interest, but also her own.

As Eric Kleefeld notes at TPM:

The really fun fact, as I’ve learned from Minnesota experts, is that Bachmann’s district would likely be the first to go if the state lost a seat. The other seats are all fairly regular-shaped, logical districts built around identifiable regions of the state (Minneapolis, St. Paul, the Iron Range, and so on). Bachmann’s district is made of what’s left over after such a process, twisting and turning from a small strip of the Wisconsin border and curving deep into the middle of the state. As such, the obvious course of action if the state loses a seat is to split her district up among its neighbors.

Basically, her district is made up of all those areas left over after they did the first 7, which are made up, in classic “Minnesota Nice” manner to be contiguous and to represent regions accurately and fairly.

I’d say that Karma was a bitch, but that would probably make Brit Hume angry.

Completely F%$#ing Delusional

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Part of a trend, not a result of selling out American workers

Rahm Emanuel believes that by voting against the Democratic base, you improve the electoral prospects of the Democrats:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has been telling Democrats a win on the health issue will reverse the slide in public opinion, just as passage of another controversial proposal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, lifted President Bill Clinton in the polls.

Let’s be clear: Clinton’s popularity did rise after the passage of NAFTA.

It was a part of a trend (see pic). When people finally noticed the passage, a few months later, his ratings fell through the floor, and the Dems lost both houses of Congress.

To be fair, a part of this might have been the collapse of healthcare reform, but NAFTA demoralized labor, and pretty much the entire Democratic base.

A bad bill is worse than no bill, and immeasurably worse than one that passes through reconciliation.

The real problem with Rahm is not that he’s determined to offer succor to right wingers because he believes that it will somehow benefit Democrats, but that he’s wrong, and incompetent.

H/t A Tiny Revolution

Ahead Dork Factor 9*

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Only $2,999.99, but shipping is free!!

I present to you the Star Trek: The Original Series: Classic Captain’s Chair Replica:

Throw away that Lay-Z-Boy. Here’s a life-size throne fit for a captain! With the sci-fi status and geek grandeur of Captain Kirk’s command chair in your collection, you can boldly go where no fan has gone before! This full-size prop replica of the U.S.S. Enterprise’s captain’s chair is designed from detailed drawings supplied by Paramount Studios and is approved by Paramount. It delivers all the accents and details from the historic prop, along with modern lighting, sound effects, and phrases designed to thrill any Star Trek enthusiast. It’s the ultimate prize from the Enterprise! The unbelievable captain’s chair measures 41-inches tall x 42-inches wide x 39-inches deep. It weighs about 215 pounds! The working swivel seat with wooden handles, leather seat cover, and armrest controls make this the perfect addition to any collection, display, home theater, or museum! The chair, seat of the chair, and arms of the chair are made of wood, with the seat covered in leather. For rigidity, it’s mounted on an iron base. Limited edition of 1,701 pieces worldwide. Left-hand arm controls include: Shuttle operation controls Activation of viewscreen Hailing frequencies Right-hand controls include: Red alert Yellow alert Jettison pod Micro tape player Intercom controls With a push of a button, voice clips from the show can be heard: ‘This is Captain James Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise.’ ‘Lt. Uhura, open a channel to all decks.’ ‘Security Alert to all decks. Kirk out.’ ‘Kirk to Engineering, Mr. Scott.”

At 215 pounds, it’s going to be murder getting it down the stairs to your parent’s basement, where the purchaser clearly lives.

I like Star Trek. I saw a few episodes when I was 6. But if you want a captain’s chair, and you can’t search the net for plans, so you spend 3 grand on a chair in which most of the buttons do not work, or even press down, you are really very lame.

*Alas, I cannot take credit for this bon mot. It was from Bladesmith at the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.

News Flash: Bernanke is an Idiot

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The Kaplan Test Prep Company Washington Post actually does some reasonably good news gathering now and again, even if their OP/EDs are complete crap.

Case in point is this history of the Federal Reserve’s mis-steps in dealing with the housing bubble and the related sub-prime debacle.

Their lede is a speech that Bernenke gave in 2007, where he, “Assured the bankers and businessmen gathered at the Westin Hotel on Michigan Avenue that their prosperity was not threatened by the plight of borrowers struggling to repay high-cost subprime loans,” because, most banks were not involved at all with sub-prime lending, which was false, and transparently so:

He was wrong. Five of the 10 largest subprime lenders during the previous year were banks regulated by the Fed. Even as Bernanke spoke, the spillover from subprime lending was driving the banking industry into a historic crisis that some firms would not survive. And the upheaval would shove the economy into recession.

Just as the Fed had failed to protect borrowers from the consequences of subprime lending, so too had it failed to protect banks.

(emphasis mine)

So, it’s clear that the Fed, and Ben Bernanke were clueless, but it gets worse:

A warning ignored

In January 2005, National City’s chief economist had delivered a prescient warning to the Fed’s board of governors: An increasingly overvalued housing market posed a threat to the broader economy, not to mention his own bank and others deeply involved in writing mortgages.

The message wasn’t well received. One board member expressed particular skepticism — Ben Bernanke.

“Where do you think it will be the worst?” Bernanke asked, according to people who attended the meeting, one in a series of sessions the Fed holds with economists.

“I would have to say California,” said the economist, Richard Dekaser.

“They have been saying that about California since I bought my first house in 1979,” Bernanke replied.

This time the warnings were correct, and the collapse of the California real estate market would bring down the nation’s fourth-largest bank, the largest casualty of the financial crisis.

(emphasis original)

This is egregious enough that one of Bernanke’s most stalwart supporters, Paul Krugman calls him out, with charts:

The point is that there was indeed a huge CA bubble in the 80s, which burst painfully. Nor was this an obscure bit of knowledge: in fact, people like Calculated Risk and yours truly were quite explicitly using the great California bubble of the 80s as a model for what was going to happen nationally.

This whole episode makes me think considerably worse of my former department head.

(emphasis mine)

Bernanke was saying that there had never been a housing bubble and crash in California, despite the fact that there had been one that popped and bottomed out just 10 years before.

This man should not be in charge of a pastry shop, much less the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America. I’m not sure how he even became the head of the econ department at Princeton….He seems far to feckless for that.

If It’s In The Weekly Standard, They Are Either Liars of Incompetent

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Well, the good folks at Defense Tech flag an article by John Noonan at The Weekly Standard suggesting that Iran’s new solid fuel multi-stage missile represents a quantum leap in missile capabilities:

I’m a little late coming in on the latest Iranian missile salvo, but there a few salient points still worth mentioning. First, the Sajjil-2 is a solid fuel rocket. That’s the type of power source that we use in our own Minuteman III rockets, as solid fuel is stable in flight and requires no preparation time ahead of a launch. Liquid fuel, which powers the Iranian Shahab-3 fleet, is highly corrosive and sloshes around in a rocket’s downstage, destabilizing flight and degrading accuracy. It’s so toxic that the fuel eats away at a missile’s internal tanks, and thus needs to be inserted right before launch. That prep time is important, as it gives us a little extra warning prior to a hostile missile launch, which could be used to kill Iranian birds before they fly. With this new Sajjil-2 system, Iran has the ability to keep their missiles hot and ready for execution, killing any chance of an advanced warning or neutralization actions prior to a launch.

………

(emphasis mine)

I understand that John Noonan, like most of the staff of The Weekly Standard, wants to bomb Iran, and wants Iran bombed, but this does not justify his not telling the truth, and in the two areas that I’ve highlighted, he’s not telling the truth:

  • The need to load the fuel immediately before launch.
    • Simply not true. The US and Russia started using storable liquid propellants, nitrogen tetroxide oxidiser and a hydrazine UDMH mix propellant in the both the Titan II, and SS-18, and had them in ready for immediate launch for years, perhaps 15 seconds from when the button is pushed until the missile exits the silo.
  • Fuel sloshing
    • Fuel tanks have baffles to prevent sloshing. The tanks are specifically designed to avoid this issues, and while it may be “rocket science”, it’s a problem that has been solved for years.
    • The numbers accuracy for both the Titan (900m), and the SS-18 (250m) show that these missiles accuracy, much like their solid fuel counterparts, is a function of the guidance system, not any fictional sloshing.

Let’s be clear, for ICBM’s, solid fuel is better. There are a whole bunch of problems, as exemplified by the Titan II silo explosion that resulted from a workman dropping a socket that punctured a tank.

Additionally, if you want to go with a mobile launcher, it’s somewhere between insane and impossible to transport a loaded liquid fueled rocket.

Additionally, the operational costs of a liquid fueled system are higher, with, for example routine replacement of seals and X-Rays of the tanks to verify fuel levels.

So, a solid fueled ICBM, or IRBM is marginally more capable, and much simpler to operate, but running around with your head on fire about it indicates that one is either incompetent, or dishonest.

Obama Gets Revolt from the Faithful on Healthcare

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Which is not particularly surprising, as his behavior has been pretty revolting on healthcare.

It turns out that OFA, originally “Obama for America,” and now “Organizing for America,” just called for a phone bank to support the Nelson/Lieberman healthcare reform sellout bill, and the base decided that they had to wash their hair:

On Wednesday morning, Organizing for America, as Obama’s reconstituted campaign organization is now known, e-mailed its list of 13 million Obama supporters asking them to “call your senators now and help us ‘ring in reform.’”

The campaign yielded 150,000 calls — less than half the number of a similar effort in October — and it prompted a backlash among online and local activists who had logged countless volunteer supporting Obama’s campaign and legislative agenda, but who felt betrayed by recent Democratic concessions in the health-care reform fight.

………

………while some OFA subscribers replied directly to the call-to-action e-mail with angry messages and others asked to be removed from the list entirely.

(emphasis mine)

I had myself removed from the OFA mailing list some months ago, and I do not regret this at all.

Additionally, the latest This Research 2000/Progressive Change Campaign Committee/Democracy for AmericaPoll shows that the public overwhelming opposes the personal mandates in the bill if there is no public option.

Respondents said that they supported a public option 59% to 31%, opposed a madate without a public option 33% to 56%, and that Obama didn’t fight Lieberman hard enough: 63% to 29%.

What a surprise. Hoocoodanode that the American public would object to a tax on breathing with the proceeds going to insurance company executive bonuses?

The real problem here is not that the bill sucks, the problem is that it’s increasingly obvious, as Senator Russ Feingold notes, that Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel thought that forcing people to buy overpriced insurance and overpriced pharmaceuticals was a good way to keep those industries from donating to Republicans, the average citizen be damned:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

“This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth,” said Feingold. “I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect.”

It seems that Obama’s fetish with signing a bill with “healthcare reform” on it, to the exclusion of any principles, or the need to actually make things better, so he could have a trophy on the wall has bitten him on the butt.

DeForest Kelly put it best when he said, “It’s not enough! You didn’t care as long as you could hang your trophy on the wall. Well, it’s not on it, Captain Mr President, it’s in it.”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?? Shy and Unpretentious?

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Uh-oh, I dissed the mouse. They will send the snow white commandos to kill me

So, Roy Disney just died, and here is how the Dawn C. Chmielewski and James Bates of LA Times described him?

Despite wealth estimated at $600 million, Disney remained shy and outwardly unpretentious, according to people who knew him. His main indulgences were a castle in Ireland, a jet, sports cars and financing a passion for sailboat racing. In 1999, Disney fulfilled a lifelong dream when he and the 12-member crew of his 74-foot sloop Pyewacket — named for the witch’s cat in the 1958 film “Bell, Book & Candle” — won the 2,225-mile Transpacific Yacht Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, setting a course record.

Let me get this straight, he owned sports cars (plural), owned a 12 crew 74-foot yacht, a private jet, and an Irish Castle, and he’s “unpretentious”?

He might be a nice guy. All I know about him is that he took Michael Eisner down, which is a plus in my book, but when you own sports cars (plural), owned a 12 crew 74-foot yacht, a private jet, and an Irish Castle, unpretentious is the last adjective that should be used.

The guy owned a freaking castle, and probably sharks with frikkin laser beams in the moat.

H/t Radosh.net

VPR Audio: VPR News: Dean On Health Care: “Kill The Senate Bill”

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The Plum Line is breaking the story that Howard Dean is calling for the Senate bill to be scrapped, and for the house to push through reform via reconciliation, which only requires 50 Senators (+ Joe Biden) to pass.

VPR has a transcript of the interview:

This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. And, honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill and go back to the House and start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.

Yeah, but Republicans will call it a “Nuclear Option,” and say bad things about Barack….You know?

Great googly moogly.

link to audio

Wanker of the Day

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Tim Fernholz.

He goes goes after Matt Taibbi on his latest article, which I called a jem, and Taibbi responds, basically blowing him out of the water, and acknowledging one minor error, confusing diplomat James Rubin, and Robert Rubin’s son Jamie Rubin, though only by calling the latter a diplomat, Jamie Rubin’s role in assembling the Obama financial team is correctly depicted.

If you want the short version, I would suggest that you review Felix Salmon’s take on this tête-à-tête, and Salmon’s take is the same as Taibbi’s: that Fernholz’s criticisms are largely conjured out of hysteria:

In other words, it’s worth cross-checking everything that Fernholz says against what Taibbi actually writes, because often Taibbi simply doesn’t say what Fernholz implies that he says.

All the schadenfreude over Fernholz’s attack on Taibbi is particularly weird since they seem to actually agree with each other. Here’s how Fernholz concludes….

….

This is quite astonishing. Fernholz is basically saying that Taibbi is right, and that not only is he right but that he will now and henceforth utterly overshadow anyone else who’s criticizing the Obama administration from the left. At the same time, however, despite Taibbi’s astonishing ability to encapsulate and personify the entire group of people who criticize the administration, he’s not even going to manage to “make a dent”, because he’s not going about his job in an evenhanded J-school manner.

Major wankerdom.

Matt Taibbi is clearly polemical writer, but he gets his facts right, and he does describe the truly sad state of affairs that is the Rubin/Summers/Geithner economic axis upon which the Obama administration spins.

The Kaplan Test Prep Company,* Yet Again

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So, the Washington Post put Sarah Palin on their their OP/ED pages yesterday, for what seems like the gazillionth time, but is most likely 2nd or 3rd time, and once again they show why all editorial pages, most particularly that of the Washington Post, really need to fact check their OP/Ed Pages. (No link, they don’t deserve it)

Of course, if they started fact checking OP/EDs, then Krauthammer and George Will would have nothing left after the editors got through with them.

Tim Lambert notes that the article is full of lies which can be verified via 10 minutes on “The Google”, while Media Matters goes a bit further in their research and notes that the lies are contradicted in articles published by……… wait for it ……… the Washington Post.

In fact, the links in Palins article actually contradict what she is writing.

While I like Matthew Yglesias’s snark that the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, Fred Hiatt, “wants the Washington Post to go out of business, I think that Atrios has what is the final word on this:

I can never quite get a handle on just what the Washington Post people – its publishers, Fred Hiatt, etc… – think that it’s for? Is it about providing a product people want to buy/advertisers want to advertise in? It is about informing readers, giving them factual information and analysis they want? Are these missions in conflict or do they coincide?

And why does it take bloggers to point out how absurd they are? Where are all the journalists who spend their days bitching about bloggers? Don’t they care that the product they’re defending is basically sh@#?”

(@# mine)

I would be remiss in not pointing the reader to Marc Ambinder’s point by point takedown.

*The Washington Post owns, and generates the vast bulk of its revenue, by owning and operating Kaplan, Inc., a company best known for selling courses to help teenagers game the standardized test process.

Dana Milbank is a Complete Tool

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So, Dana Milbank has one of his Washington Sketch columns in the Kaplan Test Prep Company today, and it’s all about how Max Baucus f%$#ing his employee and then recommending that she be made US Attorney isn’t a big deal because he is, “just too much of a nerd for a sex scandal to stick.”

He then goes on to describe why this should the the strategy of other people involved in sex scandals, including a recent scandal involving a sports figure who is on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.

You see, it’s no news when a sitting Senator sexually harasses an underling while still married, and then tries to get her appointed to a position of trust within the Department of Justice, but some sports figure chasing skirts, that’s a big deal.

Needless to say, if it had been a real Dem, instead of Max Baucus, Milbank would have been all over the scandal like US Magazine, but because it’s one of the “Moderates,” everything is just ducky:

Yet his colleagues jumped to his defense when word got out Friday night — in contrast to the initial reaction to other senatorial sex scandals. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) immediately announced his “full support” for Baucus.

That’s because he’s not giving blow jobs in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, wearing diapers, or paying hush-money and diverting campaign funds to his mistress’s benefit.

Truth be told, I’m inclined to think that what what John Ensign did was worse: He used both the apparatus of the Senate, and the Apparatus of the Republican Party* to benefit his mistress and her family, while Baucus banged a chippie who worked for him and recommended her for a plum position†.

But as to Larry “Wide Stance” Craig, and David “Diaperman” Vitter, these transgressions did not bear on their official duties beyond the hypocrisy angle.

The reason, of course, that Baucus is getting so much support is because there are other Senators out there doing the same thing: i.e. banging staff, not the US Attorney bit, and so the Senate rallies to him, because too many of them have the same vulnerability.

Wanker supreme Dana Milbank rallies to Baucus’ side because he’s an inside the beltway punk, and because he thinks that he’s being witty.

Wanker.

*It’s wrong. I feel schadenfreude because it happened to Republicans, but it’s still wrong.
†Pun intended.

What a Whiny Bitch

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So it appears that Barack “Panders to Wingnuts” Obama, took it upon himself to call call Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers to ask him to stop “demeaning” him publicly disagreeing with him on issues like healthcare and Afghanistan:

President Barack Obama recently called Rep. John Conyers Jr. to express his frustrations with the Judiciary Committee chairman’s criticism.

In an interview with The Hill, Conyers said his opinions of Obama’s policies on healthcare reform and the war in Afghanistan have not sat well with the president.

According to the lawmaker, the president picked up the phone several weeks ago to find out why Conyers was “demeaning” him.

Obama’s decision to challenge Conyers highlights a sensitivity to criticism the president has taken on the left. Conyers’s critical remarks, many of which have been reported on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, appear to have irritated the president, known for his calm demeanor.

Conyers, the second-longest-serving member of the House, said, “[Obama] called me and told me that he heard that I was demeaning him and I had to explain to him that it wasn’t anything personal, it was an honest difference on the issues. And he said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’”

Note that Conyers was the first member of the Congressional Black Caucus to endorse Obama, and spent much of 2007 and 2008 campaigning for him, but he is now saying things like, “Calling in generals and admirals to discuss troop strength is like me taking my youngest to McDonald’s to ask if he likes french fries,” which is pretty funny, when you think of it.

You Know, This Might Bother Me Too…… If I Were an 8 Year Old

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8 Year old, see Emotional Maturity of

So, when Barack Obama gave his speech on Afghanistan, he preempted a showing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the Mayor of Arlington, Tennessee decided to throw a hissy fit on his Facebook page:

“Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it….when the answer should simply be ‘yes’….”

Yes, A Charlie Brown Christmas was on that Tuesday, and yes, it was preempted, and yes, it’s among the most sincere of the Christmas specials out there, but this sort of crap is beneath maturity level of a 9-year old, particularly when it’s showing tomorrow and next Tuesday too.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

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It turns out that when General Stanley McChrystal was looking for filling in the dots on his Afghanistan escalation plan, he turned to the think tank Washington, DC, and created a “strategic assessment group”, among the members of that group, Fred Kagan and his wife, Kimberly Kagan.

If there is a bright shining center of intellect in the universe, anyone in the Kagan clan are located in a dank corner where people still believe that leeches cure cancer.

They are always wrong. All you need to look at is their history on Iraq, Saddam, and WMD.

On a more substantive note, this sort of lobbying, because when you look at the names on the group, they are largely idiots who are respected by the “very serious people” inside the Beltway, should be something that members of the military should not be doing.

The group was not about getting answers, it was not aboug evaluating potential options, it was about Beltway street cred.

While I Take a Utilitarian View on IP Law…..

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I tend to see it as a public interest law (i.e to promote the progress of science and useful arts) at its core, and not property law, there are still people who should be busted for violating the exclusive licensing agreements associated with this.

Case in point, the Hartford Courant, which has taken to using articles from the smaller local papers without attribution:

Newspaper editors and reporters across the state are noticing a new trend: their local coverage is being copied daily by the Hartford Courant.

In most cases The Courant has been attributing the reporting to the newspapers being copied, which include the Journal Inquirer, The Bristol Press, The Herald of New Britain, the Register-Citizen of Torrington, and the Waterbury Republican-American.

In some cases The Courant appears to have lifted information from the other papers in its entirety without any attribution. But either way, editors say, the Courant is using for free and making money from a product other papers pay to produce, and they want it to stop.

It appears that someone at the Courant has taken it to a high enough level that the Journal Inquirer has sued them for plagiarism, which means that the Courant is not taking stories and writing them up, but taking stories and pasting them up.

If they had been accused of just taking the stories, it would be under a separate bit of case law, it involved Hearst and wire service stories during WWI, but I could not Google it, so this is unbelievably lame.