Tag: Incompetence

Support Your Local Police

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The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is a real cesspool.

Case in point, for the second time in the past few months, the first time in Compton, and now, we have another criminal gang of cops in East LA: 

Los Angeles County’s top watchdog says in a report released Monday that substantial evidence exists that a secretive group of tattooed deputies at the East L.A. sheriff’s station are “gang-like and their influence has resulted in favoritism, sexism, racism and violence.”

In the 32-page report probing activities of the Banditos clique, Inspector General Max Huntsman says Sheriff Alex Villanueva “continues to promote a code of silence regarding these sub-groups” which have plagued the agency for decades.

………

“Minimal questions were asked about the Banditos and in the interviews during which the witnesses brought up the Banditos by name, very few follow-up questions were asked,” the report says, adding that 23 witnesses declined to give interviews. The report also criticized the failure of prosecutors to scrutinize the Banditos in their review of the case.

………

Some of the employees who received disciplinary letters were the alleged assault victims, who faced punishment for actions that included failing to report the Kennedy Hall incident to their superiors, their attorney Vincent Miller said. He said they reported the incident right away to a lieutenant they trusted. The Times has reported that only three deputies of the 26 employees were facing termination.

“This announcement of an exaggerated number of 26 Banditos being disciplined is consistent with past false statements that have been made by you and your office about your handling of the deputy gang problem,” Miller wrote to Villanueva last month in a letter obtained by The Times.

The administrative investigation conducted by the Sheriff’s Department found that some employees at the station were acting as so-called shot callers, controlling scheduling and events at the station, Cmdr. April Tardy has said, using a term often used to describe top leaders in prisons and gangs.

These cops are gang bangers.

This is why people talk about abolishing the police.

Boy, This is Turning into a Sh%$ Show

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First, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale creates the most convincing shirtless suspect audition tape for an episode of Cops ever, and now serial securities fraudster Jacob Wohl, and his partner in crime Jack Burkman, have been charged with election fraud and face the prospect of decades in prison.

The wheels really do seem to be coming off of Trump’s Evil Minions™ right now:

Conservative operatives Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were charged on Thursday for allegedly orchestrating a series of robocalls aimed at suppressing the vote in the November presidential election, Michigan authorities said.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed a slew of charges against Burkman, 54, and Wohl, 22, including conspiracy to commit an election law violation and using a computer to commit the crime of election law – intimidating voters. Prosecutors allege the two political operatives were using a robocall system aimed at scaring Detroit voters away from using mail-in voting ballots. The calls, which were made in August, went out to nearly 12,000 Detroit residents.

Both Wohl and Burkman face four felony counts and a maximum sentence of 7 years in prison.

The voice on the call attributed to Wohl and Burkman attempts to trick listeners into not sending in mail-in ballots, falsely warning that the information would be used to track fugitives, collect on credit card debts, and enforce “mandatory vaccines.” The calls also told residents to “beware of vote by mail.”

………

Wohl and Burkman didn’t respond to immediate requests for comment. In August, Burkman denied being behind the robocall, claiming it was suspicious that it was connected to his personal cell phone number.

“No one in their right mind would put their own cell on a robocall,” Burkman told The Daily Beast.

Ummmm ………We’ve seen your other frauds and scams (also here, here, and here) 

You areally ARE that f%$#ing stupid.

………

The attorney general’s office added that during the investigation into the robocalls, investigators communicated with officials in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois—all of whom reported similar robocalls being made to residents in their states. All the calls, they said, were made to residents in “urban areas with significant minority populations,” the Michigan attorney general’s office said.

………

The Michigan charges aren’t the only legal charges facing the pair. Wohl has been charged with two felonies over alleged violations of California securities law. On Saturday, The Daily Beast reported on a secret FBI investigation into Wohl and Burkman over the leak of confidential juror questionnaires and grand jury testimony in the trial of Trump associate Roger Stone.

Wohl and Burkman became notorious online in 2018, after a failed attempt to manufacture a sexual assault allegation against Robert Mueller collapsed in spectacular fashion. Since then, they have tried to create hoaxes against other Trump opponents, but the schemes always fail almost immediately, often due to Wohl and Burkman’s own errors.

Seriously, these folks are flipping out. 

My deepest wish is that the inevitable shrapnel that results from their flying to pieces so spectacularly only injures their fellow travelers.

The Studios Get the Goose to the Chopping Block

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Pirating films and music was very much a thing from the late 1990s through the middle of the teens.

It has largely died down because paid streaming services delivered a better product at a reasonable price.

However, the media conglomerates have been creating their own streaming services and making their content exclusive in order to get the entire revenue stream.

So, now instead of Netflix and Hule with a large overlap of content and each costing less than a double sawbuck, you now have something north of dozen services, each charging at least $20/month and having narrow catalogues.

It makes everything a major pain in the ass.

Case in point, the Harry Potter films:

The rise of streaming video competitors is indisputably a good thing. Numerous new streaming alternatives have driven competition to an antiquated cable TV sector that has long been plagued by apathy, high rates, and comically-bad customer service. That’s long overdue and a positive thing overall, as streaming customer satisfaction scores suggest.

But as the sector matures, there’s a looming problem it seems oblivious to.

Increasingly, companies are pulling their content off central repositories like Hulu and Netflix, and making them exclusive to their own streaming platforms, forcing consumers to subscribe to more and more streaming services if they want to get all the content they’re looking for.

Want to watch Star Trek: Discovery, you need CBS All Access. Can’t miss Stranger Things? You’ll need Netflix. The Boys? Amazon Prime. The Handmaid’s Tale? Hulu. Friends? AT&T. This week it was Comcast’s turn in announcing that the Harry Potter films would now be exclusive to Comcast’s new streaming service, Peacock. Of course it’s not as simple as all that. The titles will appear and disappear for the next few years, being free for a while… then shifting to a pay per view model for a while:

………

No, AT&T and Comcast probably aren’t going to “share” the Harry Potter films, meaning that to watch them you need to embrace the Comcast ecosystem. And while superficially you can easily understand why companies would want to lock down massive droves of exclusive content to drive subscriptions as the streaming wars heat up, there’s a certain myopia going on in terms of the impact. There doesn’t seem to be much of an awareness of that while competition is certainly good, having too many cordoned off exclusivity silos and too many content licenses shifting under the feet of consumers could generate confusion and drive more people to the simplicity of piracy.

So The Office is leaving Netflix in 2021 to go to an NBC streaming service…. pic.twitter.com/TdVgxfvsgk

— Jamie (@Jamie_2455) June 26, 2019


In fact, there’s some early anecdotal evidence this is already happening, and a few studies predicting it will get worse as every broadcaster and their moms jump into the streaming space. A 2019 Deloitte study found that nearly half (47 percent) of US consumers already suffer from “subscription fatigue,” and 56 percent were frustrated by quickly changing licensing deals.

The studios are painting targets on their shoes, and taking careful aim.

In just one example, the cost of YouTube TV has gone from $35 to $65 a month over the past few years.

This is not a good customer experience.

Powerful Bank CEOs Lead to Money Laundering

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A study shows that the more unchecked authority that bank CEOs have, the more likely that the banks will be involved in money laundering and other criminality.

Obviously, correlation does not prove causation, but ultra-powerful CEOs tend to be indistinguishable from sociopaths, so criminality logically follows their imperative to hit “the numbers”.

We have seen again and again how rock-star CEOs lead to unbalanced people running companies for their own personal benefit and twisted egos:

Banks with powerful CEO’s and smaller, less independent, boards are more likely to take risks and be susceptible to money laundering, according to new research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The study tested for a link between bank risk and enforcements issued by US regulators for money laundering in a sample of 960 publicly listed US banks during the period 2004-2015.

The results, published in the International Journal of Finance and Economics, show that money laundering enforcements are associated with an increase in bank risk on several measures of risk. In addition, the impact of money laundering is heightened by the presence of powerful CEOs and only partly mitigated by large and independent executive boards.

It’s not just banks that need to abolish the Cult of the CEO.

Stupid and an Asshole to His Staff

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PLAYBOOK PM: After we reported that @replouiegohmert was positive, we got an email from a Gohmert aide. pic.twitter.com/x31CSOdkLf

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 29, 2020

The big news is that Louie Gohmert has tested positive for Covid-19, and the distinguished gentleman with nothing between his ears but a shock absorber is blaming the few times he wore a mask for catching the disease.

This guy is stupid. Really stupid. Really, really, really, really stupid.

That’s not what matters in Congress.

Hubert Humphrey was generally considered to be one of the smartest men, if not the smartest man, in the Senate during his tenure there, and he was also known to be hamstrung by low quality staff.

In comparison, Teddy Kennedy was known for his ability to recruit and sustain an absolutely first rate staff, and arguably got a lot more done, despite generally not being considered a particularly noteworthy intellect.*

A significant portion of Louie Gohmert’s staff HATE him.

If they didn’t, you would not see leaks like this.

If his staff views him with this level of hostility, he cannot deliver, either on the national level, or in his district.

While this does not make him vulnerable to a Democratic Party challenge in the general election, TX-1 has a PV of R+25, it does mean that an enterprising Republican could successfully challenge him in the primary.

H/t Atrios.

*My father mentioned this in his recollections of discussions with Alaska Senator Ernest Greuning now and again.

Oh, Snap!

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It looks like Donald Trump won’t get his massive convention in Jacksonville.

The event has been cancelled, which means that the convention will be conducted in a far more sparsely attended manner in ……… I dunno ……… Maybe back to Charlotte, NC?

In a stunning reversal, President Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that he was canceling the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville next month, abruptly calling off an event he’d pushed only weeks earlier to relocate from North Carolina to his home state.

Trump announced the decision during a White House news conference, saying “the timing of the event is not right” amid the surging coronavirus outbreak in Florida, where earlier in the day officials announced a state record of 173 COVID-19 deaths.

“I told my team it’s time to cancel the Jacksonville, Florida, component of the GOP convention,” Trump said, adding that his campaign would still hold “tele-rallies” and online events. “I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form, but we won’t do a big crowded convention per se. It’s just not the right time for that.”

Trump’s announcement — which caught some of his closest allies off guard after he pushed the event out of Charlotte, N.C., in the hope that he could give his nomination acceptance speech in a packed arena in Florida — signals a shift in position on the novel coronavirus pandemic, which he’d attempted to write off for months as a minimal threat.

The decision also avoids a potentially embarrassing clash with Jacksonville city and law enforcement officials, who warned early this week that attempts to gather thousands of law enforcement officers to police the event had fallen short. A workshop with the city council was scheduled Friday to go over make-or-break legislation that some council members had said they might not support.

“We appreciate President Donald Trump considering our public health and safety concerns in making this incredibly difficult decision,” Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams and Mayor Lenny Curry said in a joint statement.

This is a complete cluster-f%$#, which I find intensely amusing.

Major props to Atrios for calling it, “Trumpstock.”

I wish that I came come up with that.

This Happened to Me

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When I was 19, I was feeling out of it, and had extremely swollen lymph-nodes.

I went to my college health services, and they said that it was nothing to worry about, it was just allergies. (It was fairly classic mononucleosis symptoms, which is one thing that college health services should catch, but they didn’t)

8 months later, and my pre-employment physical, ironically at a hospital working with blood samples, they detected that my eosinophil count was through the roof, and after a number of tests, they determined that I had hepatitis.

I was in treatment for about 3 years afterwards, first with steroids, and then immune suppressants. (My liver numbers have been good for about 35 years)

If they hadn’t caught it, I would probably been in liver failure in a decade, because I was otherwise asymptomatic. (Well, I did lose some weight, see this picture from my employee ID at New England Medical Center)


My Best Picture Ever

Well, now the Washington Post has taken a look at college health centers, and found a profoundly troubling standard of care:

After days of sharp pain shooting up her left abdomen, Rose Wong hobbled from her history class to the student health center at Duke University.

A nurse pressed on the 20-year-old’s belly and told her it felt like gas. Wong questioned the diagnosis but said the nurse dismissed her doubts and sent her to the campus pharmacy to pick up Gas-X that afternoon in February 2019.

The next morning, Wong doubled over in pain, and a roommate drove her to a nearby emergency room in Durham, N.C. In the hospital, doctors discovered her condition was far more serious: Her left kidney had a massive hemorrhage. The bleeding, she later learned, was caused by a cancerous tumor that required surgery and chemotherapy and forced her to miss an entire school year.

Wong said she worries that when she returns to the Duke campus next month, the university and its medical clinic will be incapable of keeping her and 15,500 other Duke students healthy and safe in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

Except for the severity of the actual condition, this exactly mirrors my experience.

………

Wong’s misdiagnosis at Duke is among the scores of problems documented by The Washington Post at college health centers nationwide. As millions go back to school during the pandemic, the ability of campus health services to safeguard and care for students will be tested as never before — and many colleges appear unprepared for the challenge.

To assess the landscape of student health services at roughly 1,700 four-year residential campuses, The Post interviewed more than 200 students, parents and health officials and examined thousands of pages of medical records and court documents and 5,500 reviews of student health centers posted on Google.

College students reported they commonly waited days or weeks for appointments and were routinely provided lackluster care. Dozens of students ended up hospitalized — and some near death — for mistakes they said were made at on-campus clinics, including misdiagnosed cases of appendicitis at Kansas State University and meningitis at the University of Arkansas.

………

Student health centers are akin to the Wild West of medical care. There are no national regulations, and most are not licensed by states. Only about 220 campus medical clinics of the thousands nationwide are accredited by outside health organizations as meeting best practices, according to a Post analysis. In one case, Georgetown University stated on its website that its student health center was accredited but removed the claim after being asked about it by reporters.

Georgetown lied about the accreditation of its health services?

Georgetown?

University leaders are publicly lobbying for federal protections from coronavirus-related lawsuits when they reopen, arguing that costly litigation would take away from already scarce resources needed to support students.

College health officials, meanwhile, are privately discussing insufficient stockpiles of personal protective equipment, inadequate access to coronavirus testing on campus and a short supply of rooms to quarantine students, according to interviews, emails and presentations reviewed by The Post.

………

In an email last year, the chief executive of the American College Health Association cautioned members about sharing information with The Post and referenced its reporting about a viral outbreak at the University of Maryland. The association later said the message was sent to inform colleges and took no position on whether universities should comply with the requests.

This is what comes from running colleges like business, and hiring legions of overpaid management types to run them.

Supreme Court Calls Trump Administration a Blithering Idiot

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The Supreme Court has ruled against the Trump administration’s attempt to repeal DACA.

The ruling was not on constitutional grounds, it was essentially a statement that the way that they had repealed DACA was so incompetently done as to be invalid.

Oh, Lord, thank you for making the evil so inept:

It has been eight years since the Obama administration created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which allows undocumented young adults who came to the United States as children to apply for protection from deportation. In 2017, the Trump administration announced that it would end the program, which it believed had been illegal in the first place. Today, by a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration acted improperly in terminating the program, and it sent the case back for the Department of Homeland Security to take another look. The ruling means that the DACA program will remain in place, at least for the foreseeable future.

………


The battle over DACA came to the Supreme Court in November 2018, when the Trump administration asked the justices to take up three different challenges, filed in California, the District of Columbia and New York, to the decision to end DACA. The challengers – which include states, cities, universities, DACA recipients, civil rights groups and even Microsoft – argued that the decision to rescind DACA violated the rights of DACA recipients and the Administrative Procedure Act, the federal law governing administrative agencies. In all three cases, the lower courts ruled for the challengers and ordered the government to keep DACA in place. At the end of June 2019, the Supreme Court announced that it would review the three cases.

………

Roberts then turned to the central question in the case: whether the Trump administration followed proper procedures in terminating DACA. Under the APA, Roberts stressed, courts should not substitute their own judgment for that of the agency. Instead, he explained, their job is to determine whether an agency made its decision “based on a consideration of the relevant factors and whether there has been a clear error of judgment.” In the majority’s view, the Trump administration had failed to meet even this relatively low bar.

“Even this relatively low bar.” 

Indeed.

This Exceeds my Capacity for Mockery

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Movie intercuts are not a part of the newscast

Fox News was reporting on the Seattle Capitol Hill occupation, and unironically reported dialogue taken from Monty Python and the Holy Grail as evidence of growing tension within the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.”

Does the phrase, “We’re an Anarcho-Syndaclyst Commune,” sound familiar?

Seriously?

I am left staring at the screen like a cow that has just stepped on its own udder.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

D’Oh!!!!!!

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The Republican Party decided that they did not need to update their party platform from what they had in 2016, so it includes a condemnation of the current President.

Old habits die hard, I guess.

Oops:

When Republicans read the platform their party is using for the 2020 campaign, they may be surprised to see that it is full of condemnations of the sitting president.

“The survival of the internet as we know it is at risk,” the platform reads. “Its gravest peril originates in the White House, the current occupant of which has launched a campaign, both at home and internationally, to subjugate it to agents of government.”

The warning about speech online is one of more than three dozen unflattering references to either the “current president,” “current chief executive,” “current administration,” people “currently in control” of policy, or the “current occupant” of the White House that appear in the Republican platform. Adopted at the party’s 2016 convention, it has been carried over through 2024 after the executive committee of the Republican National Committee on Wednesday chose not to adopt a new platform for 2020.

The platform censures the “current” president — who in 2016 was, of course, Barack Obama — and his administration for, among other things, imposing “a social and cultural revolution,” causing a “huge increase in the national debt” and damaging relationships with international partners.

Live by the Troll, Die by the Troll

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Following the backlash soliciting and publishing an opinion piece from Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) where he called for the use of the active military to use lethal force against protesters, James Bennet has been fired as Opinion Editor.

They claim that this is a “resignation” but make no mistake, it was a firing.

Bennet thought that his role as editor was to publish cartoonish trolls for click-throughs, typified by his hiring of Bret “Bedbug” Stephens and Bari “Shanda fur die Goyim” Weiss.

He finally went a troll too far:

James Bennet resigned on Sunday from his job as the editorial page editor of The New York Times, days after the newspaper’s opinion section, which he oversaw, published a much-criticized Op-Ed by a United States senator calling for a military response to civic unrest in American cities.

“Last week we saw a significant breakdown in our editing processes, not the first we’ve experienced in recent years,” said A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher, in a note to the staff on Sunday announcing Mr. Bennet’s departure.

In a brief interview, Mr. Sulzberger added: “Both of us concluded that James would not be able to lead the team through the next leg of change that is required.”

This is not what one calls a conciliatory statement.  Sulzberger basically called him out as incompetent when explaining why he was fired.

Ouch.

Here’s hoping that Stephens and Weiss head out the door as well, particularly the former, as Stephens has made it a practice to harry and intimidate anyone who criticizes him.  (Bedbug story here.)

This entire affair does appear to imply that the New York Times is a tremendously toxic place to work.

The New York Times has Turned Into a Complete Sh%$ Show

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The New York Times published an OP/ED by Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) that called for the activity military to come in to put down the anti-police brutality protests with guns blazing.

Needless to say, the Times staffers, prticularly those of color,  have completely lost their sh%$ over this, stating (correctly IMHO) that this put staffers, particularly staffers of color:

The internal fallout from the New York Times’ decision to run an op-ed by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, which called for the U.S. military to be deployed to American cities to crack down on protests against police killings of Black people, continued apace on Friday during a company all-hands meeting.

Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Chief Operating Officer Meredith Levien all offered opening statements. But as always, the most informative parts of the meeting came from the lengthy question-and-answer portion. Staffers asked for an autopsy of the piece and how it was published; if company leaders were planning to address James Bennet’s leadership of the opinion section, which has had “several misfires”; whether Opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for “openly bad mouth[ing] younger news colleagues on a platform where they, because of strict company policy, could not defend themselves”; whether the opinion section had suggested the topic of the op-ed to Cotton; and what the Times would do to help retain and support Black employees.

The newsroom first revolted Wednesday, shortly after the op-ed was published. Dozens of staffers tweeted a variation of the phrase “Running this puts Black @nytimes staff in danger,” along with a screenshot of the op-ed’s headline. The paper’s union put out a statement about the column as well.

In a development that can only be described as mind boggling, Bennet said that, “He had not read Mr. Cotton’s essay before it was published,” even though it is clear from the Times own account that there was extensive review and editing from inside the editorial division.

Fire Editor-in-Chief Dean Banquet and Opinion Editor James Bennet, and for good measure, have them take Bret “Bedbug” Stevens, whose hobby appears to be threatening reporters on the news side of the paper, with them.

This Is a Definition of a COVID-19 Hero That I Was Previously Unaware Of

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We already know that Andrew “Rat Faced Andy” Cuomo waited to long to respond to the pandemic, and now we learn that he dumped over four thousand virus positive patients on nursing homes throughout the state.

He figured out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

Not so much:

More than 4,500 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The Associated Press.

AP compiled its own tally to find out how many COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals to nursing homes under the March 25 directive after New York’s Health Department declined to release its internal survey conducted two weeks ago. It says it is still verifying data that was incomplete.

Whatever the full number, nursing home administrators, residents’ advocates and relatives say it has added up to a big and indefensible problem for facilities that even Gov. Andrew Cuomo — the main proponent of the policy — called “the optimum feeding ground for this virus.”

“It was the single dumbest decision anyone could make if they wanted to kill people,” Daniel Arbeeny said of the directive, which prompted him to pull his 88-year-old father out of a Brooklyn nursing home where more than 50 people have died. His father later died of COVID-19 at home.

………
Cuomo, a Democrat, on May 10 reversed the directive, which had been intended to help free up hospital beds for the sickest patients as cases surged. But he continued to defend it this week, saying he didn’t believe it contributed to the more than 5,800 nursing and adult care facility deaths in New York — more than in any other state — and that homes should have spoken up if it was a problem.

“Any nursing home could just say, ‘I can’t handle a COVID person in my facility,’” he said, although the March 25 order didn’t specify how homes could refuse, saying that ”no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the (nursing home) solely based” on confirmed or suspected COVID-19.

This is all a part and parcel of Cuomo trying to cut doctors and hospitals from the Medicaid program, literally to the point of his turning down billions of dollars in federal aid because it would not allow him to hurt poor people.

One of the ways that Cuomo is planning to cut Medicaid is by cutting hospital beds.

If his administration did not force infectious patients back into nursing homes, then it would appear that there was a shortage, and not a surfeit of beds, and so the budget could not be gutted.

So Not a Surprise

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The AP has come across the original recommendations from the CDC for the pandemic, the ones that the White House suppressed, and they were far more extensive than what Trump and Evil Minions™ eventually released:

Advice from the top U.S. disease control experts on how to safely reopen businesses and institutions during the coronavirus pandemic was more detailed and restrictive than the plan released by the White House last month.

The guidance, which was shelved by Trump administration officials, also offered recommendations to help communities decide when to shut facilities down again during future flareups of COVID-19.

The Associated Press obtained a 63-page document that is more detailed than other, previously reported segments of the shelved guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It shows how the thinking of the CDC infection control experts differs from those in the White House managing the pandemic response.

Hoocoodanode?

Fire Dean Banquet

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Donald Trump says that people should drink, inhale, or inject household disinfectants to prevent Covid-19 infection.

The initial response of the New York Times was to write that “some experts” found this dangerous.

We’ve deleted an earlier tweet and updated a sentence in our article that implied that only “some experts” view the ingestion of household disinfectants as dangerous. To be clear, there is no debate on the danger.

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 24, 2020

No, anyone with two brain cells to rub together gets that this is dangerous.

Even if this was not the result of an edict from Dean Banquet, the editor-in-chief of the Times, this is clearly a product of the (toxic) newsroom culture that that he has inculcated there.

Democrats Bring a Rubber Chicken to a Gun Fight

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Joe Biden has announced that he does not want to get involved in a political fight with Donald Trump over the latter’s complete mishandling of the of the Covid-19 pandemic.

My dear Biden: If you don’t want to use your Presidential Campaign I should like to borrow it for a while

This is worse than a crime, it is a mistake:

Former Vice President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he does not want to be in a political fight with President Trump over the coronavirus outbreak but that he would continue to call the president out on misinformation regarding the virus.

“I have not been criticizing the president, but I’ve been pointing out where there is disagreement on how to proceed,” Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said on ABC’s “The View.”

“The coronavirus is not his fault, but the lack of speed with which to respond to it has to move much faster,” he continued. “This is not about Democrat or Republican. This is not about what your party is. It’s about getting through this.”

“The American people don’t want us in a political fight, and I want no part of a political fight either, but when the president says things that turn out not to be accurate, we should not say ‘you’re lying,’ we should say ‘Mr. President that’s not the facts, here’s the deal.

Seriously, if Joe Biden does not want to campaign for the Presidency, why does he want to be the nomineee?

Where the F%$# is Joe Biden?

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Given the current pandemic, and Donald Trump’s mismanagement of it and his lying, Joe Biden should be proclaiming Trump’s failures from the heavens.

In the 10 days since the debates, he’s been basically invisible.

All that we have gotten is a promise of some briefings that may start in the next few days.

His campaign is missing a big opportunity to challenge the narrative that Trump is promulgating.

Boeing is Broken

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Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule is facing 61 safety issues, because those stock buybacks have to come from somewhere, I guess:

Boeing faces 61 safety fixes following last year’s botched test flight of its Starliner crew capsule, NASA said Friday.

NASA has also designated December’s aborted space station mission as a serious “high-visibility close call” that could have destroyed the capsule—twice.

In releasing the outcome of a joint investigation, NASA said it still has not decided whether to require Boeing to launch the Starliner again without a crew, or go straight to putting astronauts on board.

Douglas Loverro, NASA’s human exploration and operation chief, told reporters that Boeing must first present a plan and schedule for the 61 corrective actions. Boeing expects to have a plan in NASA’s hands by the end of this month.

Boeing needs to fire every single one of its executives.

Bobble head dolls could do a better job.

A Feature, Not a Bug

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We are now seeing indications that the 2020 census, which will go digital and online, is likely to crash and burn like the Iowa caucuses or the roll out of Obamacare.

I would argue that the failure of the census will not be a cluster-f%$# (incompetence) but a rat-f%$# (deliberate sabotage).

If the process descends into failure, it gives corrupt individuals the opportunity to manipulate the date for partisan political advantage.

The Republicans have been trying rat-f%$# the census for decades:

The stakes are high when a major civic exercise involves a large population, new technology that has not been thoroughly tested and an entire country waiting on the results.

Just ask the organizers of the Iowa caucuses, which offered a cautionary tale on the technological woes that could befall a big political event. Some observers worry that this year’s census carries the same potential for mayhem — except on an infinitely larger scale.

The U.S. Census Bureau plans to try out a lot of new technology. It’s the first once-a-decade census in which most people are being encouraged to answer questions via the internet. Later in the process, census workers who knock on the doors of homes that have not responded will use smartphones and a new mobile app to relay answers.

A government watchdog agency, the Census Bureau’s inspector general and some lawmakers have grown concerned about whether the systems are ready for prime time. Most U.S. residents can start answering the questionnaire in March.

“I must tell you, the Iowa (caucus) debacle comes to mind when I think of the census going digital,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, the congressional delegate for the District of Columbia, said this week at a hearing on the census.

Cybersecurity is another worry. Experts consider the census to be an attractive target for anyone seeking to sow chaos and undermine confidence in the U.S. government, as Russia did in the 2016 presidential election.

In a worst-case scenario, vital records could be deleted or polluted with junk data. Even a lesser assault that interfered with online data collection could erode public confidence. In 2016, a denial-of-service attack knocked Australia’s online census offline, flooding it with junk data.

Why am I thinking that there might be a Republican operative who is thinking about passing access codes to the GRU?

Dr. Evil Would Get This

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Roll Tape!

Facebook has now announced that Russian provocateurs spent as much as $100,000.00 on political ads in 2016.
Seriously?  In a campaign where both sides spent billions, this is beneath the level of chump change:

Providing new evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Facebook disclosed on Wednesday that it had identified more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on hot-button issues purchased by a shadowy Russian company linked to the Kremlin.

Most of the 3,000 ads did not refer to particular candidates but instead focused on divisive social issues such as race, gay rights, gun control and immigration, according to a post on Facebook by Alex Stamos, the company’s chief security officer. The ads, which ran between June 2015 and May 2017, were linked to some 470 fake accounts and pages the company said it had shut down.

Facebook officials said the fake accounts were created by a Russian company called the Internet Research Agency, which is known for using “troll” accounts to post on social media and comment on news websites.

The disclosure adds to the evidence of the broad scope of the Russian influence campaign, which American intelligence agencies concluded was designed to damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald J. Trump during the election. Multiple investigations of the Russian meddling, and the possibility that the Trump campaign somehow colluded with Russia, have cast a shadow over the first eight months of Mr. Trump’s presidency.

I’m wondering if the incompetent Hillary Clinton campaign might have played a bigger role in this clusterf%$# than any potential foreign interference.

Of course, that conclusion would mean that any number of incompetent political consultants would have to find honest work, and as we know, the motto of the Democratic party is, “We gotta protect our phony baloney jobs.”