And While We Are On the Subject of Obama and Subverting Regulation………

Gary Gensler surprised everyone when, as head of the CFTC, he actually enforced sensible rules.

So it it comes no surprise that Obama is firing him and replacing him with a corporate drone from the Vampire Squid:

Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.

The president is effectively dismissing Gary Gensler, the ex-Goldman partner who headed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Gensler used his post at a secondary financial regulator to push for reforms. It was his office that blew the Libor scandal wide open by taking referrals from British regulators seriously (by contrast, Geithner, who heard about widespread, deliberate mismarking in 2008, passed the buck to the Bank of England). Gensler has also been making himself unpopular by taking the view that swap dealers, which includes foreign branches of US banks and parties that conduct business with US parties, must comply with Dodd Frank. ………

Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post describes how Gensler is being ousted for his position on swaps regulation, which was coming to a head in international meetings starting June 20, with a July 12 deadline looming. The industry was pushing for the usual “race to the bottom” approach, since the Dodd Frank provisions are more stringent than overseas requirments (the spin, of course, was that Gensler was acting unilaterally, as opposed to implementing what Congress mandated). Gensler faces varying degrees of resistance from three of his four fellow commissioners. International regulators were apparently also unhappy with Gensler’s tough stand, to the point where they were complaining to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

Even if Obama fails in fast-tracking his chosen replacement, Amanda Renteria, Gensler’s lame-duck status will considerably weaken his ability to arm-twist the fence-sitters among his colleagues.

And Renteria is a simply pathetic choice. Oh, she’s got a very appealing personal story, having worked her way up from a very disadvantaged background, a child of migrant workers who made her way to Stanford and later Harvard Business School. But there’s nothing in her background that qualifies her to act either as a senior regulator or as the head of a large operation (the CFTC has over 400 employees). This leap in responsibilities is tantamount to taking a promising law firm associate and making them the head of a large law practice. You’d never do that if you cared about the health of the firm. A move like this looks an awful lot like an effort not just to sideline Gensler’s push on swaps regulation, but to render the CFTC incompetent over time.

Renteria’s knowledge of finance appears to consist of having worked right after college for a few years at Goldman. ………

And to this we add the bonus story that Barack Obama has nominated Walmart's biggest fan to head his council of economic advisors:

On June 10, 2013, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jason Furman to become the next chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. This is a big-time, highly influential post. So what kind of economist is Furman?

One who thinks Walmart is the best thing since sliced bread.

For Furman, Walmart is nothing short of a miracle for America’s poor and working-class folks. For him, progressives should be cheering the firm: he even wrote a 16-page paper titled, “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” which was posted on the Center for American Progress website. ………

In Furman’s view, “the US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.”

For the man who will have President Obama’s ear on vital matters like jobs, the evidence of whether Walmart’s wages and benefits are substandard is “murky.” And he doesn’t much care for those who question Walmart’s approach: In the 2006 dialogue with Ehrenreich on Slate, he upbraided activists who had pushed the firm to increase wages and offer better benefits:………

To complete the finger in the eye, the American Enterprise Institute has issued effusive praise on the choice.

I'm not surprised.  I'm disappointed, but not surprised.

Obama loves hippie punching.

What a Surprise ……… No MBAs Equals Business Success

Costco does not hire MBAs:

Costco Wholesale (COST), the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.

Costco Wholesale (COST), the second-largest retailer in the U.S. behind Walmart, is an anomaly in an age marked by turmoil and downsizing. Known for its $55-a-year membership fee and its massive, austere warehouses stocked floor to ceiling with indulgent portions of everything from tilapia to toilet paper, Costco has thrived over the last five years. While competitors lost customers to the Internet and weathered a wave of investor pessimism, Costco’s sales have grown 39 percent and its stock price has doubled since 2009. The hot streak continued through last year’s retirement of widely admired co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jim Sinegal. The share price is up 30 percent under the leadership of its new, plain-spoken CEO, Craig Jelinek.

………

Jelinek earned $650,000 in 2012, plus a $200,000 bonus and stock options worth about $4 million, based on the company’s performance. That’s more than Sinegal, who made $325,000 a year. By contrast, Walmart CEO Mike Duke’s 2012 base salary was $1.3 million; he was also awarded a $4.4 million cash bonus and $13.6 million in stock grants.

These are some of the reasons why Costco is successful, but I think that the most important bit is this:

It will have to look inside, since Costco does not hire business school graduates—thanks to another idiosyncrasy meant to preserve its distinct company culture. It cultivates employees who work the floor in its warehouses and sponsors them through graduate school. Seventy percent of its warehouse managers started at the company by pushing carts and ringing cash registers. Employees rarely leave: The company turnover rate is 5 percent among employees who have been there over a year, and less than 1 percent among the executive ranks. That’s impressive, but it also suggests the company does not have a regular influx of outside views. Even John Matthews, vice president in charge of human resources, calls the company “awfully inbred.”

I believe that much of their success is from the fact that they do not hire pampered self important people who do not understand the finer points of the business.

"Business school graduate," and, "Pampered self important people who do not understand the finer points of the business," are pretty much synonymous, and the fact that they have gained much in the way of currency in contemporary American business, is one of the reason that we are so completely f%$#ed.

H/t  Washington Monthly

Hope & Change ……… Not!!! Environment Edition………

The White House is slow walking major environmental regulations:

The White House has blocked several Department of Energy regulations that would require appliances, lighting and buildings to use less energy and create less global-warming pollution, as part of a broader slowdown of new antipollution rules issued by the Obama administration.

The administration has spent as long as two years reviewing some of the energy efficiency rules proposed by the Energy Department, bypassing a 1993 executive order that in most instances requires the White House to act on proposed regulations within 90 days. Regulatory review times at the White House Office of Management and Budget are now the longest in 20 years, having spiked sharply since 2011.

………

The proposed rules would require that refrigerators, light bulbs and electrical equipment use less energy, much as the Obama administration in its first term required automakers to commit to make cars more energy efficient.

With a sweeping climate bill having died in the Senate in Mr. Obama’s first term, his only options for major action on the issue in the second term appear to involve executive action. In one of the signature moments of his 2013 State of the Union address, he vowed that if Congress failed to act on energy and climate change, he would use his executive powers to do so.

What it comes down to is that Barack Obama does not believe in regulation. That's why he had Cass Sunstein as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.

The slowdown stems from a combination of factors, including high-level vacancies and election-year politics. Analysts and former administration officials said the White House, sensitive to Republican charges that it was threatening the economy by pushing out dozens of so-called job-killing regulations, reined in the process last year, leaving many major rules awaiting action for months beyond legal deadlines.

Some administration officials are also concerned that regulations have the potential to do more harm than good. “If we make refrigerators lousy, that’s a big problem,” Cass R. Sunstein wrote in “Simpler: The Future of Government,” a book published this year about his time running the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, a small unit of the budget office responsible for reviewing regulations.

………

Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University and a former top Environmental Protection Agency official who tangled with Mr. Sunstein over a number of environmental regulations in Mr. Obama’s first term, said in a recent article that such demands for detailed analysis become “a regulatory game of Whac-A-Mole: every time the agency meets one demand for a piece of information about the costs or benefits of a rule, it finds itself met with a new and different demand.”

She said the decision of how quickly to move now rested with Mr. Obama. “The cabinet does not need a presidential directive telling the agencies to do their work,” she said, “rather, it needs presidential support for the work they are trying to do.”

I think that Ms. Heinzerling is missing the point: If Obama wanted regulations to progress with alacrity, they would be.

Regulations are stalled because that is what he wants. 

Cass Sunstein was head of the OIRA, QED.

Yes, James Clapper Perjured Himself Before Congress, and Should Be Both Fired and Prosecuted

Fred Kaplan, who tends to be a font of conventional wisdom, is calling for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to be fired:

If President Obama really does welcome a debate about the scope of the U.S. surveillance program, a good first step would be to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.” As we all now know, he was lying.

We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying. In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did. He replied:

“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

Let’s parse this passage. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden had been briefed on the top-secret-plus programs that we now all know about. That is, he knew that he was putting Clapper in a box; He knew that the true answer to his question was “Yes,” but he also knew that Clapper would have a hard time saying so without making headlines.

There were actually some non-answer answers he could have given that didn't rise to the level of lying to Congress, saying something like, "No one is perfect, but we do our best not to infringe on the privacy of the American public," but he just perjured himself, and he did so because he simply did not did not care about telling the truth under oath.

FWIW, is obliquely saying the Clapper lied through his teeth as well:

Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, revealed that he had given Clapper, the director of national intelligence, a day’s advance notice of a question about the extent of government surveillance at a congressional hearing in March.

Clapper said earlier this week that he had misunderstood the question. When asked directly by Wyden in March whether the NSA was collecting any kind of data on “millions” of Americans, Clapper replied “no” and “not wittingly” - a claim undermined by the Guardian’s disclosures about NSA collection of millions of Americans’ phone records. Wyden also disclosed that he had given Clapper an opportunity in private to revise his answer, after the session.

“One of the most important responsibilities a senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,” Wyden said in a Tuesday statement.

(emphasis mine)

Note that this makes this even worse, because Clapper did not just lie off the cuff. He was given 24 hours to come up with an appropriate answer, and then he was given the opportunity to revise his answer, and he just lied, because he knew that there would be absolutely no consequences for this.

With Barack Obama in the White House, and Eric Holder as Attorney General, he is probably right, but the statute of limitations is 5 years, so a new AG could file charges between January 2017 and May of 2018.

It won't happen, but I can dream.

And in the Further Adventures of Epic Fails: NSA Edition

Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, talking about the NSA telephone drift net says that the US is behaving like China:

Even though we know governments do all kinds of things I was shocked by the information about the US surveillance operation, Prism. To me, it's abusively using government powers to interfere in individuals' privacy. This is an important moment for international society to reconsider and protect individual rights.

I lived in the United States for 12 years. This abuse of state power goes totally against my understanding of what it means to be a civilised society, and it will be shocking for me if American citizens allow this to continue. The US has a great tradition of individualism and privacy and has long been a centre for free thinking and creativity as a result.

In our experience in China, basically there is no privacy at all – that is why China is far behind the world in important respects: even though it has become so rich, it trails behind in terms of passion, imagination and creativity.

Read the rest.

Paul Ryan Calls the NSA Surveillance "Creepy", and He is Right

Look at those dead eyes, he knows creepy

Seriously, makeing Paul f%$3ing Ryan right on ANYTHING is the epitome of fail:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) expressed misgivings with the National Security Agency's sweeping surveillance programs, suggesting on Monday that the activities "go way beyond the scope" of what the federal government has been authorized to do by laws like the Patriot Act.

“It comes across as creepy,” the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee said in an interview with the Wisconsin radio station WJRN. “I understand FISA court orders to go after some known person, and their phone records and whoever they’re communicating with. But to do a blanket dragnet nationwide, that seems to go way beyond the scope of the law that I’m familiar with called the Patriot Act.”

The fail is strong with the Obama administration.

More than any sitting president I have ever seen, Obama seems to obsess over his legacy.

Well, this is your legacy.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.^™

Hurray for the ACLU

They have filed suit to get access to the FISA court orders authorizing the NSA drift netting of Americans' communications data:

The ACLU and Yale Law School's Media Freedom and Information Clinic filed a motion today with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), seeking the release of secret court opinions that permit the government to acquire Americans' phone records en masse. The public has a right to know the legal justification for the government's sweeping surveillance—but, until now, those judicial opinions have remained a heavily guarded secret.

The ACLU filed its motion on the heels of last week's disclosure of an order, issued under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, compelling a Verizon subsidiary to turn over call details for every domestic and international phone call placed on its network during a three-month period. Since then, media reports and statements by members of the congressional intelligence committees have made clear that this order belongs to a much larger surveillance program—covering all the major telephone companies—that has been in existence for the past seven years. When pressed about the program, members of Congress as well as executive officials have emphasized that this mass acquisition of Americans' phone records was reviewed and approved by judges on the FISC.

………

The release of these FISC opinions is the first step to an informed public discussion of the surveillance powers asserted by the government. It should not be able to shield such a radical and unprecedented intrusion on Americans' privacy behind a secret court issuing secret legal interpretations of our laws.

I have a sense that they are going to have to fight like hell to get access to the legal opinions, because the filings will almost certainly reveal the low bar presented by the administration, and the low bar accepted by the judiciary, will make a travesty of their protestations of due process.

As Juan Cole pithily notes, "We Misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the Domestic Surveillance to be Made Legal, not to End It.

The idea that you take a blatantly lawless program of nearly unlimited surveillance powers (Bush/Yoo unitary executive), and slap on some due process and retain the same nearly unlimited power, and it's OK, because the Obama administration is a bunch of good people^*, normal checks and balances do not need to apply.

It can all be done in secret, with the approval of a secret court that you have to keep away from toilet paper, because they will sign anything, and the public will never know, and it's all good.

It's why I call him, "the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever^™."

^*Now that Rahm Emanuel is afflicting the people of Chicago, anyway.

I Think that We May Have Identified Why College is So Expensive

And the truth from the most unlikely of sources, the New York Post:

City College President Lisa Coico’s Upper West Side home is just four subway stops from the Manhattanville campus, but Coico is chauffeured the two miles to work and back every day in a state-issued Buick.

Coico, whose salary is $300,000, is among nearly 70 SUNY and CUNY officials who enjoy the use of taxpayer-funded wheels and sometimes a driver. In Coico’s case the driver is a college public-safety officer.

In 2009, after The Post exposed the number of commissioners chauffeured to their jobs, the state cracked down on the practice, as well as the personal use of vehicles by agency heads. But the university systems set their own policies.

Both the SUNY and CUNY chancellors have cars and drivers. CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein valued the personal use of his car last year at $14,985, the highest in the state.

College presidents are entitled to cars, as well.

The Ivory Tower execs are joyriding while students are struggling to meet soaring tuition, after trustees in 2011 approved $300-per-student increases for five years for the state and city college systems. CUNY students now pay more than $5,000 per year.

This is kind of a classic result of anti-competitive cartels.

The top universities in the nation have been colluding on tuition, fees, and financial aid for decades, they started in the 1960s, when the alternative to college was the Vietnam war, and once they stopped competing on price, they bid for professors, they build gold plated housing, and they overpaid administrators.

This is what happens with a cartel. They continue to compete, they just no longer compete on price, which leads to more spending on non core "bling", which increases costs, which increases tuition.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

It doesn't help that the US government is playing banker for all this, and refuses to institute meaningful cost controls.

H/t Atrios.

I Guess the Obama Administration Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue

In the middle of a rather busy past few days for news, the Obama administration has quietly dropped restricting women's access to birth control:

The Obama administration has decided to stop trying to block over-the-counter availability of the best-known morning-after contraceptive pill for all women and girls, a move fraught with political repercussions for President Obama.

The government’s decision means that any woman or girl will soon be able to walk into a drugstore and buy the pill, Plan B One-Step, without a prescription.

The Justice Department had been fighting to prevent that outcome, but said late Monday afternoon that it would accept its losses in recent court rulings and begin putting into effect a judge’s order to have the Food and Drug Administration certify the drug for nonprescription use. In a letter to Judge Edward R. Korman of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the administration said it would comply with his demands.

The Justice Department appears to have concluded that it might lose its case with the appeals court and would have to decide whether to appeal to the Supreme Court. That would drastically elevate the debate over the politically delicate issue for Mr. Obama.

Women’s reproductive rights groups, who had sued the government to clear the way for broader distribution of the drug, cautiously hailed the decision as a significant moment in the battle over reproductive rights but said they remained skeptical until they saw details about how the change will be put into practice.

They should worry about how it is put in practice.  Barack Obama has a long history of tepid (at best) support for reproductive rights, and his comment that he supported the blatantly political and craven restriction, because, "as the father of two daughters, the government should apply some common sense," shows that he does not get women as independent people in control of their bodies.

Thankfully though, he does realize that further appeals will be a political loser, so he's throwing in the towel.

Why NSA Spying Matters

John Judis was a relatively low level political activist, primarily concerned with the Vietnam war, in the 1960s

Well, he relates the systematic program of surveillance and harassment against him:

President Barack Obama has assured us that we need not be worried about the National Security Agency listening to our phone calls or monitoring our Internet use. The NSA’s programs, he said, represent “modest encroachments on privacy” that are “worth us doing” to protect the country from terrorists. Count me among those who are not reassured by Obama’s statement. I know better—from my schoolboy knowledge of the Constitution and from my own experience during the '60s with unwarranted government surveillance.

I don’t usually like to base moral judgments on what the Constitution does or does not allow, but in this case, it makes sense to do so. The Constitution had two very different purposes: One was to create a functioning government; the other, forged in the wake of the American revolution, was to establish constraints that would prevent the abuse of state power. The First Amendment was designed to do the latter; and so was the Fourth, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The administration’s obsessive pursuit of press leaks threatens the First Amendment’s freedom of the press; and the NSA’s surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on general warrants—on indiscriminate searches without probable cause.

………

I had my own vague vision of what a socialist America would look like, but almost everything that I did was directed at immediate issues like ending the Vietnam War or later impeaching Richard Nixon. I was not a bomb thrower. I advocated running candidates in elections. I taught classes on Marx’s Capital and American history at a school we organized in Oakland. But during this period, I was under almost constant surveillance by the FBI and by other intelligence or police agencies. I received regular visits from the FBI (I told them I wouldn’t talk to them), and they also visited my parents and friends.

As my FBI file, which I later obtained, attested, my movements were being monitored even when I didn’t know it. (Most of it is, unfortunately, blacked out.) In organizing demonstrations, I encountered people who turned out to be government agents. I was pulled over by the police with guns drawn for no apparent reason. And I also received inquiries about my tax returns from the IRS even though I was living on about $3000 a year during much of this period. These inquiries, which to this day may or may not have had something to do with my politics, certainly make me sympathetic to the rightwing groups who were barraged by inquiries from the IRS—whether or not these inquiries were directed by higher-ups in the administration.

………

Obama says that the debate over the NSA’s activities is “healthy for our democracy” and a “sign of maturity.” But I think it’s a sign of forgetfulness—of Constitutional amnesia—on the part of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, not to mention the administration’s vaunted intelligence chiefs who want to divert attention from the subject of the leaks, which is their own behavior, onto the leaker. I am hoping Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress remind the administration what the Constitution was designed to do and what the original FISA legislation was meant to do, but judging from the performance of most congressional leaders so far, I am not holding my breath.

When people (like the contemptible Lawrence O'Donnell^* this evening) say that they "feel safer" because they are much less likely to be observed in the vast morass of data, they do no not get it.

The question is what happens with all that information when someone in power, whether it be the President of the United States, or minor data entry clerk like Edward Snowden, or a law enforcement official like J. Edgar Hoover decides to make you their business.

You do not get lost in the haystack when they decide to come for you.

That's why we have a 4^th amendment.

^*Seriously, he is so in the tank for Obama that he would endorse an order from Obama for O'Donnell's own execution.

Good homage to Dark Side of the Moon

Link

We Have a Name for the Hero

The NSA leaker is Edward Snowden, who is now in hiding in Hong Kong:

Link to the Guardian

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.

In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

………

He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

………

Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."

He predicts the government will launch an investigation and "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become".

………

He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he "watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in", and as a result, "I got hardened."

The primary lesson from this experience was that "you can't wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act."

They are going to try to destroy him, of course.

Note also that he wasn't working for the NSA, he was a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton. That means that information about this program was spread among dozens of entities (Booz Allen Hamilton was almost certainly one of many contractors), which means that any decent intelligence gathering operation, whether it be Russia, China, or a dude with Google and Lexis-Nexis would know about this.

It's clear that this secrecy was not about concealing this from potential rivals or adversaries, but rather its goal was to conceal this from the American public.

Click for full size

---

Clapper Said No US Surveillance, but the US Ain't Green

BTW, the Guardian has also revealed information about the global data mining operation, called Boundless Informant:

The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

………

At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

"No sir," replied Clapper.

Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian in a response to the latest disclosures: "NSA has consistently reported – including to Congress – that we do not have the ability to determine with certainty the identity or location of all communicants within a given communication. That remains the case."

The US ain't green, the lowest level of surveillance, and James Clapper perjured himself before Congress, but there will be no consequences for this.

Meanwhile Congressman Peter King is calling for Snowden's extradition:

There was no immediate reaction from the White House but Peter King, the chairman of the House homeland security subcommittee, called for Snowden's extradition from Hong Kong. Snowden flew there 10 days ago to disclose top-secret documents and to give interviews to the Guardian.

"If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date," King, a New York Republican, said in a written statement. "The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence."

It should be noted that Peter King openly and aggressively supported the IRA when it was a terrorist organization, and actually planting bombs.

By comparison, Snowden revealed the administration, and government, lies to, and spying on its own citizens.

If Snowden was seeing a psychiatrist, like Daniel Ellsburg, I fully expect Obama to pull out the Nixon playbook and stage a bag operation to steal his records.

Interesting Idea

Green Eagle observes on the web, you can judge a book by its cover:

………

As a motion picture art director, I work a lot with graphic artists constructing imitation documents of one kind and another. Perhaps because that is part of my job, I like to look for stylistic cues that give away the nature of a document, without reference to its content. This is an area (at least as it relates to politics) that has not received much attention, although institutions like the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore have fine collections of this material, much of it produced by people who are mentally ill.

In particular, very little has been said about this phenomenon on the internet. This is probably understandable; websites are a relatively recent thing, and some of the relatively well known visual characteristics of the work of the mentally disturbed are eliminated by the template-driven layout of the vast majority of websites. For example, the chaotic writing of the Miz Thang example, or the handwritten political specimen shown below are not really possible on the internet. Well, enough preface, let me dive in with some examples:

He draws comparisons between whack job websites and works of art from the mentally ill.

I won't post his examples. The picture that I am posting is the home page of the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, which shows most of the characteristics he describes.

The tinfoil hat folks wear is reflected in their web designs.

What Matt Taibbi Says

He observes that the press covering the Bradley Manning trial are missing the big point:

Well, the Bradley Manning trial has begun, and for the most part, the government couldn't have scripted the headlines any better.

In the now-defunct Starz series Boss, there's a reporter character named "Sam Miller" played by actor Troy Garity who complains about lazy reporters who just blindly eat whatever storylines are fed to them by people in power. He called those sorts of stories Chumpbait. If the story is too easy, if you're doing a piece on a sensitive topic and factoids are not only reaching you freely, but publishing them is somehow not meeting much opposition from people up on high, then you're probably eating Chumpbait.

………

All of this sh%$ [Stories focused on the security issues] is disgraceful. It's Chumpbait.

If I was working for the Pentagon's PR department as a hired press Svengali, with my salary eating up some of the nearly five billion dollars the armed services spends annually on advertising and public relations, I would be telling my team to pump reporters over and over again with the same angle.
I would beat it into the head of every hack on this beat that the court-martial is about a troubled young man with gender identity problems, that the key issue of law here rests inside the mind of young PFC Manning, that the only important issue of fact for both a jury and the American people to decide is exactly the question in these headlines.

Is Manning a hero, or a traitor? Did he give thousands of files to Wikileaks out of a sense of justice and moral horror, or did he do it because he had interpersonal problems, because he couldn't keep his job, because he was a woman trapped in a man's body, because he was a fame-seeker, because he was lonely?

You get the press and the rest of America following that bouncing ball, and the game's over. Almost no matter what the outcome of the trial is, if you can convince the American people that this case is about mental state of a single troubled kid from Crescent, Oklahoma, then the propaganda war has been won already.

Because in reality, this case does not have anything to do with who Bradley Manning is, or even, really, what his motives were. This case is entirely about the "classified" materials Manning had access to, and whether or not they contained widespread evidence of war crimes.

This whole thing, this trial, it all comes down to one simple equation. If you can be punished for making public a crime, then the government doing the punishing is itself criminal.

Manning, by whatever means, stumbled into a massive archive of evidence of state-sponsored murder and torture, and for whatever reason, he released it. The debate we should be having is over whether as a people we approve of the acts he uncovered that were being done in our names.

He's right.

Read the rest.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

The leader of the Anonymous group that acquired (pinched) much of the data used to prosecute the Steubenville football player rapists, has been raided by the FBI:

In April, the FBI quietly [His description is, "12 F.B.I. Swat Team agents jumped out of the truck screaming for me to "Get The F%$# Down" with m-16 assault rifles and full riot gear armed safety off, pointed directly at my head." This is a definition of "quietly" I was previously unaware of] raided the home of the hacker known as KYAnonymous in connection with his role in the Steubenville rape case. Today he spoke out for the first time about the raid, his true identity, and his motivations for pursuing the Steubenville rapists, in an extensive interview with Mother Jones.

"The goal of the media interviews is to get the entire nation to say 'fuck you' to these guys," said KYAnonymous, whose real name is Deric Lostutter. He was referring to the federal agents who raided his home in Winchester, Kentucky, and carted off his computers and XBox.

Lostutter may deserve more credit than anyone for turning Steubenville into a national outrage. After a 16-year-old girl was raped by two members of the Steubenville High football team last year, he obtained and published tweets and Instagram photos in which other team members had joked about the incident and belittled the victim. He now admits to being the man behind the mask in a video posted by another hacker on the team's fan page, RollRedRoll.com, where he threatened action against the players unless they apologized to the girl. (The rapists were convicted in March.)

He is facing more jail time than the rapists.

This is nuts, between the SWAT style raid, and the excessive nature of the possible sentences.

This lack of proportionality is a feature, and not a bug. Hyper-aggressive policing and sentencing has intimidation (and guilty pleas) as a goal.

I am Not a Big Video Gamer, But if Half of this is True………

Then this is Microflaccid's biggest case of jumping the shark since ……… Windows 8.

Damn. How the f%$# does this bunch of morons stay in business?

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

15. 1st Commerce Bank, North Las Vegas, NV  <= This is a Thursday closing.
16. Mountain National Bank, Sevierville, TN

Full FDIC list


Since I've started following this, I think that there have been 4 non Friday closings (not counting Friday holidays) over the last 4 years, and 2 of these have been in the past month.

Hmmmm.......

So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

So Full of Hope and Change

Roll Tape

Senator Jeff Merkley, who has been doing everything but blinking his eyes in Morse code to, is now criticizing Barack Obama for being WAY too flip about spying on everyone in the United States:

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) on Friday criticized President Barack Obama's response to the recently publicized National Security Agency phone and Internet data surveillance programs.

"There are several parts to this that the president glossed over," Merkley told MSNBC after Obama spoke.

The Oregon senator said Obama took the data collection "very lightly." In response to the president's claims that the appropriate Senate Intelligence Committees were briefed on the NSA programs, Merkley said he had to seek out "special permission" to learn about the intelligence initiatives because that information was not freely available.

Merkley is unwilling to admit it, but the core of this problem is that Barack Obama does not care about the 4^th amendment or the right to privacy of the American people.

It is a calculus that is based on hypocrisy, cowardice, and venality. He is unwilling to support our rights if there is an off chance that something bad will happen.

Supporting civil rights, and the Constitution, matters most when its difficult., not when it's convenient.

Worst ……… Constitutional ……… law ……… professor ……… ever.

It's Charles Nudelman's Birthday………

Natalie actually has a lovely voice
She's just hamming it up.

He's a good friend of hers, and so she decided to sing him a birthday song.

Actually, she left him a voice mail, and said that she would leave him a dozen more, and I suggested that she do a song for him instead.

Sometimes, her old man has a decent idea.

ROTFLMAO.

(on edit)

Issues with the Facebook embed, so here is a Youtube.

And While We are On the Subject of Secrecy and Leaks

We have another leak which shows that many of the drone strikes were conducted on the basis of the sketchiest of evidence:

The CIA did not always know who it was targeting and killing in drone strikes in Pakistan over a 14-month period, an NBC News review of classified intelligence reports shows.

About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as "other militants,” the documents detail. The “other militants” label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security.

The uncertainty appears to arise from the use of so-called “signature” strikes to eliminate suspected terrorists -- picking targets based in part on their behavior and associates. A former White House official said the U.S. sometimes executes people based on “circumstantial evidence.”

Three former senior Obama administration officials also told NBC News that some White House officials were worried that the CIA had painted too rosy a picture of its success and likely ignored or missed mistakes when tallying death totals.

Gee, you think that under the command of David Petraeus, the CIA would let public relations trump the truth?

Hoocoodanode? That's like his entire f%$#ing career!

On a more serious note, it does appear that a whole bunch of people with very high security clearances are having crises of conscience.

I think that we will see more leaks.

It's Jobless Thursday!!!

Good Week.

Initial jobless claims fell to 346,000, as did continuing claims, though the 4-week moving average rose.

OK, but not great.

Yes, We Are Being Watched

Glenn Greenwald got a copy of a FISA court order requiring that Verizon turn over all phone call information for a 3 month period.  Members of Congress have revealed that this was in fact a renewal, and that this has been going on for 7 years.  Senator Udall stated that he has been trying reveal that this was going on for much of that time, but he had been stymied:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

The secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19.

And, BTW, they are also data mining all the major Internet providers:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.

………

A chart prepared by the NSA, contained within the top-secret document obtained by the Guardian, underscores the breadth of the data it is able to obtain: email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.

………

"Fisa was broken because it provided privacy protections to people who were not entitled to them," the presentation claimed. "It took a Fisa court order to collect on foreigners overseas who were communicating with other foreigners overseas simply because the government was collecting off a wire in the United States. There were too many email accounts to be practical to seek Fisas for all."

Because that whole Constitution is just so inconvenient.

BTW, the Washington Post also published an article about the PRISM program at the same time as the Guardian, and toward the end of their article, they have this tidbit:

Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.

And in the world of conventional wisdom, the New York Times editorial board, has unleashed a can of whup ass on the Obama administration about this:

Within hours of the disclosure that federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

………

On Thursday, Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, who introduced the Patriot Act in 2001, said that the National Security Agency overstepped its bounds by obtaining a secret order to collect phone log records from millions of Americans.

“As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely troubled by the F.B.I.’s interpretation of this legislation,” he said in a statement. “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses.” He added: “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American.”

Stunning use of the act shows, once again, why it needs to be sharply curtailed if not repealed.

Yes, I agree with what Sensenbrenner says, which is a complete mind f%$#.


BTW, it gets worse, because it looks like the NSA was getting credit card data as well:

The National Security Agency's monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency's activities.

The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.'s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA's operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.

BTW, Marcy Wheeler is spot on when she says that the only reason for all this secrecy is to prevent court challenges by making it impossible for a plaintiff to show standing:

The Administration wants you to believe that “all three branches” of government have signed off on this program (never mind that last year FISC did find part of this 215 collection illegal — that’s secret too).

But our court system is set up to be an antagonistic one, with both sides represented before a judge. The government has managed to avoid such antagonistic scrutiny of its data collection and mining programs — even in the al-Haramain case, where the charity had proof they had been the target of illegal, unwarranted surveillance — by ensuring no one could ever get standing to challenge the program in court. Most recently in Clapper v. Amnesty, SCOTUS held that the plaintiffs were just speculating when they argued they had changed their habits out of the assumption that they had been wiretapped.

This order might just provide someone standing. Any of Verizon’s business customers can now prove that their call data is, as we speak, being collected and turned over to the NSA. (Though I expect lots of bogus language about the difference between “collection” and “analysis.”)

That is what all the secrecy has been about. Undercutting separation of powers to ensure that the constitutionality of this program can never be challenged by American citizens.

It’s no big deal, says the Administration. But it’s sufficiently big of a deal that they have to short-circuit the most basic principle of our Constitution.

Also, read Bruce Schneier's impassioned defense on whistle blowing.

As I have noted a number of times before, Barack Obama is showing himself to be the Worst ……… Constitutional ……… law ……… professor ……… ever.

Appeals Court Slaps Down Obama on Contraception Restrictions

They sided with the lower court, and ordered the Obama administration to make emergency contraception (AKA Plan B) over the counter:

The Obama administration has in part lost its push to sustain age limits on over-the-counter sale of Plan B One-Step, commonly known as the morning-after pill.

After a lower court recently slapped down all age limits, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday granted the Justice Department's request for a stay on one-pill variants of emergency contraceptives but denied it for two-pill variants, declaring that the appellants have "failed to meet the requisite standard."

This is a very well deserved smackdown.

The Obama administration's behavior in this mater has been craven, dishonest, and hypocritical. They have taken what should be a core value, and used it as a political football.

Ewww!!!!!!

Last night, I noticed some fleas on Destructo, so tonight, I got some flea and tick spray from the pet store, and sprayed both cats.

Meatball seemed to be relatively flea free, but when I wiped Destructo's face with a cloth moistened with the spray (as the instructions say), about a dozen fleas crawled out of the fur on his face.

Shudder

This Has Disaster Written All Over It

You've doubtless heard about the rebound in housing prices.

Well, it turns out that it's a flood of Wall Street money behind much of this.

This is completely insane. You cannot manage single family rental housing from

The last time the housing market was this hot in Phoenix and Las Vegas, the buyers pushing up prices were mostly small time. Nowadays, they are big time — Wall Street big.

Large investment firms have spent billions of dollars over the last year buying homes in some of the nation’s most depressed markets. The influx has been so great, and the resulting price gains so big, that ordinary buyers are feeling squeezed out. Some are already wondering if prices will slump anew if the big money stops flowing.

“The growth is being propelled by institutional money,” said Suzanne Mistretta, an analyst at Fitch Ratings. “The question is how much the change in prices really reflects market demand, rather than one-off market shifts that may not be around in a couple years.”

Wall Street played a central role in the last housing boom by supplying easy — and, in retrospect, risky — mortgage financing. Now, investment companies like the Blackstone Group have swooped in, buying thousands of houses in the same areas where the financial crisis hit hardest.

Blackstone, which helped define a period of Wall Street hyperwealth, has bought some 26,000 homes in nine states. Colony Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm, is spending $250 million each month and already owns 10,000 properties. With little fanfare, these and other financial companies have become significant landlords on Main Street. Most of the firms are renting out the homes, with the possibility of unloading them at a profit when prices rise far enough.

………

The story, though, often looks more complicated on the ground. Joe Cusumano, a real estate agent in Riverside County, Calif., said that in recent months 90 percent of his business had been for companies like Invitation Homes, a Blackstone subsidiary. Home values in Riverside County have risen by 15 percent in the last year, according to CoreLogic.

But Mr. Cusumano said he wondered if faraway investors would properly maintain the homes they buy. He said that Invitation Homes had been willing to put money into the properties, but he was not so sure about the other players. He also worries what will happen when these investors start selling, as they inevitably will.

The first question is not whether the big investors will keep up tens of thousands of properties. It's whether they can manage tens of thousands of single family homes.

I have dealt with a single family home managed by a local property management firm. It was a complete clusterF%$#.

If they honestly think that they can manage single family homes for properties they are nuts.

Or maybe they are just lying.  They are banksters, after all.

Canada Says "Nothing" is Not an Appropriate Response to an Oil Spill

No, seriously, the government of British Columbia just denied a permit to build a tar sands pipeline to a company that refused to offer remediation plans for a potential spill"

Oil spill cleanup concerns have led the British Columbia Government to reject a proposed multi-billion dollar tar sands oil pipeline that the Canadian company Enbridge wants to construct across the province.

In its final submission Friday to the federally-appointed Northern Gateway Pipeline Joint Review Panel, the province states that it cannot support the Enbridge Northern Gateway project because the company “has been unable to address British Columbians’ environmental concerns.”

Environment Minister Terry Lake said, “British Columbia thoroughly reviewed all of the evidence and submissions made to the panel and asked substantive questions about the project including its route, spill response capacity and financial structure to handle any incidents. Our questions were not satisfactorily answered during these hearings.”

“Northern Gateway has said that they would provide effective spill response in all cases. However, they have presented little evidence as to how they will respond,” Lake said. “For that reason, our government cannot support the issuance of a certificate for the pipeline as it was presented to the Joint Review Panel.”

………

“It shows that Northern Gateway would have comprehensive oil spill response plans for all Project components and would substantially improve existing emergency response on Canada’s pacific coast – something unprecedented for a pipeline project. It shows that the Project has been developed with a comprehensive public and Aboriginal engagement program that would continue throughout Project construction and operation,” the company said in its submission.

But the B.C. government’s submission points out that the company’s proposal indicates that “doing nothing is a possible response to a spill.”

(Emphasis mine)

<snark> Are they Communists in Canada or something?   Don't they know this is supposed to work?

Silly Rabbit, the profits go to the energy companies, and the taxpayer pays for the cleanup! </snark>

H/t Americablog

Chris Christie Splits the Baby

Chris Christie had a conundrum.

With the death of Frank Lautenberg, this leaves a vacancy that needs to be filled.

This was a problem for governor Chris Christie.

First, there are two conflicting statutes as to whether the governor appoints a replacement until the next election, or whether a special election is held.

Second, if he makes an appointment, Republicans will demand that he appoint someone with a Ted Cruze/Michelle Bachmann level of the crazy, which might interfere with his reelection bid this November.

Third, if he holds a special election at the same time as the gubernatorial election, it brings out more Democrats to votes, which would hurt his chances, though he already pretty much a shoe in.

So, his solution was to called a special election in October:

At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) called for a special election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg to be held on Oct. 16. A primary will take place on Aug. 13. Christie will appoint an interim replacement to serve in Lautenberg’s Senate seat until the election is concluded. Though he did not reveal whom he plans to choose, his deft handling of the situation has already allowed Christie to sidestep several potentially sticky situations and may have created an obstacle for one of his top rivals.

Prior to his announcement, Christie was seen as having multiple options for scheduling the Senate election. One statute was reportedly cited by Jersey Republicans as giving Christie power to appoint a replacement who would serve the remainder of Lautenberg’s original term, which ends in 2014. Christie said he did indeed have this power, but wanted to do the “right thing” and let the people of the Garden State pick their representatives in the Senate.

………

Christie’s decision also allows the governor to sidestep a series of problems the vacancy in Lautenberg’s seat presented to his current re-election bid and rumored national ambitions.

………

While other similar attacks are likely to come down the road, Christie’s masterstroke of election scheduling comes with a potent, built-in defense that he is simply standing up for the needs of the voters.

While it would seem having a handpicked senator as long as possible could be advantageous to Christie, making an appointment who serves for the absolute minimal amount of time came with a third side benefit for the governor. Christie has turned himself into a highly touted potential 2016 presidential contender based in no small part on his image as a GOP governor who isn’t afraid to make compromises with the other party. If he made a pick that would serve for a substantial amount of time and they were seen as insufficiently conservative it could damage Christie’s standing with Republicans nationally, while an unequivocally conservative pick could hurt Christie’s bipartisan branding. Allowing his choice to serve for only a few months will almost assuredly burnish Christie’s magnanimous reputation while also decreasing the spotlight on the appointment — and the chance it could reflect negatively on him.

Well played, Christopher, well played.

Elvis (Impersonator) Has Left the Building

It's now official. Paul Kevin Curtis, the Elvis impersonator originally accused of being the Mississippi ricin mailer, has been exonerated, and Wayne Newton impersonator James Everett Dutschke has been indicted:

A federal grand jury has indicted a Mississippi man suspected of sending poison-laced letters to President Barack Obama and other officials, according to an indictment made public Monday.

The 5-count indictment charges 41-year-old James Everett Dutschke (pronounced DUHS’-kee) with developing, producing and stockpiling the poison ricin, threatening the president and others and attempting to impede the investigation.

………

George Lucas, an attorney for Dutschke, said he had not yet seen the indictment and had no immediate comment.

Dutschke is the second person to face charges in the case.

Paul Kevin Curtis, a 45-year-old Elvis impersonator, was arrested on April 17, but the charges were dropped six days later.

So yes, the Wayne Newton impersonator attempted to frame the Elvis impersonator, and he got caught, and now his lawyer, George F%$#ing Lucas is waiting for the details.

This is beyond the wildest dreams of the writers for The Daily Show or The Onion.

Background here.

4th F%$#ing Shirt This F%$#ing Years

Yes, I put a pen in my pocket without putting the cap on, and ruined yet another shirt.

I'm thinking that I may have to start wearing a pocket protector, which would make my transition to poster child for sex without partners complete.

Damn!

Well, Duh………

Better than ST:TNG

The Writers Guild of America has the original Star Trek series higher than they did Star Trek: The Next Generation:

The Writers Guild of America has announced the 101 best written TV shows of all time, and I would like to draw your attention to a small excerpt from the list:

33. Star Trek

79. Star Trek: The Next Generation

I am not surprised.

In my opinion, the best written SF show around the time of ST:TNG was ALF.

Notwithstanding the fact that Jean Luc Picard might have been a better captain than James T. Kirk, particularly if I were Ensign Liebowitz of Starship Security, the characters never worked as well.

You could see Kirk being adored by the crew, while Picard was distance, intellectual, and sarcastic; the sort of commander who you would call "The Old Man", when he wasn't around.

Spock not wanting to move onto command worked, it was completely absurd for Riker.

And let's not go with the "Ships Counselor", or Wil Wheaton's first turn in the series as the boy genius.

Geebus, it sucked.

As an aside, I am heartened that The Prisoner was on the list as well, though I would have put that at number 1.

Medicare Trust Fund Lifetime Extended

Score another one for Obamacare, the exhaustion date for the exhaustion of the Medicare trust fund has been pushed back:

Falling health-care costs are brightening the financial outlook for Medicare, extending the life of the trust fund that supports the program until 2026 — two years later than previously forecast.

The new projections, released Friday by the program’s trustees, credit President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in part for the improvement in the finances of the federal health insurance program for the elderly. The act’s limits on Medicare Advantage, a more expensive form of Medicare run by private insurers, are proving more effective than previously forecast, the report said.

The trustees also cited lower-than-expected spending in “most . . . service categories — especially skilled nursing facilities,” a development that is not well understood. Costs have been slowing throughout the health-care industry, partly because of the recent recession, economists say, but also because of what appear to be more fundamental changes aimed at reducing waste and improving health outcomes.

This is particularly interesting when juxtaposed against the New York Times article on the pricing of colonoscopies:

A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing, aside from setting payment rates for Medicare and Medicaid, the government programs for older people and the poor. Many other countries deliver health care on a private fee-for-service basis, as does much of the American health care system, but they set rates as if health care were a public utility or negotiate fees with providers and insurers nationwide, for example.

………

But she noted that gastroenterologists in Austria do have their financial concerns. They are complaining to the government and insurers that they cannot afford to do the 30-minute procedure, with prep time, maintenance of equipment and anesthesia, for the current approved rate — between $200 and $300, all included. “I think the cheapest colonoscopy in the U.S. is about $950,” Dr. Ferlitsch said. “We’d love to get half of that.”

Dr. Cesare Hassan, an Italian gastroenterologist who is the chairman of the Guidelines Committee of the European Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, noted that studies in Europe had estimated that the procedure cost about $400 to $800 to perform, including biopsies and sedation. “The U.S. is paying way too much for too little — it leads to opportunistic colonoscopies,” done for profit rather than health, he said.

The real problem here is that prices are are not transparent, and they are excessive to boot, being many times for routine procedures compared to the rest of the industrialized world.

The idea of market driven healthcare does not work, because there is no transparency in pricing, and even if there were, much of the time there is no opportunity to engage the market as a rational actor (auto accident, gun show wound, etc.).

It's why, even with its apparent benefits, Obamacare, does not address the core of the problem, which is that healthcare in the US is tremendously overpriced.

Why Species Patents Suck, Part Gazillion

Stuck in the middle of an article about the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS) is this tidbit about how a lab is claiming all rights to its genome, impeding research on the illness:

But impeding an effective response is a dispute over rights to develop a treatment for the virus. The case brings to the fore a growing debate over International Health Regulations, interpretations of patent rights, and the free exchange of scientific samples and information. Meanwhile, the epidemic has already caused forty-nine cases in seven countries, killing twenty-seven of them.

At the center of the dispute is a Dutch laboratory that claims all rights to the genetic sequence of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus [MERS-CoV]. Saudi Arabia's deputy health minister, Ziad Memish, told the WHO meeting that "someone"--a reference to Egyptian virologist Ali Zaki--mailed a sample of the new SARS-like virus out of his country without government consent in June 2012, giving it to Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam.

"The virus was sent out of the country and it was patented, contracts were signed with vaccine companies and anti-viral drug companies, and that's why they have a MTA [Material Transfer Agreement] to be signed by anybody who can utilize that virus, and that should not happen," Memish said.

Though Memish referred to a "patent," the Dutch team has not patented the viral genetic sequence but has placed it under an MTA, which requires sample recipients to contractually agree not to develop products or share the sample without the permission of Erasmus and the Fouchier laboratory. Memish said that the Dutch MTA was preventing Saudi Arabia from stopping the MERS-CoV outbreak, which appears to have started eleven months ago in the Eastern part of his country. The Dutch team denies the MTA is slowing work on the outbreak, saying it has given virus samples to any lab that has requested it.

If you thought that the idea of patenting software was bad, patenting genes and species is a whole new level of f%$#ed up.

In today's world, when we are in the middle of a potential epidemic, our first priority is to make the world safe for scumbag profiteers.

Call Your Congress Critter

The SHIELD act has been proposed to to rein in patent trolls:

Shell companies that threaten legal action over patent infringement without actually producing anything themselves could be driven out of business if the newly proposed and risibly backronymed Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act becomes law.

In an all-too-rare display of US congressional bipartisanship, representatives Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) announced the legislation, which would make the infringement accuser liable for both sides' legal fees should they lose. Universities and companies that actually produce an end-product to sue about are exempt.

"These trolls are hampering innovation, slowing companies down and locking them up in lawsuits," said Chaffetz at a press conference.

Basically, it requires the trolls to cover the other side's court costs unless they can show that their suit had a reasonable chance of success, which means that fighting the trolls becomes a lot cheaper.

BTW, much like the banking system, much of the dysfunction in the banking system goes back to the Clinton administration"

In 1994, Bill Clinton broke the long-standing and utterly sensible tradition that an actual patent lawyer should be Commissioner of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and instead appointed Bruce Lehman, who was at the time the chief lobbyist for the Software Publishing Industry.

Under Lehman's leadership, the USPTO changed the rules to allow much broader patents to be issued, often spanning completely different technological areas. These types of patents are the troll's weapon of choice, with some so broad they could cover pretty much anything on the internet, for example. At the same time the amount of patents issued by the office began to increase.

Lehman was also one of the main authors of the widely reviled Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and helped negotiate the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights trade agreement. In 2006, he was inducted into the first International IP Hall of Fame by Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) magazine.

One of the distressing characteristics of the Clinton administration was its embrace of rent seeking as an economic model, whether it be banksters or patent trolls.

Read This

This is a devastating take-down of the culture of high finance. What's more, it does so from a sociological and anthropological perspective, as opposed to a conventional economics analysis, which suits my temperament better:

The excessive pay can be interpreted as a sign of unfair or inefficient markets. It is that, but I think the deeper cause is not so much economic as sociological. Financiers have persuaded the broader society that they are modern aristocrats. Pampered lives are part of the package. They go along with an unthinking sense of entitlement and a mix of self-righteousness and self-centredness, with just a hint of condescending tolerance for limited criticism.

Of course, today’s financial aristocracy is different from traditional nobility. The contemporary titles (partner, managing director) and privileges (first-rate education, political influence) are not exactly hereditary, and long hours on the job have replaced a life of leisure. But I believe the commonalities are more significant.

………

In my view, the sociological analysis provides more insight into the industry’s condition than the more common argument about “heads I win, tails you lose” incentives. I rarely meet financiers who would admit to being reckless or wasteful. What I observe is sublime and blind self-confidence.

Living largely with other members of their caste, they rarely have doubts. To them, more finance is always better than less and higher margins always better than lower. They welcome the development of more complicated financial products; they don’t worry much about the effect of these products on the rest of the economy.

Read the whole thing.

I think that his analysis is spot on, though his last 'graph is a bit too optimistic for my taste.

Neat Tech

Specifically, among other whiz bang, they are using cell phone camera technology in order to make cheaper missile sensors: (paid subscription required)

One program singled out for praise is wavefront coding, envisaged as a way of potentially reducing weight and complexity of the seeker optics in the front of a weapon. The idea—which has been developed to keep cell phone cameras inexpensive—is being examined by experts from MBDA, Selex ES and two universities in Scotland. In current missiles, heavy optics are necessary because the seekers have to operate in a wide range of temperatures, requiring correcting lenses and complex surfaces in order to maintain acceptable performance.

Wavefront coding introduces a simpler seeker layout and software processing, eliminating the need for the correcting optics. Designers place a cubic phase mask in one of the optics , which disrupts and aberrates the normal image. But knowledge of the characteristics of the phase mask means that software processing can be applied to allow sharp images to be recovered, even for objects well outside of the conventional depth-of-field of the original optical arrangement. Engineers point out that this could help reduce weight of current missiles by as much as 10%.

I always wondered how cell phones managed to "focus".

I always figured that they weren't using conventional moving lenses, there is not a whole bunch of space for that, and mechanical actuators at that size could drive up the price.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!! (On Saturday)

And here it is, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

14. Banks of Wisconsin d/b/a Bank of Kenosha, Kenosha, WI

Full FDIC list

Still averaging less than one failure a week.

So, here is the graph pr0n with last few years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

Gee, Another Case Where the Chain of Command Does the Wrong Thing When Sexual Assault is Alleged

In this case, it's the Naval Academy in Annapolis:

Three football players at the U.S. Naval Academy are under investigation in an alleged sex assault involving a female midshipmen almost a year ago, according to a Defense Department official.

According to the official, the three midshipmen were first accused by her at the time of the alleged incident, but she dropped her complaint a few months after the incident. She then made a complaint again earlier this year, and the investigation is now underway by the Navy. The alleged victim's lawyer, Susan Burke, said her client has participated in wiretapping as part of the investigation at the request of NCIS.

Normally, I would not be sure if this is a military thing, or if it is a sports thing, but reading this:

In a statement to CNN, attorney Susan Burke said the woman went to an off-campus party at a "football house" in April 2012 and became intoxicated, and woke up there the next morning "with little recall" of what occurred.

"She learned from social media and from friends that three football players had claimed to have had sexual intercourse with her while incapacitated," Burke said.

She reported the incident to Navy authorities and explained that she could not provide much information because she had been intoxicated, Burke said.

Burke said the woman was disciplined for drinking and the case was closed without further action by the academy.

Leads me to believe that the problem here is not sports culture, but military culture.

At this point that non only does sexual assault need to be moved out of the chain of command under the UCMJ, but every crime not directly related to military operations and discipline needs to be moved out of the chain of command.