I think that this needs the same musical accompaniment that occurred when her firing from HP was announced:
I am not embellishing here.
When HP finally fired her, groups of people at multiple locations literally started to dance among the cubicles, while singing this song.
The mother of British Prime Minister has signed a petition against her son’s cuts of children’s services:
Among the 10,000 names on a petition against planned cuts to children’s services by a local council is a name that will cause embarrassment to British Prime Minister David Cameron — his mum.
Mary Cameron, 81, told the Daily Mirror newspaper that she had signed a petition to save children’s centers earmarked for closure by Oxfordshire county council, which is run by her son’s Conservative Party.
“My name is on the petition but I don’t want to discuss this any further,” Mary Cameron, a former magistrate, said.
The petition says: “Our children’s centers are a lifeline to new parents who rely on locally accessible advice and support at a time when it is most needed. Cutting these essential services would leave families vulnerable and isolated and fail an entire generation of children.”
………
Mary Cameron has intervened in her son’s career before. In 2013, she was asked about her son’s support for gay marriage despite opposition from Tory grassroots supporters, and reportedly replied: “I know, but David just won’t be told.”
From his mother? That’s harsh.
It’s more generally referred to as “The Blue Book”, and a group of law students at NYU are publishing a similar set of instructions, which they have referred to as the “Baby Blue”.
The response from the HLRS? A cease and desist letter to the students from their lawyer:
War is brewing over the most boring piece of intellectual property imaginable: the “Bluebook,” the 580-page quasi-authoritative source of proper legal citation formats published by the Harvard Law Review, described by Adam Liptak of the New York Times a few months ago as “a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like [that] is both grotesque and indispensable.”
Students at NYU Law School have prepared a new, streamlined, open-access citation system and gotten it ready for publication; but Chris Sprigman, a law prof at NYU, posted this open letter to his “law professor friends” yesterday:I am writing to ask you to help me with something important. You may know that for the last year, I’ve been working on a public domain implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation.
The work, which I’ve named #BabyBlue, is now done, but we’re holding it, because the Harvard Law Review Association has hired counsel and is threatening to sue (me, and Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org, the publisher).………
The conflict has been brewing for a few months — starting with a letter from Harvard Law Review’s lawyers to publisher Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org:I write concerning . . . your imminent release of an “implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation” called “BabyBlue,” possibly as soon as December 31, 2015. Based on the description of “BabyBlue” … we believe that “BabyBlue” may include content identical or substantially similar to content or other aspects of The Bluebook that constitute original works of authorship protected by copyright, and which are covered by various United States copyright registrations.
………
It’s copyright nonsense, and Harvard should be ashamed of itself for loosing its legal hounds to dispense it in order to protect its (apparently fairly lucrative) publication monopoly.
Here’s a bit of free legal advice: If you want to assert copyright protection over something, don’t call it “A Uniform System of Citation” — because systems are, by definition, unprotected by copyright. Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act couldn’t be clearer:In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, [or] method of operation, … regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.
It gets even better.
It appears the Harvard Law Review Society is not the creator of this document:
Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable.
The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.” The librarians, Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, have done impressive archival research and make a persuasive case that their own institution is the guilty party.
“It’s clear that the idea of a uniform citation manual came from Yale, and a lot of the specifics of the early rules came from Yale,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “Harvard entered into the picture later.”
………
The new article ends on a sheepish note.
“Some readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale,” it says. “Our response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 fairly large pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.”
“And these were,” the article says, “very small pages.”
Shades of the song, Happy Birthday to You, where the evidence is fairly clear that the copyright holders never actually wrote the song.
Our IP system is broken, and needs to be fixed.
Actually, it needs to be burned to the ground, because the system has engendered attitudes that lead to this crap.
The prosecutor for the military commission at Guantánamo is retroactively classifying pubic hearings:
The war court prosecutor is arguing that public disclosure of a transcript of a public hearing held at Guantánamo last year could endanger national security in response to a legal motion brought by 17 news organizations protesting pick-and-choose secrecy in the Sept. 11 pretrial hearings.
Army Brig. Gen Mark Martins makes the argument in a filing obtained by The Miami Herald that was still being reviewed for sensitive information on Thursday and not publicly released. At issue is the Pentagon’s decision to black out large portions of a 379-page transcript of an Oct. 30 hearing that included testimony from two soldiers who work at Guantánamo’s most clandestine prison, called Camp 7.
“That this information was uttered in a public session or is reported in news coverage does not render the information unprotected or vitiate the damage further disclosures would beget,” prosecutors wrote Jan. 29 in the 29-page filing in the war court case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
In defending the decision to censor what was public information, the prosecutors included a less-redacted transcript that showed previously blacked out sentences and in the same filing sealed up a declaration from the Guantánamo prison commander explaining what is at risk.
………
Reporters, Sept. 11 victim family members and other members of the public heard the testimony on Oct. 30 through a 40-second audio delay designed to let the judge or a court security officer mute the sound if anyone spilled national security secrets. No one ever pushed the button. But when the transcript came out weeks later, portions that the Miami Herald had reported in a routine Twitter stream were gone.
Now, a comparison of the two different censored transcripts of the same hearing offer a study in over-classification. Nearly every redaction is refined in the updated version.
The term to describe this sh%$ is “Orwellian”.
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem has just suggested that young women are supporting Bernie Sanders because they are looking to impress boys:
Feminist activist Gloria Steinem on Friday suggested that young women support Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders over rival Hillary Clinton because they want to meet boys.
On HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher asked Steinem why Clinton, who has campaigned on the historic nature of her candidacy, was losing the young female vote.
“I don’t mean to over-generalize … but men tend to get more conservative because they gain power as they age, and women get more radical because they lose power as they age,” Steinem responded.
“So it’s kind of not fair to measure most women by the standard of most men, because they’re going to get more activist as they get older,” she added.
“And when you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys?’ The boys are with Bernie.”
Maher joked that if he had chalked up Bernie’s support among young women to their desire to meet boys, Steinem would have slapped him.
Seriously?
After a lifetime of supporting equality, you blithely dismiss the attitudes of women as some sort of attempt at catching the right man?
She is saying that young women have no agency of their all.
I understand how some people are excited about the possibility of Hillary Clinton being the first woman President, but this is nuts.
The bigger picture is that identity politics is morally bankrupt, but I’m not a big picture kind of guy.
I’ll just call lame beyond belief.
There is a bill being mooted in the Iowa Senate proposing that Stanford University be published because their marching band is too mean.
There is something seriously wrong here, even without the whole “Bill of Attainder” thing:
………
Stanford’s football team defeated the University of Iowa 45-16 in the game. In addition, the Stanford band, which has a history of irreverent performances, poked fun during the halftime show with a dancing cow, a frowning farmer formation and other tongue-in-cheek gestures that upset some Iowans. ESPN, which televised the game, cut away from the band’s performance. State Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa, told The Des Moines Register at the Iowa Capitol on Wednesday that he introduced Senate File 2081 because he believes Stanford officials have condoned improper behavior by the marching band. “I think it’s unfortunate because here in Iowa we try to teach sportsmanship,” Chelgren said. “We try to teach courtesy, and when someone behaves in a way that is contrary to that, we need to point it out.”
Good thing we can all ignore Iowa again until the 2018 state fair.
Seriously, what the actual f%$#?
It appears that he considers the fact that Bernie Sanders does not worship his brilliance akin to terrorism:
Just days after a Bernie Sanders campaign ad singled out Goldman Sachs as “one of the Wall Street banks that triggered the financial meltdown,” the head of the global investment banking firm said such criticism is “dangerous.”
According to The Hill:
Sanders has railed against Wall Street throughout his populist campaign, accusing the sector of ruining the economy and holding down the middle class. And he has singled out [Goldman CEO Lloyd] Blankfein and his firm as a poster child for the greed and recklessness he says is endemic in finance.
In a January interview with Bloomberg, he specifically mentioned Blankfein as representing greed on Wall Street, for taking massive pay packages “after destroying the economy.”
“To personalize it, it has potential to be a dangerous moment,” Blankfein told CNBC on Wednesday. “Not just for Wall Street…but for anybody who is a little bit out of line.”Blankfein also reportedly argued “that Sanders and his ilk are too rigid to get anything done,” as The Hill put it.
On the campaign trail, Sanders has criticized not only big banks, but rival Hillary Clinton’s cozy ties to them.
Bloomberg notes that Blankfein—who supported Clinton for president in 2008—also “declined to endorse a candidate for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, saying his imprimatur could harm that person’s chances.”
Oh, you poor delicate flower.
Bernie says mean things about you, and it’s the end of the world.
Get over yourself, you pampered, overpaid, psychopath.
Aver at Sic Semper TyrannisRichard Sale unloads on Hillary Clinton, with a level of venom that really is really off putting:
………
There are few things as ugly as this rampant self-worship. Under its gaze, ordinary life shrivels and diminishes. The vast universe contracts to a mere tawdry bauble kicked to and fro by contending rivals. Hillary has eyes only for those circumstances, facts and incidents that suit and confirm her own biases and which advance her own designs, however morally dubious they may be. Self-worship like hers is not blind in the least– her temperament, her disposition, her power of analysis, enables her to select people whose ideals and ambition and desires are similar to her own. A political leader estimates his or her allies based on their usefulness in furthering the leader’s designs and schemes. Think of the people who occupy high positions in her campaign: her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, or her deputy chiefs, Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan, loyalists all, all working to cover up the e-mail scandal, a scandal that clearly threatens Hillary’s viability as a candidate. Staffers like hers bend the rules until they break. One suspects that aanything or anyone that doesn’t serve Clinton’s appetite for public power is cast aside, belittled, scoffed at, undermined or marooned. A political leader like her, sees people as furniture, objects to be moved here, moved there, placed where they will do the leader the most good. A close supporter of a leader has no will or desires or designs of their own. They suspend such things in the hope that their subjugation will be generously rewarded. They accept that their purpose in life is to be used by someone greater, someone who will prove a generous giver of favors, advancement, money and prestige. In other words, their destiny is to be the tool of another’s more powerful and decided will.
This is complete bullsh%$.
I do not support Hillary Clinton, but by the standards of mainstream Presidential Candidates,* she is not especially narcissistic or immoral.
In fact if there is one thing that is remarkable about her political career it is that there have been no tell-all insider books published by people who work closely with her.
Even Bill had a few while president, and if one of Hillary’s acolytes had an axe to grind, they would get a 7 figure book advance from Regenry or other right wing publishers.
If she used people as you asserted, there would already have been such a book published.
Heck, it would have been published in the mid 1990s.
The loyalty of her people under these circumstances is remarkable.
I don;t like Clinton, but she is not a Borgia Pope.
*Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play.
There is a mildly amusing parody web site that does a compare and contrast of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, things like:
It’s kind of silly, and not too deep, and pokes fun at Hillary Clinton’s perceived lack of authenticity,* but someone at Salon decided to use the meme to attack all Bernie Sanders supporters as male chauvinists, aka Bernie Bros:
………These jabs at Clinton’s imagined sonic preferences reinforce the tired idea that the tastes of non-cis-male cultural consumers—from teenagers on through boomers and beyond—are something to be mocked and disrespected.………
Don’t even bother trying.
Annie Zaleski has won the bullsh%$ bingo game for this month, and possibly for the entire f%$#ing presidential campaign.
She has her head so far up her ass that she resembles a Klein bottle.
*Not her fault. Bill Clinton does authenticity so well that if he were sharing a bill with Pope Frank, the Pontiff would look like the Andy Kaufman character Tony Clifton.
It seems that whenever you have a conspiracy theory nutcase, they will eventually descend into antisemitism and/or Holocaust denial.
Case in point, Oscar winning director Oliver Stone:
Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington’s foreign policy for years.
In the Sunday interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the “Jewish domination of the media,” adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.”
“There’s a major lobby in the United States,” Stone said, adding that “they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington.”
The famed Hollywood director of such films as “Platoon” and “JFK,” also said that while “Hitler was a Frankenstein,” there was also a “Dr Frankenstein.”
“German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support,” Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 [million killed].”
Referring to the alleged influence of the powerful Jewish lobby on U.S. foreign policy, Stone said that Israel had distorted “United States foreign policy for years,” adding he felt U.S. policy toward Iran was “horrible.”
So not a surprise.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is wondering where the compassionate conservatives have gone in the Republican Party:
Back in 2000, George W. Bush did something fascinating: On the campaign trail he preached “compassionate conservatism,” telling wealthy Republicans about the travails of Mexican-American immigrants and declaring to women in pearls that “the hardest job in America” is that of a single mother.
Those well-heeled audiences looked baffled, but applauded.
That instinct to show a little heart helped elect Bush but then largely disappeared from Republican playbooks and policy. Yet now, amid the Republican Party’s civil war, there are intriguing initiatives by the House speaker, Paul Ryan, and some other conservatives to revive an interest in the needy.
Has the columnist, aka Mr. “Sh%$ for Brains” actually read these proposals?
They are all the same: “Make the alternative starvation, and the poor will pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
As fellow Times pundit Paul Krugman noted Eight Years Ago, “Compassionate Conservatism” was, “A dog-whistle to the religious right:
Oy. Why are political writers still unaware that Bush’s phrase “compassionate conservatism” wasn’t an acceptance of the Great Society, but rather a dog-whistle to the religious right? It comes from Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion. From the Publisher’s Weekly review:
Compassion means tough love in which those who give must demand self-help from those who receive … Olasky adds a proviso that the giver too must be personally involved. He holds up the example of 19th-century charity workers, whose religious beliefs made them compassionate and willing to deal intimately with the poor … Olasky does not blame the system for poverty. He faults the poor, along with social workers back to Jane Addams and the founders of the settlement house movement.
Paul Ryan and the rest of them have no plan beyond making the poor even poorer.
My conclusion is that Nicholas Kristof is in a competition with Tom Friedman for dumb-assery.
Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, aka the “Human Bowling Jacket”, is proposing a return to the guillotine:
Maine Gov. Paul LePage says his state is too easy on drug crimes, suggesting it should bring back the guillotine for serious offenders.
The Republican governor, known for his controversial statements, was speaking on local radio Tuesday about combating the drug epidemic in his state.
“What I think we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he told WVOM. “We could have public executions and have, you know, we could even have (guessing) which hole it falls in.”
He said that he was “all in” on fighting drug criminals and said a recent proposal to establish a minimum sentence of four years for drug traffickers was too lenient.
“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people that kill Mainers,” LePage said.
………
Even as the hosts of the show tried to wrap the interview, LePage interrupted to show his resolve, suggesting the guillotine be used for public executions, joking that the idea was part of his French ancestry.
“I like French history,” he said.
It’s only the latest controversial comments from LePage. Earlier this month, he made waves talking about drug dealers in his state.
“These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” he said. “They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.”
Seriously, can the legislators of Maine please impeach his flabby white ass?
We already know that he has abused his official power to engage in a personal vendetta, and the investigation is ongoing, but it needs to move faster.
This guy is a clear and present danger to the state of Maine.
H/t Charlie Pierce.
I understand that Track Palin, Sarah’s kid, is alleged to have beaten and brandished a firearm at his (hopefully former) girlfriend.
I also heard Sarah Palin blaming Barack Obama, because Track was in Iraq, and has PTSD.
I’m inclined call bullsh%$ on former ½ Governor Palin, because the best evidence is that Track Palin has always been a been prone to violent outbursts.
That being said, articles like this one that claims that Track could not have PTSD because he never saw combat, are crap:
………
The head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Rick Rieckhoff responded to Palin’s statement, saying she shouldn’t “politicize” the issue of PTSD and hoped it “doesn’t become a portable chew toy in a political campaign.”
In addition, Track Palin’s public records indicate that not only did he only serve one year in Iraq, which was under the George W. Bush administration, he also didn’t even see one moment of combat. An anonymous fellow solider also spoke about the issue, debunking Palin’s earlier claims. “Speaking as a combat vet who literally slept in the same barracks as Track Palin, his mother is wrong and her son is not a victim.”
Let’s be clear here: This is NOT how PTSD works.
There are doctors, and nurses, and MPs, and supply officers who never saw a shot fired in anger who have PTSD.
Not being shot at, or shooting someone, does NOT rule out PTSD.
Honestly, I think that the PTSD explanation is likely Palin alibiing (again), but painting with that broad a brush maligns a lot of people who have a very real condition, and need treatment.
Her tenure at State was categorized by mindlessly bellicose rhetoric, and not a whole bunch of major accomplishments.
One of the best examples of this, though it started a few months after Clinton left Foggy Bottom, was the negotiations to open up with Cuba, where the Obama administration had to keep the State Department in the Dark to prevent it from sabotaging negotiations.
It wasn’t Clinton’s direct doings, but it was her people that the Obama administration had to deceive.
The most compelling case on a personal level is how Clinton’s mindlessly bellicose statements kept US citizens prisoners, detained, and abused in Iran:
I rarely think about being a prisoner in Iran anymore. I’ve been free for more than four years. It’s been a long time since the sounds of hard soles on a cement floor would remind me of my interrogator or I would suddenly need to bolt from a restaurant because I couldn’t take the throngs of people after so much time in a prison cell.
Last Saturday, I was dripping coffee on myself during an early morning drive when I heard that four Americans were being released from Iran as part of a prisoner swap. Suddenly, my eyes welled up. I could feel the knot of excitement and confusion that had turned in my gut when my plane from Tehran hit the tarmac in Muscat, Oman, in September 2011. I pictured the way my and my friend Josh’s families looked small in the distance, their little hands waving, as we taxied toward them. I remembered the force that pulled me—running!—down the stairs of the airplane and how, at the bottom, I laughed and cried at the same time. Everyone else did too.
I was elated for these men and their families.
Later, the joy was tempered by an old, familiar frustration. While scouring the internet for updates on the four Americans, I read that shortly after their release, Hillary Clinton called for new sanctions on Iran for testing two ballistic missiles last year. I was shocked. The prisoners had not yet been let out of the country. Why would she provoke Iran when their freedom was still on the line?
The Omani envoy trying to negotiate our release was repeatedly frustrated by Clinton. “Why can’t your Hillary just keep quiet?” he blurted to me.
I remembered sitting in my cell in 2009—I think I was trying to memorize a family tree from Greek mythology or something equally random—when I heard then-Secretary of State Clinton’s voice from a television in a neighboring cell. I ran to the door and pressed my ear into its little window. She was commanding Iran to release us immediately. My heart sank. I imagined my interrogator bringing me into his padded room, blindfolded, and ranting about how Iran would not be bossed around by America, “The Great Satan.” I came to fear the sound of Clinton’s voice. Whenever I heard her publicly slam Iran about something, I would mentally prepare for at least another couple of months in prison.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Many of our family members grew frustrated with their meetings with her and White House officials. My wife, Sarah, who was released a year before Josh and I were, shared this frustration. Once, during a meeting with us in the prison, Swiss Ambassador Livia Leu, who represented American interests in Iran, broke from her usual reassuring demeanor and said, “They will never respond to your government demanding they release you. They need to talk to the Iranians.”
The title of this article, “When I was a prisoner in Iran, I came to fear the sound of Hillary Clinton’s voice,” pretty much says it all.
Clinton’s mindless dick swinging in foreign policy (Yes, I intend the juxtaposition) is not an indication of foreign policy knowledge, it is an indication of her determined and unwavering foreign policy ignorance.
She gives Dick Cheney a run for his money in the incompetence in the foreign policy arena.
At the last kiddie table debate, Rick “A Frothy Mixture” Santorum suggested that debate watchers Google him:
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum encouraged viewers to Google him in Thursday’s undercard Republican presidential debate, an unfortunate choice of words that reminded many of his search engine woes fueled by sex columnist Dan Savage.
“Go and Google Rick Santorum and Hillary Clinton you’ll see a five-minute debate. I’ll let you decide who won the debate,” he said during his closing statement. “I’ll tell you who won, I know I’m out of time, I’m going to take some of Rand Paul’s time here for a second.”
The prompt recalled sex columnist Dan Savage’s retribution campaign against Santorum for his anti-gay remarks, when Savage asked readers to come up with an alternate definition for “santorum.” A highly NSFW entry rose to the top and has for years plagued top search engine results for Santorum’s name across sites.
If you Google “Santorum”, you will find multiple references to, “The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex,” a neologism coined by Dan Savage in the late 2003.
If you are Rick Santorum, you should NEVER ask people to Google you.
Pharma bro Martin Shkreli hasw taken the 5th in response to a Congressional inquiry into price gouging in drugs:
The founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli, invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination on Wednesday, and he won’t comply with a subpoena for documents issued from a Senate panel investigating pharma drug pricing tactics.
The 32-year-old Shkreli was also subpoenaed to appear before a different panel, the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to testify about the price of a life-saving drug he increased by more than 5,000 percent.
Shkreli became the poster child for greed last year after he raised the price of Daraprim—used to treat parasitic infections—from $13.50 a pill to $750. A single pill once sold for $1. Now facing criminal charges that he allegedly defrauded investors, Shkreli has said he should have boosted prices for the drug even more.
Let’s be clear: He has a right not to testify against himself, but generally it doesn’t apply to, you know, physical proof.
And yes, he is a ratf%$# who deserves to spend the rest of his life in gaol.
The Pentagon is considering retroactively demoting David Petraeus for his mishandling of classified data and lying to investigators:
The defense secretary is looking to clamp down on misbehaving generals. Pentagon insiders say Petraeus could be the next general to face the consequences.
The Pentagon is considering retroactively demoting retired Gen. David Petraeus after he admitted to giving classified information to his biographer and mistress while he was still in uniform, three people with knowledge of the matter told The Daily Beast.
The decision now rests with Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who is said to be willing to consider overruling an earlier recommendation by the Army that Petraeus not have his rank reduced. Such a demotion could cost the storied general hundreds of thousands of dollars—and deal an additional blow to his once-pristine reputation.
“The secretary is considering going in a different direction” from the Army, a defense official told The Daily Beast, because he wants to be consistent in his treatment of senior officers who engage in misconduct and to send a message that even men of Petraeus’s fame and esteemed reputation are not immune to punishment.
Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook told The Daily Beast that Carter had requested the information ex-Army Secretary John McHugh had when he made his recommendation on the matter, before reaching a final decision. McHugh had recommended taking no action against Petraeus.
“The Department of the Army is still in the process of providing the secretary with information relevant to former Secretary McHugh’s recommendation,” Cook told The Daily Beast. “Once the secretary has an opportunity to consider this information, he will make his decision about next steps, if any, in this matter.”
………
Reducing Petraeus’s rank, most likely to lieutenant general, could mean he’d have to pay back the difference in pension payments and other benefits that he received as a retired four-star general. That would amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over his retirement. According to Pentagon figures, a four-star general with roughly the same years of experience as Petraeus was entitled to receive a yearly pension of nearly $220,000. A three-star officer would receive about $170,000.
Petraeus didn’t respond to a request for comment.
But the financial pain to Petraeus isn’t likely to be severe. He has confided to friends and acquaintances that he’s making a hefty sum from his job at a private equity firm and through speaking fees.
The demotion in rank would be a bigger, lasting blow, and take from Petraeus the rare achievement he’d set his eyes on many years ago.
This guy is getting a 6 figure pension, and what is likely a 7 figure gig at a private equity firm, and the most that can be done is to hurt his feelings.
He should be in jail, but absent that, dropping a star, or better dropping more than one stars, is quite literally the least that they can do.
Cruz Camp: New York Values Include Men’s Masturbation Booth
Not The Onion.
You know Peter King, the Congressman from New York.
This is the guy who raised funds for the terrorist organization the IRA, called for the assassination of Snowden, Greenwals, and Poitras, and pretty much accused every Muslim in America of being a part of a 5th column.
But credit where credit is due, he just told Ted Cruz to go back under the rock he crawled out of:
New York Republican Rep. Peter King has some harsh advice for Ted Cruz: “Go back under a rock.”
“Memo to Ted Cruz: New York Values are the heroes of 9/11; the cops who fight terror; and the people you ask for campaign donations. Go back under a rock,” King said in a statement mailed to POLITICO Thursday regarding Cruz’s comments about “New York values.”
The Texas senator, who had been avoiding going after Donald Trump for much of the campaign cycle, finally hit back after Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility for the White House. Cruz suggested in an interview with “The Howie Carr Show” Tuesday that Trump “may shift in his new rallies to playing ‘New York, New York,’ because you know Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values.”
I really hate agreeing with him, but he’s right, though incomplete.
When Ted Cruz talks about “New York values”, he’s really accusing Donald Trump of being in the thrall of the secret Jewish cabal that runs the world.
It’s how Cruz is trying to appeal to the Talibaptist wing of the Republican party.
I miss the Republican Party of Richard Milhous Nixon.
Following weeks of backbiting and sabotage from his front benchers, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is cleaning house, and the whining has reached a crescendo:
Jeremy Corbyn has launched a strong defence of his controversial frontbench reshuffle, saying it has made Labour “stronger, more diverse and more coherent” as he insists he can lead the party to general election victory.
Writing in the Observer after a turbulent week, Corbyn says his election as leader in September reflected a “deep-seated desire for change and a new direction in our politics” which, unsurprisingly, some in the party are finding difficult to adjust to. In terms that may alarm some of his MPs, who fear he is trying to bypass the parliamentary party over issues such as the renewal of Trident, he makes it clear that he will shape new policies through the “democratic participation of our own hugely expanded party and supporters”.
In a call for loyalty, Corbyn says the Tories under David Cameron are engaged in a systematic attempt to undermine democracy and that this must be challenged by Labour. He argues that new rules on voter registration, attempts to cut the number of parliamentary seats and slash funding for Labour amount to an unprecedented attack on democratic rights and freedoms.
However, his attempts to impose unity will come under further strain on Sunday when an MP appointed to head a key policy review on tax credits and child poverty will resign on BBC TV, in protest at being branded by the leadership as part of a “rightwing clique”.
After three frontbenchers quit in protest at Corbyn’s reshuffle, Alison McGovern, MP for Wirral South, will launch a bitter attack on John McDonnell, Corbyn’s close ally and shadow chancellor, who said last week that the pressure group Progress, which she chairs, is full of people with “hard-right” conservative views.
Her appearance on the BBC’s Sunday Politics will also fuel a row that has erupted between Labour and the BBC over its coverage of the reshuffle, and comes as tensions over Corbyn’s attempts to change party policy on Trident reach new heights.
Oh you poor delicate flowers.
Corbyn fired back in The Guardian, noting just that Cameron is attempting to systematically dismantle all opposition in the UK, both on a political and a policy level.
It won’t matter for New Labour.
They honestly think that the Conservatives running the country is better than having a Labour Party that actually gives a sh%$ about ordinary people.
After all, they have to think about their post politics career working for the City of London, Britain’s financial industry.