Zuckerberg hires former Clinton pollster Joel Benenson – POLITICO

My first though upon hearing that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired former Clinton pollster and political advisor Joel Benenson, oh my God, this dirt-bag is going to run for President.

My second thought was that I didn’t have to worry, because if he is going to be relying on the incompetents who managed to lose an election to an inverted traffic cone, then he has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually winning anything:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have hired Democratic pollster Joel Benenson, a former top adviser to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, as a consultant, according to a person familiar with the hire.

Benenson’s company, Benenson Strategy Group, will be conducting research for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropy. The organization — whose mission statement, according to its website, is “advancing human potential and promoting equality” — is endowed with the couple’s Facebook fortune.

Zuckerberg and Chan have vowed to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares, worth an estimated $45 billion, to charity. Bringing on Benenson is the latest sign that they’re pushing their philanthropic work more heavily into the political and policy world.

In January, the couple hired David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run, as president of policy and advocacy. Plouffe had previously worked at Uber. Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, also sits on the board.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is seriously considering a Presidential run, and he is availing himself of the most incompetent people available, so it’s going to be a clown show.

There is nothing to worry about.

Then again, that’s what they said about Donald Trump.

Pass the Popcorn

You may recall that in 2012,  Bruno Iksil, aka the, “London Whale,” lost billions of dollars for JP Morgan by playing Russian Roulette with credit default swaps.

He agreed to testify against two relatively low level employees, but is now saying that the orders to cover up the losses came from Jamie Dimon and his Evil Minions™:

The U.S. case against two former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. traders charged with concealing billions of dollars in losses fell apart because a key witness known as the London Whale shifted blame to Chief Executive Officer James Dimon and other top executives, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The 2012 trading debacle that unfolded inside a London outpost of J.P. Morgan ultimately cost the bank more than $6 billion. Former trader Bruno Iksil, who was nicknamed the London Whale for his outsize bets, agreed in 2013 to testify against ex-coworkers Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout for their alleged roles in hiding the losses.

But over the past year, Mr. Iksil changed his story.

“I mostly inferred that Dimon and his close lieutenants were responsible much, much more than my two colleagues could ever be,” Mr. Iksil said in an email, his first comments since prosecutors requested the case be dropped on July 21.

Mr. Iksil’s shifting explanations about who was responsible helped to end the high-profile U.S. criminal case, the person said.

On July 21, prosecutors in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office filed a motion in federal court to drop the charges against Messrs. Martin-Artajo and Grout, saying the government “no longer believes that it can rely on the testimony of Iksil in prosecuting this case” after “a review of recent statements and writings made by Iksil.” The office provided no other details beyond that statement.

………

Mr. Iksil never asserted that Mr. Dimon gave this initial order, but on his website, he cited a September 2010 public presentation from the CEO that predicted such reductions as a way of meeting new regulatory demands.

Even as losses mounted in 2012, valuations of those positions weren’t hidden, Mr. Iksil wrote in his memoir. Instead, he wrote, they were communicated to top bank officers, suggesting to Mr. Iksil that others were fully aware of the issues.

A J.P. Morgan spokeswoman declined to comment about Mr. Iksil’s allegations.

There is an old saying, “A fish rots from the head down.”

It seems to apply here.

This is Profoundly Weird

Marcus Hutchins, a white hat hacker who shut down the WannaCry ransomware, was just arrested by the FBI, and charged with creating and distributing a banking Trojan 3 years ago:

On Wednesday, US authorities detained a researcher who goes by the handle MalwareTech, best known for stopping the spread of the WannaCry ransomware virus.

In May, WannaCry infected hospitals in the UK, a Spanish telecommunications company, and other targets in Russia, Turkey, Germany, Vietnam, and more. Marcus Hutchins, a researcher from cybersecurity firm Kryptos Logic, inadvertently stopped WannaCry in its tracks by registering a specific website domain included in the malware’s code.

Hutchins was arrested for allegedly creating the Kronos banking malware.

Motherboard verified that a detainee called Marcus Hutchins, 23, was being held at the Henderson Detention Center in Nevada early on Thursday. A few hours after, Hutchins was moved to another facility, according to a close personal friend.

The friend told Motherboard they “tried to visit him as soon as the detention centre opened but he had already been transferred out.” Motherboard granted the source anonymity due to privacy concerns.

“I’ve spoken to the US Marshals again and they say they have no record of Marcus being in the system. At this point we’ve been trying to get in contact with Marcus for 18 hours and nobody knows where he’s been taken,” the person added. “We still don’t know why Marcus has been arrested and now we have no idea where in the US he’s been taken to and we’re extremely concerned for his welfare.”

So, they have arrested him, and are holding him incommunicado, and at this time it appears that he has not been allowed to talk to a lawyer.

Also note that “MalWareTech” seemed to confirm that the WannaCry code originated with the NSA, which might imply that there some institutional imperative to go after him that was not strictly judicial.

Also, at the time of the Kronos release, Marcus Hutchins was casting about on Twitter for a copy of the code, which seems to an awfully odd thing to do if he wrote the code in the first place:

Anyone got a kronos sample?

— MalwareTech (@MalwareTechBlog) July 13, 2014

Marcy Wheeler also noticed an odd coincidence that corresponded to his arrest:

In remarkably timed news, between 3:10 and 3:25 AM UTC this morning (8 PM last night Mountain Time), someone emptied out all the WannaCry accounts.

So, while Hutchins was detained, someone took all the ransom money that 

This is all profoundly odd.

Is it Possible that Much of Silicon Valley is Just White Boy Criminality?

It turns out the vaunted “Unicorns” of Silicon Valley may have a lot more in common with bucket shops than they do with any meaningful technological innovation:

Unicorns aren’t real, and neither are the valuations ascribed to many of the startups that say they’re worth $1 billion or more.

 About half of private companies with valuations exceeding $1 billion, known as unicorns, wouldn’t have earned the mythical title without the use of complex stock mechanics, according to a study by business professors at the University of British Columbia and Stanford University. The tools used to negotiate a higher share price with investors often come at the expense of employees and early shareholders, sometimes drastically reducing the actual value of their stock.

 The chasm between public and private valuations is a topic of increasing prominence following several disappointing listings. Among them is Blue Apron Holdings Inc., which is trading well below the price venture capitalists paid in the last fundraising round.

 An often-overlooked explanation for the divide is buried in investor contracts. Blue Apron, which delivers meal kits to customers, gave stock preferences to some shareholders in 2015 in exchange for a $2 billion valuation, according to the study. A convertible loan this year included a provision that offered equity at a discount to the IPO share price, and investors took advantage of the mechanism.

 The use of special investor protections has soared in recent years as startups chase dreams of becoming a unicorn. A lofty valuation can build credibility and help recruit talent in a tight labor market. But it has also complicated the already-opaque process of valuing a private business.

One provision frequently afforded to investors is called a liquidation preference. It guarantees a minimum payout in the event of an acquisition or other exit. The study found that it can exaggerate a company’s valuation by as much as 94 percent. Researchers pointed to AppNexus, a digital advertising startup. The company sold shares with a liquidation preference that guaranteed new backers at least double the amount they put in if AppNexus is acquired.

When we look at the larcenous and corrupt cultures of companies like Uber, we sometimes miss the forest for the trees.

The basic culture of the Silicon Valley startup is pump and dump.

If prosecutors ever looked at the business practices of Silicon Valley with anything near due diligence, I think that half of the company founders, and ⅔ of the venture capitalists would end up in the dock.

Of course, that’s never going to happen, because ……… Markets!

There are Fewer Dead Blodies at a Jessica Fletcher Dinner Party

Another day, another batsh%$ insane Trump staffer gone: (2 actually)

National security adviser H.R. McMaster on Wednesday removed Ezra Cohen-Watnick, his senior intelligence director, from his position in the White House more than four months after he initially tried to get him out of the job.

In March, McMaster told the 30-year-old former Defense Intelligence Agency official that he was being moved to another position. But Cohen-Watnick, who worked on the Trump transition team and is close to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, appealed to Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief White House strategist. Bannon and Kushner spoke with Trump, and Cohen-Watnick was kept in place.

McMaster’s removal of Cohen-Watnick suggests that his influence in the White House and control over his personnel might be on the rise because of the arrival of new White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general.

………

The statement said that Cohen-Watnick would take on another position in the administration. His dismissal follows the removal last week of retired Army Col. Derek Harvey, an influential voice on Iran, Syria and counterterrorism policy.

Harvey and Cohen-Watnick were known in the White House for their hawkish views on Iran and were regular allies in White House debates on counterterrorism, Middle East policy and Iran policy, U.S. officials said. Cohen-Watnick and Harvey were hired by McMaster’s ousted predecessor, Michael Flynn.

There probably is a Game of Thrones metaphor in all this, but I really have no urge at all to watch that show, so I’ll stick with bad 1990s television.

The Streisand Effect Benefits Us All

I’ve written a bit about the increasingly larcenous and parasitic scientific journal industry.

I have in fact said that the giant of the industry, Elsevier, “Is determined to suck the marrow out of learning, and dance on its bones.”

I have on occasion (first link) noted that there is a site, Sci-Hub, based in Russia, which is making much of the previously paywalled material freely available.

Elsevier has aggressively gone after Sci-Hub in court, with the result that Sci-Hub’s profile and hence access on the internet, has skyrocketed:

Techdirt has been covering the story of Sci-Hub, which provides unrestricted access to a massive (unauthorized) database of academic papers, for a while now. As several posts have emphasized, the decision by the publishing giant Elsevier to pursue the site through the courts is a classic example of the Streisand Effect: it has simply served to spread the word about a hitherto obscure service. There’s a new paper exploring this and other aspects of Sci-Hub, currently available as a PeerJ preprint. Here’s what one of the authors says in a related Science interview about the impact of lawsuits on Sci-Hub:

 In our paper we have a graph plotting the history of Sci-Hub against Google Trends — each legal challenge resulted in a spike in Google searches [for the site], which suggests the challenges are basically generating free advertising for Sci-Hub. I think the suits are not going to stop Sci-Hub.

That free advertising provided by Elsevier and others through their high-profile legal assaults on Alexandra Elbakyan, the academic from Kazakhstan who created and runs Sci-Hub pretty much single-handedly, has been highly effective. The surge in searches for Sci-Hub seems to have led to its holdings becoming incredibly comprehensive, as increased numbers of visitors have requested missing articles, which are then added to the collection: 

As an FYI the Streisand effect is where an attempt to suppress information results in further publicizing and popularizing the data.

Considering the nature of peer reviewed journals, where the publishing houses neither pay the authors, the reviewers, and frequently the editors, and prices have increased largely because of industry consolidation.

If Sci-Hub and its ilk sends these publishers into bankruptcy, the world will benefit.

Linkage

Getting my engineering geek on with the Maltese Cross/Geneva mechanism:

Let him go! We will not. Let him go! We will not.*

Selected Tweets

#Scaramucci sells his company, loses his wife & then his job. Sounds like a rich man’s country song.#YouGotTrumped

— Jonathan (@CrashDavis757) July 31, 2017

Anthony Scaramucci has resigned to spend more time with his… well, no, that’s not gonna work.

— Matt Goldich (@MattGoldich) July 31, 2017

aww congrats to Scaramucci for taking his paternity leave!!! love when men set such good examples!!!!!!

— Elaine Filadelfo (@ElaineF) July 31, 2017

Comedians Protest Anthony Scaramucci’s Ouster. Has Trump blamed Obama yet? https://t.co/wesFNRastr

— Jay Novarra (@Ominabeshi) July 31, 2017

RT if you’ve had a period that lasted longer than Scaramucci

— Allure (@Allure_magazine) July 31, 2017

It should be illegal to fire anyone before SNL does their bit. #MoochOut #Scaramucci @Scaramucci

— Askhole (@BlowNob) July 31, 2017

The Trump administration really is a sh%$ show.

After last week’s Night of the Long Knives, which saw the Press Secretary quitting and the Chief of Staff fired and left on the tarmac to find his way home, Anthony Scaramucci, the architect of these changes, was fired today.

Seriously, I’ve had encounters with the Department of Motor Vehicles that have taken more time to go through the system than this guy did:

President Trump on Monday removed Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, the White House announced, ousting him just days after Mr. Scaramucci unloaded a crude verbal tirade against other senior members of the president’s senior staff.

“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving his role as White House Communications Director,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best.”

Mr. Scaramucci’s abrupt removal came just 10 days after the wealthy New York financier was brought on to the West Wing staff, a move that convulsed an already chaotic White House and led to the departures of Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, and Reince Priebus, the president’s first chief of staff.

In a Twitter message just before 5:30 on Monday morning, just hours before the announcement about Mr. Scaramucci, Mr. Trump insisted that there has been “No WH chaos!”

The decision to remove Mr. Scaramucci became public as Mr. Kelly, who replaced Mr. Priebus as the top adviser in the White House, began his first day in charge of the White House staff. He told aides gathered in early-morning staff meetings that he intended to impose a new sense of order and operational discipline that had been absent under his predecessor.

Mr. Scaramucci had boasted about reporting directly to the president, not the chief of staff. But the decision to remove him came at Mr. Kelly’s request, the people said.

It was not clear whether Mr. Scaramucci, who is known informally as “The Mooch,” will remain at the White House in another position or will leave altogether. The White House had originally said that his official start date as a government employee was to be August 15, although he appeared to begin performing his duties immediately.

I called my dad about potential metaphors for Mr. Scaramucci’s short tenure this afternoon, and he was extremely amused at recent developments.

He made an interesting observation, that new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly just had what is probably the best day in his job that he will ever have.

It’s all down hill from here.

We do, however need to have a few moments of silence for all the gags that have been written, and now must be thrown away.

The writers for the late night shows must be furiously rewriting opening monologues as we speek.

*Not my bon mot. DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS came up with it.

Karma is a Bitch, and He Should Die in Jail

Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been found guilty of criminal contempt and faces up to 6 months in jail.

It’s not long enough. This guy has spent the past 30 years trampling the rule of law and abusing his position, but it’s a good start:

The immigration policies that elevated former Sheriff Joe Arpaio to fame were the same that would ultimately lead to his political demise and conviction of a federal crime.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt of court, finding that he willfully violated a federal judge’s order.

The sentencing phase will begin Oct. 5. Arpaio faces up to six months in confinement, a sentence equivalent to that of a misdemeanor.

Bolton’s ruling follows a five-day June and July trial, in which Department of Justice prosecutors argued that the 85-year-old had intentionally flouted a federal judge’s orders halting Arpaio’s signature immigration round-ups.

Honestly, his anti-Hispanic activities are really a small part of his wrongdoing.

He:

This is a deeply evil man, and he needs to spend the rest of natural life in prison.

Of course, the maximum sentence is only 6 months, but I think that some other rocks will be turned over in the interim.

Quote of the Day

My objection is not just academic or aesthetic or cultural; it’s also political. I don’t believe in technocracy. I don’t think I (or people like me) am qualified to lead the country or to have a Clinton-like position in this country because I went to good schools or read a lot of books. There’s a limited place for expertise in a democracy, but it’s limited. I know I’m in the minority here on this, but I get no comfort from the fact that Barack Obama reads great literature (that was a Facebook post a while back) or that Chelsea Clinton knows how to name drop Arendt. For me, that doesn’t reflect the legitimate needs for some limited expertise. Nor does it reflect the requirements of good leadership, and it sure as sh%$ is not about democracy. It’s about social class, social standing, and social signaling.

—Cory Robin on his Twitter exchange with Chelsea Clinton over her clueless use of the Hanna Arendt quote, “The Banality of Evil.”

Mr. Robin is not intending to be deeply profound, he correctly sees this as just some bullsh%$ on the internet, but in a very real way, he has put his finger on the pulse of what is wrong with the current Democratic Party.

The current mission of the party is to produce the feeling of virtue with the top 10% of social strata that believes themselves not to be sociopaths, which might explain why it’s been performing so poorly among the rest of the country.

Support Your Local Law Enforcement

Well now we have seen at least 34 cases tainted by evidence tampering by the Baltimore cops:

Maryland prosecutors have tossed 34 criminal cases and are re-examining dozens more in the aftermath of recent revelations that a Baltimore police officer accidentally recorded himself planting drugs in a trash-strewn alley.

Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby said that, in all, 123 cases are under review in the wake of a scandal in which one officer has been suspended and two others put on administrative duty. Body cam footage revealed nearly two weeks ago showed one of the officers planting drugs when he didn’t realize his body cam was recording. The Baltimore Police Department’s body cams, like many across the nation, capture footage 30 seconds before an officer presses the record button. The footage was turned over to defense attorneys as part of a drug prosecution—and that’s when the misdeed was uncovered.

………

Mosby added that the authorities are likely to dismiss many more cases, and they have reviewed hundreds of body cam videos. At least one other is suspicious, she said.

The real question is how common this sort of behavior really is.

My guess is that this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Linkage

A virtual reality homage to the classic Ah-Ha video Take On Me:

Well, We Finally Knows What Makes a Federal Judge Call Bullsh%$ on the FBI

The FBI was saying that it needed 17 years to accomodate a Freedom of Information Act request.

The judge was having none of it:

Getting answers to Freedom of Information Act requests is often a protracted and tiring process, but how long a wait is too long?

 One federal judge just came up with an answer: 17 years.

 U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler bluntly rejected the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s proposal that documentary filmmaker Nina Seavey wait until the year 2034 to get all the law enforcement agency’s records for a request pertaining surveillance of anti-war and civil rights activists in the 1960s and 1970s.

 The request involved an unusually large amount of material — about 110,000 pages of records at the FBI and more at other agencies — but Seavey said waiting almost two decades for the complete files wasn’t viable for her.

You can run the numbers: 110,000 pages taking 17 years with 50 weeks a year working 5 days a week, and you hve a processing rate of less than 26 pages a day.

This is bullsh%$, and it’s a coverup in an attempt to protect the reputation of J. Edgar Hoover, who should be remembered primarily as a Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria

“Literally, they were talking 17 years out. I’m 60 years old. You can’t do that math,” the George Washington University professor and documentarian told POLITICO this week. “It wasn’t going to work for me.”

 The FBI said it has a policy of processing and releasing large requests at a pace of 500 pages a month, while Seavey, represented by D.C. transparency lawyer Jeffrey Light, had proposed 5,000 pages a month. (At one point, the FBI thought it had about 150,000 pages of responsive records, which would’ve meant a 25-year wait.)

 Justice Department lawyers and the FBI argued that going faster than 500 pages a month would disrupt the agency’s workflow and create the possibility of a few massive requests effectively shutting down the rest of the their FOIA operation.

 Kessler didn’t buy it.

 ………

 Ultimately, Kessler ordered the FBI to process 2,850 pages a month, which should get Seavey the records she’s seeking within three years.

………

 It’s not the first FOIA case to produce staggering estimates of how long the government would need to make records public. Last year, the State Department rebuffed a request for emails of aides to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying it could take 75 years to work through the material.

Yeah, that’s a f%$3ing coverup too, but tragically, it was a coverup of basically nothing driven by unreasoning paranoia, which created the appearance of guilt.

But of Course

Of course, the office has been irrelevant for a while, see Iraq-Bush, Libya-Obama, Yemen-House of Saud, etc., but it’s a bit of a bummer anyway:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is reportedly considering closing the Office of Global Criminal Justice, a tiny agency with a meager budget of $3 million a year, located within the State Department.

According to its website, the office “advises the Secretary of State . . . on issues related to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.” It “also coordinates U.S. Government positions relating to the international and hybrid courts currently prosecuting persons responsible for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—not only for such crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia—but also in Kenya, Libya, Côte d’Ivoire, Guatemala, and elsewhere in the world.”

Furthermore, it deploys “a range of diplomatic, legal, economic, military, and intelligence tools to help expose the truth, judge those responsible, protect and assist victims, enable reconciliation, deter atrocities, and build the rule of law.”

The New York Times reported that human rights advocates saw the proposal as an example of “the Trump administration’s indifference to human rights outside North Korea, Iran and Cuba.” Human rights activists also said that shutting the Office “would hamper efforts to publicize atrocities and bring war criminals to justice.” Newsweek reported, however, that the Obama administration also reportedly considered downgrading the office and merging it with another agency.

Let’s be clear:  If we consider the House of Saud to be an essential ally, any war crimes office is necessarily a joke.

OK, This Explains a the Furor………

As a part of the Brexit, the UK is renegotiating export deals with the US.

One of the sticking point is chlorine washed chicken.

In the EU and the UK, cleanliness is required at every step of the process, while in the US, the carcasses are washed with a solution of water and chlorine because the chickens are raised in in extreme conditions, and the chlorine washing is required to make ensure that the chickens are safe to eat:

The disturbing prospect of chlorine-washed chickens from the US going on sale in British shops in a post-Brexit trade deal last week sparked an explosive row at the heart of Government.

 But beyond the politics lies the story of why American poultry needs such drastic chemical treatment – and of the horrendous conditions at the farms where they are bred and reared.

 Now whistleblower farmers have revealed the full horror of the suffering to The Mail on Sunday, including how:

  • Tens of thousands of super-sized ‘Frankenstein’ birds are crammed in vast warehouses.
  • The chickens, which weigh up to 9lb, often buckle under their weight and must live without natural sunlight.
  • Chickens frequently die before they reach maturity and many are left covered in their own faeces, turning warehouses into vile breeding grounds for disease.

Unlike in the UK and Europe, there are no minimum space requirements for breeding chickens in the US. America also does not have any rules governing lighting levels in the sheds and, crucially, its farms have no maximum allowed level of ammonia, which indicates how much urine and faecal matter is present. This means there is no limit on how much can fester inside the sheds.

 There is no legal requirement to wash US chickens in chlorine or other disinfectants, but 97 per cent of its birds are cleaned in this way after slaughter.

………

Another reason poultry in the US is chlorinated is that farmers are not required to vaccinate against diseases such as Salmonella. Britain and the EU have widespread vaccination programmes.

………

Leah Garces, of the Global Animal Partnership, an animal welfare group, added: ‘The fact we have to wash our food in chlorine to make it safe indicates that we are not doing farming right in the first place. It indicates how unhealthy we are raising our birds.’

While UK chicken farmers are not wholly free from criticism from animal welfare campaigners, there are strict regulations that must be followed. In the UK and Europe, poultry farmers must not keep more than 17 chickens per square metre in their sheds. There are also rules governing available natural light, temperature and the maximum levels of ammonia.

………

Shraddha Kaul, of the British Poultry Council, said: ‘We strongly reject any move to import chlorine-washed chickens as part of a makeweight in trade negotiations with the US.

‘Chlorine is used as a catch-all. It is an approach which means it doesn’t matter how badly you treat your chicken, you can just clean it away at the end of the process.’

This reflects a very big difference in philosophy, the Europeans bake in sanitation throughout the process, while in the US, you hose the chickens down with disinfectant when they hit the slaughter house.

Of course, lousy chicken and a race to the bottom is the par for the course in free trade deals, so limeys need to eat their mutant steroid and antibiotic fetid chicken, and they need to like it.

Private Prisons

In Estancia, New Mexico, a private prison is threatening to close unless the authorities throw some more people in prison:

The company that has operated a private prison in Estancia for nearly three decades has announced it will close the Torrance County Detention Facility and lay off more than 200 employees unless it can find 300 state or federal inmates to fill empty beds within the next 60 days, according to a statement issued Tuesday by county officials.

“This is a big issue for us,” Torrance County Manager Belinda Garland said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s going to affect Torrance County in a big way.”

Jonathan Burns, a spokesman for CoreCivic — formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America — had this to say about the closure:

“The city of Estancia and the surrounding community have been a great partner to CoreCivic for the last 27 years. CoreCivic is grateful for the support the community has shown through the years and we’re honored to have been a part of that community. Unfortunately, a declining detainee population in general has forced us to make difficult decisions in order to maximize utilization of our resources.”

Garland said the prison’s imminent closure will affect the county in a number of ways, not the least of which is that the county, which does not have its own jail, will have to find another place to house the 40 to 75 inmates it sends there each month.

Seriously, holding a town for ransom in an attempt to get law enforcement to lock up more people.

That is pretty f%$#ing cold.

If You Are Suggesting that John McCain is Playing 3D Chess, You are an Imbecile

Let’s be clear: McCain is neither intelligent enough to come up with this, and he is far to vain and chatty to keep his mouth shut for the requisite 24 hours of so to make it work.

He did this, because he was upset that people were calling him out on the “straight shooter” myth that he has cultivated his entire political career, and I believe that acted in this manner because of his own self regard.

But in the interest fairness, I will quote the theory: (%$# mine)

I’m not sure if it’s really being appreciated just how comprehensively the Republicans were just f%$#ed over.

See, the Republicans have been trying to pass these godawful healthcare bills through a process called budget reconciliation, which, among other things, protects the bill from being filibustered in the Senate and only requires a simple majority of 50 votes (rather than 60, which the Republicans don’t have).

The thing is, the Senate can only consider one budget reconciliation bill per topic per year. Of course, if the bill dies in committee and never comes to an official vote, it doesn’t count- which is why they’ve been able to keep hammering away at the issue.

This bill, though, was allowed to come to the Senate floor, because the Republicans thought they’d secured the votes. Collins, Murkowski and the Democrats would vote no, everyone else would vote yes, and Pence would break the tie. And then McCain completely f%$#ed them. And it was almost certainly a calculated move; he voted to allow the bill to come to the floor. Had McCain allowed it to die in committee, McConnell could have come back with yet another repeal bill; but he let it come to a vote, and now they can’t consider another budget reconciliation bill for the rest of the fiscal year. The Senate needs 60 votes to pass any kind of healthcare reform now.

So now they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Either they concede defeat on the issue and try again later (causing a big, unpopular stink that could damage elections if they try it before the midterms, or risking losing the slim majority they already have if they wait) or they actually sit down with the democrats like adults and write a halfway decent healthcare bill.

This is amazing.

While I admit that his actions MAY have had the stated effect, I think that was a happy accident.

Simply put, this is not how John McCain plays the game.

Also, the idea that McConnell gives a flying f%$# about Senate procedure, and won’t wreck 200+ years of dysfunction tradition to get his way is simply delusional.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.