Pass the Popcorn

I’ve generally been pretty dismissive of the “A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin,” wing of the Democratic Party.

I’ve always observed that at worst, what we have is a violation of campaign finance laws, where, if the Russians explicitly coordinated with the Trump campaign, it was an illegal in-kind donation.

That’s a lot of “ifs”, and even if true, the penalties are minimal.

The real jeopardy only occurs if members of the Trump campaign engaged in obstruction of justice in an attempt to cover this up.

After all, it was obstruction of justice that took Nixon down.

I’m still not sure if there is any “There” there, but things is getting profoundly interesting:

CNN and the New York Times this evening published dueling scoops on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

As Jim Comey might put it: Lordy, there appear to be tapes.

First, CNN reported that U.S. government investigators wiretapped Paul Manafort, the onetime Trump campaign chairman, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. According to CNN, the court that provides judicial oversight for the administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized an FBI investigation into Manafort in 2014 focused on “work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine’s former ruling party.” Manafort’s firm, among notable others, had failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian regime. This first investigation was reportedly halted in 2016 by Justice Department prosecutors because of lack of evidence, but a second warrant was later issued in service of the FBI’s investigation into Russian influence of the election and potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

CNN reported that interest in Manafort was “reignited” because of “intercepted communications between Manafort and suspected Russian operatives, and among the Russians themselves.” The FBI also conducted physical searches: one of a storage facility belonging to Manafort and a more widely reported search of his Alexandria home in late July. Manafort was not under surveillance when he became chairman of Trump’s campaign, CNN sources suggested, because of the gap between the two warrants.

………

Shortly after CNN’s story broke, the New York Times published its own scoop regarding Manafort. The story is largely a scene piece, but includes a number of highly significant facts. The Times catalogs what it describes as “aggressive tactics” that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has employed in his investigations of Trump associates, specifically Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn. First, the Times reveals that after the July raid on Manafort’s residence, Mueller’s prosecutors warned Manafort that he would be indicted. The story also reports that Mueller’s team has subpoenaed several of Manafort’s associates, including Jason Maloni, a former Manafort spokesman; the heads of Mercury Public Affairs and the Podesta Group; and one of Manafort’s former lawyers (with Mueller’s team claiming an exception to attorney-client privilege). While White House officials have been given the opportunity to appear for “voluntary interviews” instead of before grand juries, Manafort’s associates have been subpoenaed, marking a less deferential approach to the Manafort investigation. The Times suggests that Mueller, leaving no rock unturned, is investigating Manafort for “possible violations of tax laws, money-laundering prohibitions and requirements to disclose foreign lobbying.”

I’m not sure where this is going, but it is getting interesting.

Headline of the Day

Hopeful Martians Emerge From 8-Month Experiment To Find Earth Horrific As Ever

—Gizmodo

This is an actual news story.

The headline is opinion, but I do understand the sentiment:

Before Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other space enthusiasts can ship humans to Mars as easily as an Amazon Prime delivery, we need to figure out they’ll fare on a foreign planet. Luckily, NASA and the University of Hawaii have been all over this, funding several successful iterations of an experiment called Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), in which a crew of “astronauts” live in Mars-like conditions in a dome on a Hawaiian volcano. On Sunday, the fifth Hi-SEAS endeavor ended, meaning a crew of six “astronauts” have left the comfort of a literal bubble to greet the fresh hell that is Earth right now.

I do understand the urge to stay in a cave.  I have on occasion had an urge to go live in a cave.

A Good Explaination of the Brexit

At its core, the Brexit vote was a political act, not an economic one, despite the arguments made by both supporters and opponents of the UK leaving the EU:

Defending Brexit is not the easiest thing to do at the moment when we have a government hell bent on delivering the worst case scenario. It also doesn’t help that the Brexit groupthink produces pretty feeble economic justifications rather than looking at the issue as a whole. Fighting on the enemy’s turf is always a loser and the mainstream Brexiter economic justifications are collapsing. 

I have argued for a long time now that the economy is a secondary concern – and as far as that goes, the aim of the Brexit process should be to minimise what is bound to be economically stressful. Something this government is failing to do.

But then, I repeat, this isn’t an economic question and it never was. It is political, cultural and constitutional. It is said that Brexit has divided the nation but in fact all it has done is exposed a deep cultural chasm that was not being addressed by the status quo. There is a gulf of misunderstanding between the factions and it’s time we dragged it all out for examination.

And then comes this bit, which I found particularly informative:

When we look at that we find that it stems from a collapse of trust in UK institutions. And that can hardly be a surprise. Every major increment in EU membership has been done by subterfuge and deception. Direct consent has never been sought and our interactions in the EU have been yet more deception. Cameron’s phantom veto and the bogus attempts at reform were quite obvious pieces of political theatre from an establishment with no regard to the wishes of the public.

I think that this critique, when taken generally, is also at the core of the right-wing populist movements throughout the western world.

People feel that the sales pitch for increasing global integration have been dishonest, and I’m inclined to agree.

Well, This is Great

Did you know that Equifax runs the My Social Security and is responsible for verifying data for Obamacare exchanges for the US government?

You know, that whole, “Reinventing Government”, thing that Bill Clinton put forward in the 1990s, when critical government functions were outsourced to private for-profit operators, is looking to be an even worse deal than when it was first implemented in the mid-1990s.

Of course, efficiency and savings were never really the goals: It was a depressingly successful attempt to subvert the civil service laws and to return to the spoils system.

Just ask President Garfield how well that worked out.

What a Load of [Excrement Metaphor]

Researchers at Abertay University and the University of New South Wales Canberra have concluded that boys are better at physics because they can “Fire for Effect” when peeing:

Boys are better at Physics because they learn about “projection” while going to the toilet, researchers have claimed.

From a young age, boys are taught about how to aim accurately so that they do not make a mess in the bathroom, and this gives them a better understanding of “projectile motion”, according to three academics.

Writing for Times Education Supplement (TES), Anna Wilson of Abertay University along with Kate Wilson and David Low of the University of New South Wales Canberra, explained their theory.

“Playful urination practices – from seeing how high you can pee to games such as Peeball (where men compete using their urine to destroy a ball placed in a urinal) – may give boys an advantage over girls when it comes to physics,” the academics wrote.

The researchers said they have examined gender differences in achievement on physics tests, and found that girls generally perform worse than boys, but with a more marked gap in specific topic areas.

“In particular, the largest gaps in performance between girls and boys arise in questions that involve projectile motion – things that have been thrown, kicked, fired, etc,” they said.

“On some projectile questions, we’ve seen only around one-third of girls answer correctly, compared to two-thirds of boys. This isn’t a trivial gap in performance, particularly when a diagnostic test may contain several questions on projectiles.”

Seriously?

The stupid, it burns ………

More of This

The best way to protect your credit is to initiate a cred freeze with the cred bureaus.

They make this difficult, and charge for doing this.

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has introduced a bill requiring the credit bureaus to offer a credit freeze for free:

In the wake of the the massive Equifax customer data breach, many consumers are wondering: Why, exactly, should we be paying the credit bureaus for credit freezes or monitoring when it was one of them that just lost all our personal data? Two U.S. Senators are wondering that, too, and have now introduced a bill to fix it.

Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Brian Schatz (HI) today introduced a bill that would prevent credit bureaus from charging people for freezing their records. In the grand tradition of government backronyms, the bill [PDF] is called the FREE Act, or Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act. (Yes, that would actually be the FFEE Act. Maybe you’re supposed to squint a little.)

The bill’s purpose is simple: If passed, it would stop credit bureaus from charging consumers to place a freeze on their credit records to prevent identity theft.

Good policy and good politics.

Needless to say, Democratic “moderates” will find a way to oppose this.

Cowards

In the past week, the hypocrites at Harvard University have denied entry to their PhD program to a world renowned candidate* in history and the Harvard Kennedy School denied has denied visiting fellow status to Chelsea Manning.

As near as I can ascertain, this is because they are worried that right wing talk show host will say nasty things about them:

Yesterday, we discussed Harvard overriding a decision to admit Michelle Jones to the History Ph.D program, based at lest in part of the well-known sacred moral principle What Would Tucker Carlson Say? Well, capitulating to criticism from vocal reactionaries (pre-emptive or otherwise) is now becoming a hot trend:

Facing harsh criticism, a Harvard dean said early Friday morning that he was revoking his invitation to Chelsea Manning, a former United States soldier convicted of leaking classified information, to be a visiting fellow at the university.

The sudden turnabout by the Harvard Kennedy School came after a day of intense backlash over the university’s announcement on Wednesday that Ms. Manning would become a visiting fellow at the Institute of Politics this school year. Douglas W. Elmendorf, the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, said that while the university encourages a diversity of opinions and does not shy from controversy, naming Ms. Manning a fellow was a mistake for which he accepted responsibility.

It should be noted that the Harvard Kennedy School granted visiting fellow status to serial liar Sean Spicer and failed Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

The deal is, you give a talk, hang around for questions, and you become a “Visiting Fellow.”

Only the torturers and the torturer apologists in the US state security apparatus has major butt-hurt over this, so they folded.

The case of Michelle Jones is even more egregious, though the reason for potential outrage, a horrific crime for which she served her time, is marginally more understandable, though the two professors who went jihad against her admission to the history program were crystal clear as to their motivations, they were motivated by cowardice:

“We didn’t have some preconceived idea about crucifying Michelle,” said John Stauffer, one of the two American studies professors. “But frankly, we knew that anyone could just punch her crime into Google, and Fox News would probably say that P.C. liberal Harvard gave 200 grand of funding to a child murderer, who also happened to be a minority. I mean, c’mon.”

I believe that these two professors pictures appear in the dictionary next to the definition of “Limousine Liberals.”

This is amazing.  The current administration at Harvard is making me long for the days of Lawrence Summers as University President.

On the bright side, the current President of Harvard, the incredibly aptly named Dr. Faust, is leaving in about a 10 months.

*She did groundbreaking original research that found that prostitutes were not sent to prison in Indiana, but rather they were sent to forced labor laundries operated by the Catholic Church (see Magdalene Laundries) as opposed to being sent to prison around the turn of the 19th century.

Linkage

Cockney Star Trek, or as I like to think of it, the USS Chav:

Jimmy Kimmel Wins

During his monologue, he noted that Senator Ted Cruz had liked some MILF porn in Twitter.

He made the following observation:

I honestly don’t think it was Ted Cruz.

I don’t think Ted Cruz looks at porn. Ted Cruz masturbates to pictures of poor people without health care.

Kimmel didn’t just win the late night monologue Tuesday night, he won the world Tuesday night.

Video below:

Did Not Expect This

In a rare moment of bipartisanship, the House of Representatives just attached a rider to an appropriations bill restricting asset forfeiture:

In a stunning move, the House of Representatives on Tuesday approved an amendment to the Make America Secure and Prosperous Appropriations Act that will roll back Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s expansion of asset forfeiture.

Amendment No. 126 was sponsored by a bipartisan group of nine members, led by Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich. He was joined by Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna of California; Washington state’s Pramila Jayapal, a rising progressive star; and Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard.

Civil asset forfeiture is a practice in which law enforcement can take assets from a person who is suspected of a crime, even without a charge or conviction. Sessions revived the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allowed state and local police agencies to take assets and then give them to the federal government — which would in turn give a chunk back to local police. This served as a way for these local agencies to skirt past state laws designed to limit asset forfeiture.

The amendment would roll back Sessions’s elimination of the Obama-era reforms.

This is a good, if thoroughly unexpected, development.

Generally, law and order types, whether Republican or Democratic, favor asset forfeiture, because it allows cops to steal from black folks, and keep the money for themselves.

Clueless Protesters

Some fans in the Monster Seats hung a banner over the wall that said, “Racism Is As American As Baseball.” Security removed them. pic.twitter.com/tVSai9XocY

— Pete Abraham (@PeteAbe) September 14, 2017

Given Boston’s history of racism, I’m inclined to think that protesting racism at Fenway Park during a Red Sox game is a good thing.

Boston is NOT a “woke” place, and getting in the face of the town in what is arguably the most Boston place in Boston is a good thing.

That being said, if you do protest, run it by an editor to make sure that your actual words are unambiguous:

Fans draped a sign reading “Racism is as American as baseball” over the Green Monster at Fenway Park during the Red Sox-Athletics game Wednesday night.

 Red Sox spokeswoman Zineb Curran replied with the following statement via email when asked about the incident:
“During the 4th inning of tonight’s game, four fans unfurled a banner over the left field wall in violation of the club’s policy prohibiting signs of any kind to be hung or affixed to the ballpark. The individuals involved were escorted out of Fenway Park.”

 According to The Boston Globe, the sign was visible for about two minutes and no arrests were made in connection to the incident.

………

 One member of the group spoke to CSNNE anonymously Wednesday night, telling the network they expected to be kicked out of Fenway but were surprised by some people’s interpretation that their message wasn’t clear.

“I guess we should have seen that coming, but we also didn’t think of it as an ambiguous message,” the group member said. “It’s kind of telling that it is being interpreted as one.”

When I first heard about this, I thought that it was a group of white supremacists endorsing racism.

For F%$#’s sake, you need to run you slogans by an someone who wasn’t involved in drafting the slogan, and maybe a trained copy editor.

To quote a an internet meme, “Get a brain, morans.”

Time to Retire, Nancy

Nancy Pelosi is doing her level best to minimize the increased support for single payer healthcare.

I guess that she’s too interested in campaign donations from the insurance companies.

It should be noted that Sanders got 16 co-sponsors on his bill, something that would have been unthinkable 2 years ago.

It’s time for Nancy Pelosi to step aside.

Unfortunately, the likely successors (Hoyer, etc.) suck too.

Schadenfreude Alert

Martin Shkreli just had his bail revoked, because he was posting to Facebook offering money for a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair.

The judge was unamused:

Martin Shkreli got slammed into jail Wednesday when a federal judge delivered a poetic punch line to the Pharma Bro’s Hillary Clinton jokes.

Brooklyn Federal Judge Kiyo Matsumoto revoked Shkreli’s $5 million bail Wednesday evening, saying his $5,000 bounty on Clinton’s hair was the final straw.

She said his recent Facebook post calling for someone to pluck the ex-presidential candidate’s locks during her recent book tour could “cause a reasonable person to have concern.”

And even if Shkreli wasn’t being violent himself, no one knows what his online devotees were capable of doing, the judge said.

Am a bad person because his pain amuses me so much?

Linkage

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox announces his candidacy for President of the US. (Massive Trump Ownage)

Righteous Indignation

If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.

—Victor Klemperer* in his book I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years

Cory Robin uses this quote to explain his dissatisfaction with American Political Science Association, which has decided to have John Yoo, a man who supported the crushing of the testicles of a child of a terror suspect to extract information.

Dr. Robins is unamused by this, and explains the parallels:

The reason Klemperer reserved such special contempt for the professors and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s was that professors and intellectuals played a special role in bringing on the horrors of the Nazi regime, as Claudia Koonz and other historians have documented. Not only did those professors and intellectuals provide some of the leading arguments for the rise of that regime, but they also served in that regime: as doctors, population experts, engineers, propagandists. And lawyers.

………

I fear that with this invitation to Yoo to address our profession, as if he were simply the author of controversial and heterodox opinions rather than the architect of a regime of torture and barbarity, the American Political Science Association has written itself a chapter in those future histories.

The APSA should be ashamed of themselves.

Attendees of the conference should bring extra pairs of shoes to throw at John Yoo.

*Yes he was a cousin of actor Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer.

Gee, You Think

It appears that the radical Marxists at the Financial Times have finally noticed that privatizing municipal water service are basically a license to steal, with a soupcon of incompetence thrown in:

How hard can it be to be the chief executive of a privatised British water company? Your customers are determined by geography, your prices set by a regulator and designed to offer ample scope to fund both capital expenditure and to pay returns to your investors. Pretty much all you have to do is to make sure your sewage plants work and to keep the public waterways clear of human waste.

Yet even this bare minimum seems to have eluded Martin Baggs, the former boss of Thames Water. He, you might recall, was the man at the corporate stopcock when the utility’s malfunctioning plants spilled so much excrement into the Thames that locals in the Berkshire town of Little Marlow took to referring to the scum-covered surface as “crappucino”. The company was this year fined a record £20m for venting 4.2bn litres of raw sewage into the rivers Thames and Thame between 2012 and 2013.

Not that this escapade unduly crimped Mr Baggs’ career prospects. Despite evidence of negligence in its operations that later led a judge to brand the company’s actions “borderline deliberate”, he not only prospered after its disclosure, but received a rise of 60 per cent in 2015, taking his pay to a princely £2m. He stood down last year, showered with encomiums for his “huge contribution”.

To be fair to Mr Baggs, he is not alone. The boring job of plumbing seems almost an afterthought in determining the rewards of water supremos. Not only is pay uniformly high: Steve Mogford, chief executive of United Utilities, collected £2.8m last year, for instance. But if things go wrong, well, why should a bit of sewage stop those cheques rolling? In 2016, Yorkshire Water was fined £1.7m for polluting a lake near Wakefield and a section of the River Ouse. But that didn’t prevent it handing its boss Richard Flint £1.2m.

………

The regulator needs to look again at the generosity of its regime, and its cock-eyed governance. As things stand, water privatisation looks little more than an organised rip-off. Quite why this natural monopoly should not operate through not-for-profit, public interest companies is ever less clear.

This observation is not a surprise, though the source is a bit of a shocker.

This is what happens when you privatize water: higher prices and (literal) random sh%$ty events.

The above article being about the UK, we aren’t seeing riots as happened in Bolivia, but it’s still an ugly picture.

Unfortunately, our current international trade regime makes deprivatization extremely difficult, which is another reason to oppose those deal.

The Motives of Leakers Don’t Matter

What matters is what they leaked, and the context of that information.

Case in point, if one looks at the history perhaps the most prominent leaker of all time, Mark “Deep Throat” Felt, it becomes clear that he was motivated by a desire to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the FBI, not concerns about either the bureau or the rule of law:

The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt—the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights—was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. Or, as David Remnick spelled out in the New Yorker—echoing Deep Throat’s original hagiographers, Woodward and Bernstein—Felt “believed that the Nixon administration was corrupt, paranoid and trying to infringe on the independence of the bureau.” The president and his top aides ran, Felt believed, “a criminal operation out of the White House, and [Felt] risked everything to guide” the Post reporters. A new biopic about Felt, starring Liam Neeson, is due out on September 29 and shows every sign of continuing to portray Deep Throat as a profound patriot and dedicated FBI lifer.

But here’s a heretical thought: Mark Felt was no hero. Getting rid of Nixon was the last thing Felt ever wanted to accomplish; indeed, he was banking on Nixon’s continuation in office to achieve his one and only aim: to reach the top of the FBI pyramid and become director. Felt didn’t help the media for the good of the country, he used the media in service of his own ambition. Things just didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way he wanted.

Only recently, more than four decades after Nixon’s downfall, has it become possible to reconstruct Felt’s design and what really happened during those fateful six months following the Watergate break-in. Doing so requires burrowing through a great number of primary documents and government records against the backdrop of a vast secondary literature. Nixon’s surreptitious tape recordings rank first in importance, but only mark the starting point. One has to also research documents from the FBI’s vast Watergate investigation; the bureau’s subsequent internal leak investigation; records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; documents from Felt’s own FBI file; and lastly, two unintentionally rewarding books: Mark Felt’s original 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, and the slightly reworked version published in 2006, A G-Man’s Life. What you’ll end up with is the real story of Deep Throat. And you might be left with this realization: No matter what happens to Donald Trump—whether he’s absolved, exposed or neither—you should hope there’s nobody as duplicitous as Mark Felt manipulating our understanding of Russiagate.

Here’s the important thing:  Felt’s motives do not matter.

Except to the degree that they effect credibility,* a source’s motives never matter.

What matters was that he was telling the truth.

What matters is the accuracy of the information and the significance of the information.

If reporters refused to take information from disgruntled bureaucratic climbers, there would be very little real news out there.

*Yes, I acknowledge that the trustworthiness of the source is a big f%$#ing deal. But once you are past that not inconsiderable hump, motive does not matter.

So Not a Surprise

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin is telling people not to donate to the Red Cross:

Houston City Councilman Dave Martin, who represents hard-hit Kingwood, had a message for the public about the American Red Cross.

“I beg you not to send them a penny,” he said at Wednesday’s council meeting. “They are the most inept unorganized organization I’ve ever experienced.”

………

“Don’t waste your money,” said Martin. “Give it to another cause.”

Martin is not the only public official to go after the Red Cross’ response to Harvey.

Harris County Judge Ed Emmett has said he asked local nonprofit to set up a shelter at NRG Park in large part because he did not trust the Red Cross to do so.

“The Red Cross could not have done this. They wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to do it,” Emmett said. “Don’t get me wrong, they’re out there on the front lines, but I had already seen the difficulty and we needed to get this set up quickly.”

The organization also has been faulted for failing to ensure supplies reached area shelters quickly enough. By sunrise Sunday, when much of the Houston area awoke under water, one of the city’s two Red Cross shelters could not accept evacuees due to high water and the other had only 200 cots for what turned out to be more than 2,000 people. Cots did not arrive to the George R. Brown Convention Center downtown until after dark Sunday, and shortages there persisted for days.

This is a recurring theme with the American Red Cross.

They raised hundreds of millions after storms Sandy and Isaac, and f%$#ed it all up, and it raised half a billion dollars for Haiti, and built 6 houses.

Then there are its deceptive claims about overhead and serviced delivered.

The Red Cross is a broken organization. The management is driven by “the appearance of aid, not actually delivering it.”

The organization is not just dysfunctional, it is completely broken, and without a top to bottom revamp of its management, it will remain broken.

What’s more, the problems predate the current management, my father recalls an inadequate response to the 1964 Good Friday earthquake in Anchorage, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it gave AIDS to most of the hemophiliacs in the United States, because it refused to screen its blood supply properly.  (Liddy Dole was a part of that clusterf%$#, dragging her feet for years over changes to the program)

The Red Cross, and its charter from Congress, need to be fixed.