Tag: Incompetence

Abolish the CBO

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In the 2019 they used 11 studies, and found the median “directly affected employment” elasticities (closely related to the own-wage elasticity of employment) of around -0.25. Then they multiplied by 1.5 to capture “long run” effects, getting -0.38. pic.twitter.com/thBqW6t0Cj

— Arindrajit Dube (@arindube) February 8, 2021

The Twitter thread gets wonkier.  Short version:  The CBO juiced their report

The Republican hack running the CBO just released a report saying that raising the minimum wage would create unemployment.

That’s news to me, since the overwhelming majority of studies show no such effect.

The CBO report also disappointed people whose studies were actually used in that report.It also people who study this for a living, who note that the CBO report is complete sh%$: (I miss profanity SO much)

………

Michael Reich, a prominent minimum-wage expert at the University of California at Berkeley whose work is cited by the CBO, disputed the report’s more pessimistic estimates.

“Studies have found that wage floors have minimal to low effect on level of jobs or for inflation,” he said on a call with reporters. “Minimum-wage increases are generally paid for by small price increases, mostly in restaurants, but restaurants have increased sales….When low-wage workers get a wage increase they put it to good use — to improve living standards of themselves and their families.”

Reich did his own estimate of the minimum-wage proposal earlier this month, which found that instead of creating a budget deficit, it would increase federal tax revenue by $65 billion a year. This was due largely to increases in payroll taxes from higher wages and a reduction in government spending on safety net programs such as food stamps, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which are heavily used by people earning below minimum wage and living in poverty.

The problem is not that the CBO is full of crap now, it is that it is ALWAYS full of sh%$, and this is by design.

The CBO and the power that it is given by the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) through PAYGO rules is not, and has not, fulfilled its stated purpose, to give Congress accurate and timely budget projections and information.

Rather it is a place where bills that might inconvenience fat-cat donors go to die.

And the Crazy Gets the Republican Party Sanction

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So, the Republican House Caucus has refused to take actions against Marjorie Taylor Greene for posting death threats to other members of congress, AND asserting that Jewish Space Lasers™ started the California wild fires, AND asserting that the Sandy Hook Elementary and  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shootings were frauds promulgated by “crisis actors”, AND the whole pedophile lizard alien cannibal thing.

This means that the whole House will be voting to strip her of her committee assignments tomorrow.

The flip side is that the Republican Caucus did not remove Liz Cheney as their #3 for voting to impeach Trump, which I’ll call neutral because any good news for a Cheney is simply not good news ever:

House Republicans voted to keep Rep. Liz Cheney in party leadership despite her harsh criticism of former President Donald Trump, while declining to punish a Trump loyalist who made comments embracing conspiracy theories and political violence.

After a dizzying week of recriminations, both Ms. Cheney, of Wyoming, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) remained within the fold of the House GOP, highlighting Republicans’ efforts at stitching together a still-fractious party.

Facing Democrats’ demands that Mrs. Greene be stripped of her committee assignments, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) condemned her comments but declined to take further steps. With no action from Republicans, Democrats scheduled a full House vote Thursday to remove Mrs. Greene from the education and budget committees.

“Past comments from and endorsed by Marjorie Taylor Greene on school shootings, political violence, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference,” Mr. McCarthy said. He said that he stressed in a private meeting with Mrs. Greene on Tuesday night that she must now hold herself to a higher standard as an elected official. He also said that she apologized for her comments during Wednesday’s closed-door party meeting.

At that same gathering, Ms. Cheney defeated a motion from Mr. Trump’s allies to oust her as House GOP conference chairwoman in a 145-61 vote, conducted by secret ballot after hours of intense debate.

………

Mr. McCarthy’s decision to leave Mrs. Greene on committees shifts some of the political heat to Democrats, who will now try to remove her. But it also opens up Mr. McCarthy to frustration among some House Republicans that he hasn’t done more to manage the fallout over Mrs. Greene. Thursday’s vote could also put some House GOP lawmakers in a difficult spot in deciding whether to vote to protect Mrs. Greene from Democratic attempts to punish her, a stance that could be off-putting to donors and voters skeptical of both her and Mr. Trump.

To quote Napoleon, “Never stop your enemy from stepping on his own dick,” I guess.  (It’s a loose translation from the original French)

 Still, this is an unbelievable clusterf%$#.

Trump Writ Small

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I am referring, of course to Andrew “Rat-Faced Andy” Cuomo, the Governor of the great state of New York, who thinks that he is smarter than public health experts, which, among other things, has led to vaccines being thrown out because of fears of draconian fines under Cuomo’s directives:

The deputy commissioner for public health at the New York State Health Department resigned in late summer. Soon after, the director of its bureau of communicable disease control also stepped down. So did the medical director for epidemiology. Last month, the state epidemiologist said she, too, would be leaving.

The drumbeat of high-level departures in the middle of the pandemic came as morale plunged in the Health Department and senior health officials expressed alarm to one another over being sidelined and treated disrespectfully, according to five people with direct experience inside the department.

Their concern had an almost singular focus: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Even as the pandemic continues to rage and New York struggles to vaccinate a large and anxious population, Mr. Cuomo has all but declared war on his own public health bureaucracy. The departures have underscored the extent to which pandemic policy has been set by the governor, who with his aides crafted a vaccination program beset by early delays.

The troubled rollout came after Mr. Cuomo declined to use the longstanding vaccination plans that the State Department of Health had developed in recent years in coordination with local health departments. Mr. Cuomo instead adopted an approach that relied on large hospital systems to coordinate vaccinations not only of their own staffs, but also of much of the population.

I’m wondering if there are any major Cuomo donors at the “Large Hospital Systems.”

In recent weeks, the governor has repeatedly made it clear that he believed he had no choice but to seize more control over pandemic policy from state and local public health officials, who he said had no understanding of how to conduct a real-world, large-scale operation like vaccinations. After early problems, in which relatively few doses were being administered, the pace of vaccinations has picked up and New York is now roughly 20th in the nation in percentage of residents who have received at least one vaccine dose.

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference on Friday, referring to scientific expertise at all levels of government during the pandemic. “Because I don’t. Because I don’t.”

How very Trumpian.

………

In Albany, tensions worsened in recent months as state health officials said they often found out about major changes in pandemic policy only after Mr. Cuomo announced them at news conferences — and then asked them to match their health guidance to the announcements.

That was what happened with the vaccine plan, when state health officials were blindsided by the news that the rollout would be coordinated locally by hospitals.

But it also occurred earlier with revisions in a host of state rules from the fate of indoor dining and businesses like gyms to capacity limits on social gatherings, according to a person with direct experience inside the department.

………

But at least nine senior state health officials have left the department, resigned or retired in recent months. They include Dr. Elizabeth Dufort, the medical director in the division of epidemiology; Dr. Jill Taylor, the head of the renowned Wadsworth laboratory — which has been central to the state’s efforts to detect virus variants — and the executive in charge of health data, according to state records.

Additionally, the Health Department’s No. 2 official left for another job in state government, and another official, who helped oversee contact tracing, is expected to leave the department, also for another state government job.

………

Mr. Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic has come under criticism in recent days after the state attorney general, Letitia James, said his administration had undercounted the tally of Covid-19 deaths of nursing home residents by not publicly disclosing deaths of those residents that occurred at hospitals.

Given just how much of a control freak hizzoner is, this was not an accident.

This is Cuomo playing politics with the numbers, because he went to bat for his nursing home donors to get them immunity from their own malfeasance.

He knows that the horrific death numbers from New York nursing homes, if reported accurately, will be a source of criticism for any future elections.

Current and former health officials agreed to be interviewed about the crisis inside the public health bureaucracy only on condition of anonymity, saying that they feared retaliation for speaking out against the governor.

Also, he’s a vindictive son of a bitch, and managing through fear does not work.

………

The departures came as the state prepared for and then stumbled through the early weeks of its vaccine campaign, in which experts said speed was paramount because of the threat posed by more contagious variants of the coronavirus.

………

………

Mr. Cuomo said his approach had delivered results in New York, including a positivity rate that has been declining after a peak in early January and better vaccination rates. New York saw the worst of the pandemic in the spring, and roughly 43,000 have died, more than in any other state.

………

In the fall, Mr. Cuomo shelved vaccine distribution plans that top state health officials had been drawing up, one person with knowledge of the decision said. The plans had relied in part on years of preparations at the local level — an outgrowth of bioterrorism fears following Sept. 11 — and on experience dispensing vaccine through county health departments during the H1N1 pandemic in 2009.

………

But elements of the state’s approach hindered the rollout, New York City officials contended.

“Extensive red tape and unnecessary rigidity over who we could vaccinate and when — all with the looming threat of millions of dollars in punitive fines — made an extraordinarily difficult task all the more challenging in those first initial weeks of the rollout,” said Avery Cohen, a spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio.

In his own planning for the vaccine rollout, Mr. Cuomo spoke with hospital executives, outside consultants and a top hospital lobbyist in closed-door meetings. In December, Mr. Cuomo announced that the state would rely on large hospital systems as “hubs” to coordinate vaccinations, not simply for their own staff but also for ordinary New Yorkers.

Again, I gotta figure that the hospital systems are major Cuomo donors.

The state designated as a regional vaccination hub in New York City not the city’s 6,000-person Health Department, but rather the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group with a multimillion-dollar lobbying arm that had been a major donor to the governor’s causes.

Ka-ching!

The approach included narrow eligibility rules and suffered from a lack of urgency by some hospitals. That led to fewer doses being administered in the early weeks, followed by abrupt shifts in policy that created a kind of free-for-all among those searching for vaccine appointments, according to interviews with more than two dozen current and former health officials, county leaders, vaccination experts and elected officials.

“The governor’s approach in the beginning seemed to go against the grain in terms of what the philosophy was about how to do this,” said Dr. Isaac Weisfuse, a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s Health Department who often served as an incident commander during emergencies. “It did seem to negate 15 to 20 years of work.”

Sounds like the Donald, doesn’t it?

………

For help in planning the vaccination campaign, the governor turned to consultants from Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group. The in-house lobbyist for New York’s largest hospital system, Northwell Health, had direct involvement in the rollout.

For about a month, starting in mid-October, the Northwell lobbyist, Dennis Whalen, worked from an office inside the State Health Department and helped shape the state’s approach. Mr. Whalen had worked previously as the department’s No. 2 official.

Yeah, Cuomo was rat-f%$#ing the vaccine roll-out to accommodate lobbyists.  Hoocoodanode?

………

Still, Dr. Denis Nash, a professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York and a former senior city health official, said that giving such a large share of doses directly to hospitals meant that the government lost control of the pace of vaccinations during the program’s first month.

“That was the bottleneck,” Dr. Nash said. “To put hospitals in charge of a public health initiative — for which they have no public health mandate, or the skills, experience or perspective to manage one — was a huge mistake, and I have no doubt that’s what introduced the delays.”

This is Cuomo considering his donors, and his ego, before the well being of the people of New York.

I am wrong.  That does not sound like Donald Trump at all.

Not Walking the Walk

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In response to years of poor decisions by upper management, they Ohio Democratic Party is laying off most of its employees and replacing them with temps, because the new management thinks that short term MBA style thinking and abusing your employees is a good look for the Democratic Party.

This is the single stupidest thing that I’ve ever heard of a member of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) doing who was not working on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign:

More than half of the permanent staffers at the Ohio Democratic Party have been let go under the leadership of the party’s new chairman, multiple Democratic sources have confirmed.

………

Earlier this month Democrats installed a new chairman, Liz Walters, an elected official from Summit County, to replace ex-chairman David Pepper, who decided to step down after the election.

Ms. Walters promised an overhaul of the party, which has struggled in recent statewide election cycles. Both parties are now looking ahead to a newly competitive U.S. Senate race with Rob Portman’s surprise retirement announcement and a gubernatorial race in 2022.

Sam Melendez, director of the party’s Main Street Initiative, said on Twitter on Friday that he was being let go. The program he headed was started in 2015 to recruit and train local candidates.

………

The party’s data department staffers are among those also let go, sources say.

Yeah, outsourcing your IT to high priced consultants always results in lower costs and more effective services, said no one ever.

Employees were laid off with no more than a week’s notice and no severance, sources say, and the staffers being let go are expected to be replaced with independent contractors in a bid to save money.

………

“I have a bunch of information to share with stakeholders before I comment to the press,” [Liz Walters] said.

………

In 2018 the Ohio Democratic Party became the first state party to recognize a chapter of the Campaign Workers Guild, which represented seasonal campaign organizers during the 2018 midterm election who sought better pay and working conditions.

Interesting factoid at the end, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe this is about taking out the union as well.

Outsource the seasonal campaign organizers to a Washington consultancy group, and let them treat your workers like shit, because this is what the Democratic Party is all about in Ohio, I guess.

Hypocrites and morons.

Yeah, Lihop*

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So, now we know that there were specific rports from the FBI that right-wings intended to invade the Capitol on January 6.

Yet more evidence that the passivity of law enforcement in the face of a clear threat was more than just incompetence:

A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s demonstrations in support of President Trump planned to do harm.

A situational information report approved for release the day before the U.S. Capitol riot painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.

“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington, D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

………

Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free-speech rights.

We can’t do this to Wypipo.


The warning is the starkest evidence yet of the sizable intelligence failure that preceded the mayhem, which claimed the lives of five people, although one law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary action, said the failure was not one of intelligence but of acting on the intelligence.

………

The head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Steven D’Antuono, told reporters on Friday that the agency did not have intelligence suggesting the pro-Trump rally would be anything more than a lawful demonstration. During a news conference Tuesday, held after The Post’s initial publication of this report, he said the alarming Jan. 5 intelligence document was shared “with all our law enforcement partners” through the joint terrorism task force, which includes the U.S. Capitol Police, the U.S. Park Police, D.C. police, and other federal and local agencies.

………

Steven Sund, who resigned as Capitol Police chief, said in an interview Tuesday that he never received nor was made aware of the FBI’s field bulletin, insisting he and others would have taken the warning seriously had it been shared.

“I did not have that information, nor was that information taken into consideration in our security planning,” Sund said.

………

The Jan. 5 FBI report notes that the information represents the view of the FBI’s Norfolk office, is not to be shared outside law enforcement circles, that it is not “finally evaluated intelligence,” and that agencies receiving it “are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI.”

Again.  “We can’t do this to Wypipo!”

………

The document notes that one online comment advised, “if Antifa or BLM get violent, leave them dead in the street,” while another said they need “people on standby to provide supplies, including water and medical, to the front lines. The individual also discussed the need to evacuate noncombatants and wounded to medical care.”

On Jan. 6, a large, angry crowd of people who had attended a rally nearby marched to the Capitol, smashing windows and breaking doors to get inside. One woman in the mob was shot and killed by Capitol Police; officials said three others in the crowd had medical emergencies and died. A Capitol Police officer died after suffering injuries.

………

For weeks leading up to the event, FBI officials discounted any suggestion that the activities of Trump supporters upset about the scheduled certification of Biden’s election win could be a security threat on a scale with the racial-justice demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.

………

Even so, there were warning signs, though none as stark as the one from the FBI’s Norfolk office.

FBI agents had in the weeks before the Trump rally visited suspected far-right extremists, hoping to glean whether they had violent intentions, said a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the law enforcement activity. It was not immediately clear who was visited or if the FBI was specifically tracking anyone who would later be charged criminally. These visits were first reported Sunday by NBC News.

In addition, in the days leading up to the demonstrations, some Capitol Hill staffers were told by supervisors to not come in to work that day, if possible, because it seemed the danger level would be higher than many previous protests, according to a person familiar with the warning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Capitol Police did not take the kind of extra precautions, such as frozen zones and hardened barriers, that are typically used for major events near the Capitol.

Again, this looks like deliberate malfeasance.

Law enforcement departed from standard protocols in order to empower the insurrectionists.

………

The FBI recently issued a different memo saying that “armed protests” were being planned “at all 50 state capitols” and in D.C. in the run-up to the inauguration, according to an official familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter.

They knew that there was a risk of violence, and either because of interference from the Trump administration, or because senior elements of the US State Security Apparatus chose to be on the side of insurrection.

I’m more inclined to believe the latter case today than I was yesterday.

*Let It Happen On Purpose.

Good Point

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Matt Stoller makes a very good point, that the penetration of “premier” cybersecurity firm SolarWinds by hackers,* was a direct consequence of the private equity looting ethos.

They did not play close attention to security (Passwords from movies, seriously), our-sourced work into Eastern Europe, where the FSB† could recruit operatives in a day trip.

Security, you see, is not profitable, even if you are a cyber security firm:

Roughly a month ago, the premier cybersecurity firm FireEye warned authorities that it had been penetrated by Russian hackers, who made off with critical tools it used to secure the facilities of corporations and governments around the world.

The victims are the most important institutional power centers in America, from the FBI to the Department of Treasury to the Department of Commerce, as well as private sector giants Cisco Systems, Intel, Nvidia, accounting giant Deloitte, California hospitals, and thousands of others. As more information comes out about what happened, the situation looks worse and worse. Russians got access to Microsoft’s source code and into the Federal agency overseeing America’s nuclear stockpile. They may have inserted code into the American electrical grid, or acquired sensitive tax information or important technical and political secrets.

………

And that makes this hack quite scary, even if we don’t see the effect right now. Mark Warner, one of the smarter Democratic Senators and the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said “This is looking much, much worse than I first feared,” also noting “The size of it keeps expanding.” Political leaders are considering reprisals against Russia, though it’s likely they will not engage in much retaliation we can see on the surface. It’s the biggest hack since 2016, when an unidentified group stole the National Security Agency’s “crown jewels” spy tools. It is, as Wired put it, a “historic mess.”

……….

The most interesting part of the cybersecurity problem is that it isn’t purely about government capacity at all; private sector corporations maintain critical infrastructure that is in the “battle space.” Private firms like Microsoft are being heavily scrutinized; I had one guest-post from last January on why the firm doesn’t manage its security problems particularly well, and another on how it is using its market power to monopolize the cybersecurity market with subpar products. And yet these companies have no actual public obligations, or at least, nothing formal. They are for-profit entities with little liability for the choices they make that might impose costs onto others.

………

All of which brings me to what I think is the most compelling part of this story. The point of entry for this major hack was not Microsoft, but a private equity-owned IT software firm called SolarWinds. This company’s products are dominant in their niche; 425 out of the Fortune 500 use SolarWinds. As Reuters reported about the last investor call in October, the CEO told analysts that “there was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which [they] did not provide some level of monitoring or management.” While there is competition in this market, SolarWinds does have market power. IT systems are hard to migrate from, and this lock-in effect means that customers will tolerate price hikes or quality degradation rather than change providers. And it does have a large market share; as the CEO put it, “We manage everyone’s network gear.”

SolarWinds sells a network management package called Orion, and it was through Orion that the Russians invaded these systems, putting malware into updates that the company sent to clients. Now, Russian hackers are extremely sophisticated sleuths, but it didn’t take a genius to hack this company. It’s not just that criminals traded information about how to hack SolarWinds systems; one security researcher alerted the company last year that “anyone could access SolarWinds’ update server by using the password “solarwinds123.’”

Using passwords ripped form the movie Spaceballs is one thing, but it appears that lax security practice at the company was common, systemic, and longstanding. The company puts its engineering in the hands of cheaper Eastern Europe coders, where it’s easier for Russian engineers to penetrate their product development. SolarWinds didn’t bother to hire a senior official to focus on security until 2017, and then only after it was forced to do so by European regulations. Even then, SolarWinds CEO, Kevin Thompson, ignored the risk. As the New York Times noted, one security “adviser at SolarWinds, said he warned management that year that unless it took a more proactive approach to its internal security, a cybersecurity episode would be “catastrophic.” The executive in charge of security quit in frustration. Even after the hack, the company continued screwing up; SolarWinds didn’t even stop offering compromised software for several days after it was discovered.

………

And yet, not every software firm operates like SolarWinds. Most seek to make money, but few do so with such a combination of malevolence, greed, and idiocy. What makes SolarWinds different? The answer is the specific financial model that has invaded the software industry over the last fifteen years, a particularly virulent strain of recklessness typically called private equity.

………

In October, the Wall Street Journal profiled the man who owns SolarWinds, a Puerto Rican-born billionaire named Orlando Bravo of Thoma Bravo partners. Bravo’s PR game is solid; he was photographed beautifully, a slightly greying fit man with a blue shirt and off-white rugged pants in front of modern art, a giant vase and fireplace in the background of what is obviously a fantastically expensive apartment. Though it was mostly a puff piece of a silver fox billionaire, the article did describe Bravo’s business model.

………

As I put it at the time, Bravo’s business model is to buy niche software companies, combine them with competitors, offshore work, cut any cost he can, and raise prices. The investment thesis is clear: power. Software companies have immense pricing power over their customers, which means they can raise prices to locked-in customers, or degrade quality (which is the same thing in terms of the economics of the firm). As Robert Smith, one of his competitors in the software PE game, put it, “Software contracts are better than first-lien debt. You realize a company will not pay the interest payment on their first lien until after they pay their software maintenance or subscription fee. We get paid our money first. Who has the better credit? He can’t run his business without our software.”

………

Did this acquisition spree and corporate strategy work? Well that depends on your point of view; it certainly increased accounting profits. From a different perspective, however, the answer is no. Accounting profits masked that the corporate strategy was shifting risk such that the firm enabled a hack of the FBI and U.S. nuclear facilities. And from the user and employee perspective, the strategy was also problematic. It’s a little hard to tell, but if you look at software feedback comment forums, you’ll find a good number of IT pros dislike SolarWinds, seeing the firm as a financial project based on cobbling together random products from an endless set of acquisitions. (If you are at SolarWinds or another Thoma Bravo company, or use their products, send me a note on your experiences.)

………

It’s not clear to me that Bravo is liable for any of the damage that he caused, but he did make one mistake. Bravo got caught engaging in what very much looks like insider trading surrounding the hack. Here’s the Financial Times on what happened:

Private equity investors sold a $315m stake in SolarWinds to one of their own longstanding financial backers shortly before the US issued an emergency warning over a “nation-state” hack of one of the software company’s products.

The transaction reduced the exposure of Silver Lake and Thoma Bravo to the stricken software company days before its share price fell as vulnerabilities were discovered in a product that is used by multiple federal agencies and almost all Fortune 500 companies.

But the trade could prove embarrassing for Menlo Park-based Silver Lake and its rival Thoma Bravo, which rank among the biggest technology-focused private equity firms in the world.

………

In this case, however, possible insider trading really isn’t the problem. Though I hate the phrase, the real scandal isn’t what’s illegal, it’s what is legal. Bravo degraded the quality of software, which usually just means that people have to deal with stuff that doesn’t work very well, but in this case enabled a weird increase in geopolitical tensions and an espionage victory for a foreign adversary. It’s yet another example of what national security specialist Lucas Kunce notes is the mass transformation of other people’s risk into profit, all to the detriment of American society.

………

There are many ways to see this massive hack. It’s a geopolitical problem, a question of cybersecurity policy, and a legally ambiguous aggressive act by a foreign power. But in some ways it’s not that complex; the problem isn’t that Russians are good at hacking and U.S. defenses are weak, it’s that financiers in America make more money by sabotaging key infrastructure than by building it.

And they are celebrated for it. If Western nations had coherent political systems, the men responsible for this mess would be dragged in front of legislative committees and grilled over the business practices putting all of us at risk. Instead, five days ago, Pitchbook just gave out their Private Equity Awards, and named their “dealmaker of the year.”

Yes, it was Orlando Bravo.

We need to change the laws to hold these guys accountable.

As it currently stands, they borrow money, and then loot the companies, and then retreat behind the bulwark of the bankruptcy courts to avoid any responsibility for what they have done.

*According to “Knowledgeable Sources”, Russia, but no one is willing to go on the record, so YMMV.
†Again, no one is willing to go on the record as to whether this was the FSB, or the GRU, or maybe it was the fault of those damn Eskimos.‡
‡The line is from Judgement at Nuremberg. It’s a great movie. Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and a very young William Shatner. (Widmark says the line about the Eskimos.)

Daym!

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South Dakota is trying to deny a speedy trial to a number of criminal defendants arguing that the Corona Virus pandemic should allow them to get a waiver due to extraordinary circumstances.

A federal judge has called bullsh%$ on this, justifying this by the fact that, “South Dakota has done ‘little, if anything’ to curtail COVID-19.” 

Basically, the judge is saying that the government of South Dakota, at the instigation Governor Kristi “Crazy Eyes” Noem, has refused to take even the most basic measure to deal the the situation, and that defendants should not suffer as a result.

Karma is a bitch:

A federal judge says a state court can’t use the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to delay a Codington County trial and in the same breath criticized South Dakota’s response to the pandemic, saying it has done “little, if anything,” to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

U.S. District Judge Charles B. Kornmann ordered that unless the Codington County state court resolves Matthew Kurtenbach’s May 2019 case by January 15, 2021, Kurtenbach will win a federal petition he filed claiming wrongful imprisonment and a violation of his right to a speedy trial.

And in that same adjudication, filed federally in the Northern Division of the District of South Dakota and which can be read in full at the bottom of this story, Kornmann harshly criticized the state and Gov. Kristi Noem’s response to the pandemic and said some state courts could have done more to keep cases moving while protecting parties.

“South Dakota has done little, if anything, to curtail the spread of the virus,” Kornmann wrote in the Dec. 28 decision.

He later said:

“South Dakota cannot ‘take advantage’ of its own failures to follow scientific facts and safeguards in entering blanket denials of the rights of speedy trials.”

………

An excerpt from the filing:

The Governor has steadfastly refused to impose a statewide mask mandate. She has often questioned publicly the scientific fact that mask wearing prevents the virus from spreading. she appeared at a dedication ceremony for a large 3M Company in Aberdeen manufacturing plant expansion — to allow 3M to produce even more N95 respirators needed by front-line healthcare workers — as the only public official not wearing a mask. Her example significantly encourages south Dakotans to not wear masks. South Dakota is now a very dangerous place in which to live due to the spread of COVID-19. Even a casual observer must note the failure of most residents of South Dakota to wear masks and maintain social distancing.

He went on to cite a separate case, Carson v. Simon, in saying: “There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution.” 

I should not feel schadenfreude about this, but I do.

Amazon Ring Hacked to Abuse Homeowners

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Given that Amazon’s model for its Ring security cameras is its ability to collect extensive data on its users, and their neighbors.

Their plan is to monetize your data, and to share your data with law enforcement to further additional sales.

This model, where there are hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals and organizations with access to the cameras, it should come as no surprise that their system was hacked, and the hackers used their control of the network to harass people:

Dozens of people who say they were subjected to death threats, racial slurs, and blackmail after their in-home Ring smart cameras were hacked are suing the company over “horrific” invasions of privacy.

A new class action lawsuit, which combines a number of cases filed in recent years, alleges that lax security measures at Ring, which is owned by Amazon, allowed hackers to take over their devices. Ring provides home security in the form of smart cameras that are often installed on doorbells or inside people’s homes.

The suit against Ring builds on previous cases, joining together complaints filed by more than 30 people in 15 families who say their devices were hacked and used to harass them. In response to these attacks, Ring “blamed the victims, and offered inadequate responses and spurious explanations”, the suit alleges. The plaintiffs also claim the company has also failed to adequately update its security measures in the aftermath of such hacks.

………

Ring has not said who is behind the hacks, and victims say they still do not know who accessed their homes through the devices.

Repeatedly, Ring blamed victims for not using sufficiently strong passwords, the suit claims. It says Ring should have required users to establish complicated passwords when setting up the devices and implement two-factor authentication, which adds a second layer of security using a second form of identification, such as a phone number.

However, as the lawsuit alleges, Ring was hacked in 2019 – meaning the stolen credentials from that breach may have been used to get into users’ cameras. That means the hacks that Ring has allegedly blamed on customers may have been caused by Ring itself. A spokesperson said the company did not comment on ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit also cites research from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others that Ring violates user privacy by using a number of third-party trackers on its app.

My old axiom applies, “If they treat their employees like sh%$, how do you think that they will treat you as a customer?”  

Amazon is a pernicious and corrupt organization, and cannot be trusted with your privacy.

Do Not Let This Man Anywhere near to the Levers of Power

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Between grossly mismanaging the Harvard endowment, using school funds to bail out a corrupt protege, making Obama’s economic team a cesspool of sexism, his championing the repeal of Glass Steagall, and his suggestion that it might make economic sense to use African countries as toxic waste dumps, Larry Summers has a long and inglorious record. 

Now he is making the talking heads tour, claiming that a one time stimulus payment of $2,000.00 might overheat the economy.

Assuming that every single person in the United States got a check, (They won’t, it would probably be less than half that) this would be about $660 billion, or about 3% of GDP.

I do not know how Larry Summers has achieved the positions of authority and prestige that he has, but he may very well be the single most overrated person inside the Washington, DC establishment:

Liberal economist Larry Summers said Thursday sending out $2,000 stimulus checks to Americans would be a “mistake,” making him the first prominent Democratic figure to come out against more direct relief.

Larry Summers is not a liberal economist. He is a a Robert Rubin Democrat.

He has made his career out of carrying water for corrupt finance.

  • In an interview with Bloomberg, Summers argued the federal government shouldn’t focus on boosting consumer spending with direct assistance because it runs the risk of a “temporary overheat” of the economy.
  • Summers noted he’s not “enthusiastic” about $600 checks either, which both parties in Congress already agreed to, for the same reason.

    ………

  • Summers is generally seen as a left-of-center economist—but he’s previously drawn criticism from progressives for favoring policies that helped big banks as well as mismanaging stimulus negotiations during the Great Recession under Obama.

Why this guy is not treated as if he were as radioactive as bottled water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant?

He’s always wrong, he’s is toxic to his co-workers and subordinates, and he’s shown this again, and again, and again, and again.

Of Course They Did

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The Federal Reserve has allowed banks to start issuing dividends and make stock buybacks again, because, after all, how can our financial system work without the masters of capitalism that we just bailed out (AGAIN!) having their damn stock options vest.

Financial stability is secondary to making sure that Wall Street CEOs get the obscene bonuses:

The Federal Reserve has given America’s most profitable banks the green light to resume share buybacks for the first quarter of next year, even though it found that the country’s biggest lenders could face pandemic-related loan losses of more than $600bn.

The US central bank’s decision to lift a six-month ban on buybacks followed months of public protests by profitable lenders, including Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, several of whom immediately signalled their intention to restart purchases.

Many analysts and investors expected the Fed to hold firm to its restrictions, as the US continues to suffer record coronavirus cases and deaths and lawmakers struggle to agree stimulus measures to boost the economy through another round of shutdowns.

………

Lael Brainard was the only one of the Fed’s five-person board of governors to vote against freeing banks up to return more to shareholders.

“Today’s action nearly doubles the amount of capital permitted to be paid out relative to last quarter,” she said in a statement. “Prudence would call for more modest payouts to preserve lending to households and borrowers during an exceptionally challenging winter.”

Just a small reminder:  The Federal Reserve does not work for the American people, or even for the benefit of the financial system.  It works for the bankers.

We are going to buy out these rat-f%$#s again sooner rather than later.

This Is the Most Depressing Statement about Modern Journalism I Have Ever Heard

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Dean Baquet is one of the biggest threats to journalism right now, but everyone in a position to report on him wants a job from him. https://t.co/JsgUd30IlS

— Tentin Quarantino (@agraybee) December 19, 2020

Dean Banquet said the following about being taken in by a transparent fraud by a phony “Isis executioner“.

We fell in love with the fact that we had gotten a member of ISIS who would describe his life in the caliphate and would describe his crimes ……… I think we were so in love with it that when we saw evidence that maybe he was a fabulist, when we saw evidence that he was making some of it up, we didn’t listen hard enough.

In essence, Dean Banquet was quoting the Mason Williams song The Exciting Accident, which states, “This is not a true tale, but who needs truth if it’s dull.”

While this is fine for Williams, song writer, comedian, photographer, poet, and photographer to do in a song, it is not the proper attitude for the editor in chief of the what is arguably most prestigious newspaper in the United States. (Though each year that Banquet is there this status seems increasingly precarious)

The Problem with the Democratic Party Establishment (There Is No Democratic Party Establishment)

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A good post mortem of how the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) made it impossible for Sara Gideon to beat Susan Collins.

Basically, it comes down to the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) selecting an uninspiring candidate, and then flooding the zone with so much money in negative ads, mailers, etc. that Gideon still has $14 million in campaign funds left over, (over $10 unspent for every man, woman, and child in Maine) that any she might have beyond the, “Collins is a Republican,” message was obscured.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) needs to be dismantled root and branch:

Democrat Sara Gideon’s bid to unseat Sen. Susan Collins was doomed the day after she announced she was running.

Gideon, a state legislator from Freeport who was then Maine’s Speaker of the House, formally announced her candidacy on Monday, June 24, 2019. The next day, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), a powerful political organization controlled by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other top members of the party establishment, announced it was backing her campaign.

At the time, the DSCC’s endorsement was perceived as a huge boost for Gideon. It would ensure her campaign would be well funded and guided by the brightest political minds in the business.

In retrospect, it was the kiss of death — a guarantee her campaign would be ugly, uninspiring, obscenely expensive, and out of touch with local concerns. Despite spending nearly $60 million, twice as much as Collins’ campaign did, Gideon lost by over 8 percentage points, more than 70,000 votes, in a state where Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over 74,000.

………

Incessant negative advertising by outside groups helped make this race the most expensive in Maine’s history. It also made a mockery of Gideon’s oft-repeated pledge to “limit the influence of big money in politics.” Republicans were quick to call the DSCC’s endorsement proof that Gideon was a puppet of Beltway powerbrokers, and her two Democratic primary challengers were equally critical. “The DC elite is trying to tell Mainers who our candidate should be,” Betsy Sweet, one of those challengers, tweeted that summer.

But, crucially, the DSCC’s endorsement also limited the impact of Gideon’s positive messages, the campaign promises she made to improve the lives of everyday Mainers.

………

In the aftermath of Election Day, some top Democrats sought to blame progressives for the party’s poor showing in Senate and House races, but the DSCC’s record speaks for itself. Of the 18 Senate candidates endorsed by the committee, only four were victorious last month (two contenders, both in Georgia, failed to win on Nov. 3 but qualified for runoff elections next month).

As the campaign gained speed, the pandemic and the national uprising against police brutality gave Gideon two big opportunities to break from the moderate pack and distinguish herself from Collins, who denied that “systemic racism” is a “problem” in Maine, and whose Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a fraud-riddled failure. But Gideon’s position on racial justice was limited to training-manual adjustments like banning chokeholds and racial profiling, as well as further study of the problems that have plagued Black Americans since Reconstruction. Her credibility to criticize the PPP was compromised by the million or more dollars her husband’s law firm got from the program. And Republican critics took to social media daily to point out that, as far as anyone could tell, the House Speaker was doing practically nothing to help Mainers crushed by COVID-19.

While her constituents worried about keeping their jobs and homes, Gideon’s campaign bombarded them with tens of millions of dollars’ worth of ads, including pleas for them to give her money. The fundraising juggernaut engineered by her highly paid political consultants badgered Mainers for more cash till the bitter end.

………

Lisa Savage, a longtime Green Party activist and educator who ran as an independent in this ranked-choice Senate race and finished third, said a member of her team calculated how much each candidate spent per vote received. Savage spent $4.69 per vote, Collins about $65, and Gideon over $200.

………

“The model this cycle — and the model I am certain we’ll see repeated as Chuck Schumer continues on as Minority Leader — is that the party chooses a candidate they expect to bring in money, a candidate who will go along with corporate interests that fund the legions of Democratic campaign professionals that keep the machine running,” [Bre] Kidman [One of Gideon’s primary opponents] continued. “Mainers could smell the disingenuousness a mile away and, frankly, I don’t think the top-dollar, out-of-state consultants who worked on the campaign did anything at all to mask it.”

Gideon “didn’t have a single Maine person on her [communications] team,” said Savage. “Not one. They just don’t understand Maine.”

A review of the Gideon campaign’s finance filings reveals page after page of big payments to out-of-state consulting firms and media companies. DSCC executive director Mindy Myers personally received over $100,000 from Gideon’s campaign for consulting services. Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic ad agency that also worked for Biden this year, was paid over $8 million. Aisle 518 Strategies, a D.C. digital fundraising outfit, raked in over $6 million.

This is not political consulting, this is looting.


………

A key race for a Maine Senate seat this year illustrates how Gideon’s result may have been different had she run a less toxic and more responsive campaign. Democrat Chloe Maxmin, a progressive state lawmaker from the midcoast town of Nobleboro, challenged Republican Dana Dow, then the Minority Leader of the Maine Senate, and won. Maxmin ran a “100% positive” campaign “grounded in community values, not Party or ideology,” her website declared.

Maxmin and her local team created all their ads and adjusted content based on voter feedback. They knocked on over 13,000 doors in her rural, Republican-leaning district. The voters they encountered had no interest in the type of who-took-money-from-who sniping that characterized the U.S. Senate race. “The things I hear from people are, ‘We want good jobs here, we want to live in a rural place and make a good living,’” Maxmin said. “‘We want to know our children will have the same opportunity.’”

The goal of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is not to win elections, it is to profit from Democratic Party campaigns.

They are parasites.

We Are Doomed

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Just interviewed the head of a major progressive group who said that the Biden transition team reached out after the Tanden nomination to say “aren’t you happy, we met your demands, we brought in a movement leader”

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) December 1, 2020

Biden-world isn’t being cynical with this pick, they actually believe that they are throwing a bone to progressives because they imagine progressives like Neera Tanden. Team Biden really thinks they are picking lots of progressives. https://t.co/5OgJvuJFKe

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) November 30, 2020

It appears that senior staff in the Biden campaign have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie, because they think that picking Neera Tanden is a favor to liberals.

This actually explains a lot.  

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), now largely alumni of the Obama administration, honestly believe that your life story is your politics, which explains why they pushed the hapless Amy McGrath so hard. 

McGrath was literally the worst political campaigner that I have ever seen in my life

Neera Tanden is not, and has never been a progressive, she’s been a party apparatchik, and the thoroughly despised overseer of a Podesta brothers’ lobbying shop that masqueraded as a think tank.


This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth. Perhaps we should shoot him.*

Biden and his Evil Minions™ are going to lead the Democratic Party into an electoral catastrophe that will make 2010 look like Johnson in 1964.

Midterms are base elections, and they think that kicking the base in the nuts is doing said base a favor.

*What, you’ve never seen Ruthless People? Great movie.

Oh God No

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I don’t know who, except for Rahm Emanuel, would even consider giving the disgraced ex-mayor of Chicago a position in the Biden Cabinet, but it appears that he is under consideration:

When former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s name quickly surfaced as a possible transportation secretary in a Joe Biden administration, it came as little surprise to those in the political-media ecosystem.

If the longtime Beltway insider didn’t float his own name for a Cabinet spot, he has plenty of friends up to the task. Soon to turn 61 and out of power since abruptly pulling the plug on a bid for a third mayoral term 26 months ago, the TV pundit, investment banker and informal Biden adviser could be looking for a fourth act on the national stage in his third White House.

But it was a trial balloon those on the other side of the centrist-leftist Democratic divide quickly sought to pierce.

Leading the charge was progressive U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. After telling The New York Times that Emanuel would be “a pretty divisive pick” and signal “a hostile approach to the grassroots and the progressive wing of the party,” Ocasio-Cortez responded to a tweet on the subject by WTTW’s Heather Cherone with this: “We must govern with integrity and accountability. Laquan McDonald’s life mattered.”

………

His policy chops and experience in the White House, in Congress and working on transit projects as mayor make him a strong choice to join presumptive President-elect Joe Biden’s team. But Emanuel is lambasted by some Democrats for his reputation as a pro-Wall Street, anti-teachers union centrist, and especially for his handling of the 17-year-old Black teen’s shooting death by a white police officer who went to prison for it.

His second term was dogged by allegations he sought to keep the now-infamous police dashcam video of the incident from coming out until after he won reelection in 2015.

The city Law Department quickly reached a $5 million settlement in April 2015 with the McDonald family in their lawsuit about the shooting, shortly after Emanuel defeated Jesús “Chuy” García in a mayoral runoff election. The Emanuel administration fought against releasing the video until a Cook County judge ordered it in November 2015.

People will refer to his success as DCCC chair during the 2006 election, but many, if not most of the seats that were picked up resulted from Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy, and not his DCCC supported candidates who underperformed.

This man is a toxic and corrupt self-promoter.  Do not allow him anywhere near the halls of power.

I Cannot Believe that I am Citing a Wall Street Journal Editorial Page

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But given that it’s clearly a part of an effort by their editorial page to foment conflict within the Democratic Party, it’s not a surprise.

That being said, progressive icon Cenk Uygur take on the Democratic party, that the current Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is incompetent and useless, is (IMNSHO) completely correct.

Schumer, Pelosi, and the rest of them are about as useful as tits on a bull:

Will there ever be accountability for Democrats? The establishment wing of the party blew one election to Donald Trump and came to the precipice of blowing another. Were there any lessons learned from 2016? Nope. Same guys, same mistakes. The band marches on.

Start with Chuck Schumer in the Senate. With more coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world and a buffoonish Republican president, he couldn’t find a way to pick up three seats. That means Republicans can block any progressive legislation. Will Mr. Schumer face accountability? Of course not.

Nancy Pelosi lost seats in the House when every Democrat in the country thinks we have the worst president in history. There’s got to be some accountability for that, right? Nope. Not a chance. There is no more revered person in Washington than Mrs. Pelosi. The rest of the country sees her as a feckless elitist, but Washington sees her as a master legislator. She’s passed one major piece of legislation in her career: a health-care law whose central provision was conceived by the Heritage Foundation.

This is the same Democratic leadership that lost almost 1,000 state legislative seats nationwide to Republicans during the Obama era. That’s a large village in Kazakhstan. Was there any accountability after those failures? Nope. Still the same folks in charge.

………

The national media has seen all of this unfold but rarely commented on it. There was no reckoning after Hillary Clinton’s historic loss. It was blamed on James Comey, the Russians, the Bernie Bros., the weather, the dog that ate our votes. A question for the Democrats: Did you ever consider that maybe, just maybe, it was actually you? But the media didn’t ask. They’re all in the same establishment together. Criticizing the corporate wing of the Democratic Party would feel like criticizing themselves.

………

Will it happen now? Very unlikely. The members of this establishment all know and like each other. Most important, they have the same interest in protecting the status quo, which has empowered and enriched them. That’s why they’ll continue to pretend there is no problem and that the Democratic Party was always supposed to serve corporate donors and lose easy elections.

My name is Matthew Saroff, and I endorse this message.

Corrupt Idiots, Not Trump Edition

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I did not realize that the Democrats spent more on the hopelessly run McGrath campaign than they did in an attempt to take back state houses, which control redistricting.

Giving your money to the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is less effective at getting Democrats elected than giving to the Libertarian party, which is the margin in a few states in the Presidential election.

If the DNC, DCCC, or DSCC call you asking for donations, calmly explain to them that you have decided to hit yourself over the head with a rubber mallet while setting your money on fire, because that is a far more pleasant and far more effective way of supporting the Democratic Party.

This is not incompetence though, this looting.

It’s not incompetence, it’s looting.

The Democratic Party establishment’s (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has a revolving door between party staff and political consultants, and those consultants make more money losing expensive than they do winning cheap.  (They get a cut of the media buy)

We need to break the hold of the consultants on the party machinery, because the foxes are running the henhouse.

What a Dump F%$#ing Mook

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Ironically, this is also the name of serial malpractice political consultant Robbie Mook.

In 2016, he ran Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and lost to an inverted traffic cone, and now:

The Democratic Super PAC in charge of House races is going to face serious questions about how it lost seats when projected to pick them up.

House Majority PAC’s president is Robby Mook.

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 5, 2020

So the guy who lost by neglecting the ground game and local reports in 2016, lost in 2020 by doing the same thing.

Why does this motherf%$#er have a job? 

Seriously, when it comes to failing up, Dick Cheney looks at Robby Mook, and thinks:

This is a Metaphor for Something………

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In North Dakota, the uncool Dakota, a dead man won a seat in the state house.

Honestly, if there is a better metaphor for the incompetent Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), I have not seen it:

David Andahl died of covid-19 in early October, just as the coronavirus was pummeling his home state of North Dakota. But that did not keep the 55-year-old rancher from winning his race for the state House of Representatives on Tuesday.

With an apparent victory in North Dakota’s 8th District, Andahl’s election marks an unusual overlap between two of the most consequential events in the United States this year: a pandemic that has killed at least 232,000 people in the United States and the unprecedented election season it upended in the process.

………

A cattle rancher and land developer, Andahl had spent 16 years serving on the zoning and planning commission in Burleigh County, including eight years as its chair, according to the Bismarck Tribune. Earlier this year, he won a heated GOP primary against longtime state Rep. Jeff Delzer, who chaired the chamber’s powerful Appropriations Committee.

………

When the coronavirus reached North Dakota, Andahl — who was already grappling with several health issues — was “very cautious,” his family wrote on Facebook. They did not elaborate on what medical challenges he was facing.

As the largely rural state saw a sharp increase in coronavirus cases this fall — at one point leading the country in the number of new cases per capita — Andahl contracted the potentially deadly virus. After four days in the hospital, he died Oct. 5.

The Democratic Party lost to a dead man, and right now, it’s still not settled in the Presidential campaign when they are running against a man whose brain serves only as a launch pad for his hair. 

The current Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) is incredibly, and ineluctably, incompetent.

We cold fire them all and replace them with drinking bird toys, and get better results.

The Bobbsey Twins Are At It Again

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Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have veen indicted in yet another state for their program of threatening voter suppression robocalls.

Seeing as how they have shown themselves to be undeterred from their lives of crime by the prior indictments, I think that pre-trial detention without bail is called for:

A grand jury in Cleveland on Tuesday indicted right-wing political hoaxers Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman with felony charges connected to a multi-state robocall campaign that prosecutors say was meant to scare voters in urban areas with large minority populations out of voting by mail in the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Wohl, 22, of Irvine, California, and Burman, 54, of Arlington, Virginia, are indicted on eight counts of telecommunications fraud and seven counts of bribery in connection with more than 8,000 calls that were placed to residents of Cleveland and East Cleveland.

Wohl and Burkman already face similar criminal charges in Michigan and a civil lawsuit in New York City connected to the same scheme. They are free on a $100,000 bond after pleading not guilty to charges in that state.

Cuyahoga County court records say Wohl and Burkman are expected to make their first court appearance on Nov. 13.

The charges stem from a group called Project 1599, which Wohl and Burkman founded. The caller told potential voters that police and debt-collection companies could use personal information that voters put on their mail-in ballots to track down people who have outstanding warrants and credit-card debt. The claim is not true.

………

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office was the first to file charges against the duo. Ohio’s investigation began when U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge, a Cleveland Democrat, and others went to Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost’s office, which referred the case to prosecutors in Cuyahoga County, the Columbus Dispatch reporter earlier this month.

………

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose referenced the indictments Tuesday afternoon during an appearance on Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s twice-weekly coronavirus address. DeWine invited LaRose on to discuss voter turnout and concerns about in-person voting.

LaRose said that his office received a tip through its voter-fraud website of “an incident of voter intimidation that was targeted particularly at the minority community,” which he called a “really ugly and pernicious act of voter intimidation.”

………

Wohl and Burkman have risen to notoriety in recent years as they blundered their way through a series of public announcements of scandals later discredited.

Wohl earlier this year began circulating what he said was a copy of a lab report showing that Biden had contracted COVID-19 and had 30 days to live. Biden and his campaign dismissed the report as fraudulent.

The pair is also accused of hiring one of Wohl’s ex-girlfriends to publicly accuse Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is more popular and seen as more trustworthy on information about the pandemic than Trump, of assaulting her in a hotel in 2014. The woman later told a reporter that the accusation was false and that Wohl and Burkman paid her to levy it.

How do folks like this, and I am including the evil James O’Keefe (I know a good James O’Keef) stay out of jail.

If they weren’t white ……… Oh, now I get it.

All the News That’s Fit to Print, Huh?

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It seems to be a routine thing. Some New York Times reporter goes on safari and conduct man on the street interviews, and many of these so-called “Ordinary Folk” are actually Republican operatives.

This happens over, and over, and over again.

This is not accidental.  This is baked into the culture: 

The New York Times has been caught, once again, passing off Republican operatives as “regular” Republican voters in an article intended to show how effectively Trump is maintaining his support.

It raises serious questions about whether Times editor and reporters, rather than actually trying to determine how voters feel, are setting out to find people to mouth the words they need for predetermined story lines that, not coincidentally, echo the Trump campaign’s propaganda.

In the latest case, an article posted on Wednesday headlined “Around Atlanta, Many White Suburbanites Are Sticking With Trump” by Times national reporter Elaina Plott initially misidentified two of the four allegedly run-of-the-mill voters who supported the article’s thesis: That Trump’s unfounded fear-mongering along the lines that “ANTIFA THUGS WILL RUIN THE SUBURBS!” is working.

The lead anecdote came courtesy of Natalie Pontius, who was simply identified as “an interior decorator, married with two children and a University of Georgia alumna.”

………

Pontius, it turns out, was a paid political consultant for a Republican candidate for Georgia’s House of Representatives in 2018.

Plott also quoted Jake Evans, initially identified simply as “an attorney in Atlanta.”

………

Evans, it turns out, chairs the state’s branch of the Republican National Lawyers Association, is the immediate past president of the Atlanta Young Republicans, is a member of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s election-security task force — and he’s the son of Randy Evans, a Republican heavy-hitter rewarded by Trump with a cushy gig as ambassador to Luxembourg.

And this isn’t the first Times story like this to feature ringers. In a notorious June 2018 story by political reporter Jeremy Peters – headlined “As Critics Assail Trump, His Supporters Dig In Deeper,” the supposedly ordinary Republican woman in the lead anecdote turned out to be a board member of an ultra-conservative PAC.

………

Because the fact that the reporter couldn’t find real people to support its thesis suggests that she was assigned to produce precisely the story she did. (So does the URL, which I suspect reflects the editor’s original “slug” for the story: “atlanta-trump-voters-women.”)

………

This, I’m afraid, is Dean Baquet’s newsroom in a nutshell, where the anachronistic notion of “objectivity” is horribly misapplied to produce both-sides stenography instead of calling out liars and racists.

………

Going forward, readers deserve to know exactly how the reporters found their way to the “average” people they quote, to judge for themselves how typical or atypical they may be. How many people did the reporters talk to before they found the person they needed for their story? What questions did they ask?

And finally, I need to bring up a point I’ve made repeatedly before: Simply quoting Trump supporters who mouth crazy talking points (whether they’re ringers or not) is a terrible disservice to the reader.

………

The hero in this story is Charles Bethea, a New Yorker staff writer — and Twitter.

Bethea quickly recognized Jake Evans:

Here’s my 2018 mini-profile of Jake Evans, who is very much not a man-on-the-street. (Side note: Evans told me he was 31 years old in January of 2018, and NYT says he’s still 31 years old today. Not sure how that works.) https://t.co/jdfm4xmWdG

— Charles.Bethea (@charlesbethea) October 21, 2020

That’s because Bethea had actually written a short profile of Evans for the New Yorker in 2018, when Evans was president of the Atlanta Young Republicans.

Eventually, after sleuthing by Zach Kopplin, an investigator for the Government Accountability Project, and Georgia attorney Eric Teusink, Bethea also announced:

Wow: Natalie Pontius was a paid political consultant for a Republican candidate for GA House of Reps in 2018.
Yet she remains in the shortened but still misleading @nytimes story about voting in GA, described only as “an interior decorator” & UGA alumna. https://t.co/aBYhvmgJ0G https://t.co/c5UbZS8L4y pic.twitter.com/0leSKTCUeI

— Charles.Bethea (@charlesbethea) October 23, 2020

Seriously, there is something very toxic in the New York Times newsroom, and while Dean Baquet makes the problem worse, as an institution, it has rot at its bones.

The “Gray Lady” keeps screwing up these stories because senior editors send reporters into the field with the mission to serve predetermined narrative, and reporters know that.