One Less Reason to Go to Cleveland

I no longer have the slightest desire to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

It used to be that the Grammys came up with the most irresponsible assessment of popular music, overlooking important artists during their best years (and sometimes apologizing with belated lifetime achievement awards). Recently, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has surpassed the Grammys dubious track record, and this year brings the group to what may be a new low. The Hall’s new slate involves turning down several worthy nominees for the sake of inducting Steve Miller, Deep Purple, and Chicago. If these are the bands most suitable for honoring, the hall should just fold itself up and go home.

I want to have nothing to do with any organization that has the Steve Miller Band as a member.

Putin Wins Troll of the Day Award

It is now confirmed Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is just f%$#ing with us:

Vladimir Putin handed out a couple of ringing—if not entirely official—endorsements to two of this year's most notorious men: Donald Trump and suspended FIFA President Sepp Blatter. During his annual press conference on Thursday, the Russian president praised Donald Trump, calling the frontrunner in the Republican primary race a "bright and talented person," according to the Associated Press. He also welcomed Trump's calls for improved U.S-Russia relations.

A recurring theme among GOP presidential candidates is whether they possess the negotiating chops to deal with the Russian strongman. It appears Trump and Putin would be bosom buddies. (Trump has previously said he thinks he'd get along with Putin "very well.")

Putin also handed out praise to Sepp Blatter, who's facing a criminal investigation in Switzerland for allegations of corruption. Blatter, Putin said, is "a very well respected person."

"He has always tried to treat football not as a sport but as an element of cooperation between countries and peoples," Putin added. "He is the one who must be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."

 Seriously, he is just poking us with a stick for his personal amusement.

The Past 48 Hours in Criminal Justice has Been a bit of a Roller Coaster

Yesterday, I looked out the window at work, and saw 2 helicopters hovering about 5000 feet up in the general direction of Lexington Market.

On closer examination, I noticed that they were both news choppers, as I saw the cameras, and I figured that something had happened in the first Freddie Gray trial.

It turned out that we had a hung jury and a mistrial:

A judge declared a mistrial Wednesday in the case of Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter after jurors said they had failed to reach an agreement on any of the charges against him in the death of Freddie Gray.

The decision, which came a day after jurors told Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry Williams they were deadlocked, frustrated activists who had watched the first trial in Gray's death closely. Outside the downtown courtroom, city officials and community leaders pleaded for calm, and authorities reported two arrests, but no violence or serious disruptions.

Porter, 26, the first of six police officers to be tried in Gray's death, remains charged with involuntary manslaughter, second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and misconduct in office. Gray, 25, died in April after suffering a severe spinal cord injury in the back of a police van.

Jurors deliberated for three days before Williams declared the mistrial. The decision now throws the other trials into flux.

Prosecutors chose to try Porter first, planning to use him as a witness at the trial of Officer Caesar Goodson. Goodson, who is charged with second-degree murder, was slated for trial in the first week of January.

I can't imagine that the States Attorney Marilyn Mosby is not going to announce her intention to retry him soon.

Even ignoring the political overtones, if she gives up, she has no leverage at all about getting him to testify against his superiors.

Even so, it's kind of depressing.

On the other hand, the announcement that "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli had been arrested for securities fraud:

It has been a busy week for Martin Shkreli, the flamboyant businessman at the center of the drug industry’s price-gouging scandals.

He said he would sharply increase the cost of a drug used to treat a potentially deadly parasitic infection. He called himself “the world’s most eligible bachelor” on Twitter and railed against critics in a live-streaming YouTube video. After reportedly paying $2 million for a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, he goaded a member of the hip-hop group to “show me some respect.”

Then, at 6 a.m. Thursday, F.B.I. agents arrested Mr. Shkreli, 32, at his Murray Hill apartment. He was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn on securities fraud and wire fraud charges.

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

The picture of him being hauled off in handcuffs (above) just made my day. (Does this make me a bad person?)

The comment of the day on this comes from the inimitable Charlie Pierce, "I suppose he could argue for a change of venue, but I think it impractical to delay the trial until we make it to Mars."

Honestly, I think that it would be impossible to find a jury that wouldn't want to give him the death penalty for jaywalking.

This is Repugnant

It appears that the Danes have have become the Donald Trumps of Europe:

Denmark vows to strip refugees of their valuables to help pay for the cost of resettlement. Weddings rings are off limits.

As if refugees needed yet another reason not to want to resettle in Denmark after the country placed “Don’t come here” ads in Arabic newspapers over the summer, now the country warns it will strip immigrants of their valuables.

The latest anti-refugee sentiment came closer to reality on Sunday when Denmark’s parliament debated a measure that would allow border police to strip incoming refugees of all valuables and cash worth over €300 to help offset costs of resettlement, according to Swedish STV television.

After some discussion, the Danish government apparently decided that refugees could keep their wedding rings, cellphones, and laptops in the measure that will eventually go up for a vote. At least one Danish parliamentarian reportedly insisted that wedding rings with a diamond over a certain carat weight should also be confiscated.

Sören Pind, Denmark’s immigration minister, told Danish television that the plan was the only way the country could afford to house the refugees seeking asylum. “I’m talking about a situation in which there are personal items of significant value but no sentimental worth,” Pind told the television station. “I’m talking about a situation in which a man comes along with a case full of diamonds and asks for protection in Denmark. That’s only fair.”

Fair, perhaps, in that strange world in which theft is OK. The measure, whether it eventually passes or not, raises the question of whether certain European countries really think it is OK to repeat the Nazi approach to immigration, during which the confiscation of valuables was the practice.

I'm with the Danish journalist who said, "Having armed men indiscriminately seize refugees’ personal belongings doesn’t strike me as the best representation of a free society."

But wait there's more:

Denmark has promised that any of the 13,000 asylum seekers who are eventually granted a right to stay will be forced to live in segregated tent camps erected in two tent cities and that they will defy European standards and triple the normal waiting period for family reunification as a further deterrent.

So, stealing their stuff, and putting them in internment camps.

This?  From the Danes?

What do they think they are?  Germans?

Another Myth Disproven

The FBI has now made official statements (as opposed to the leaks that they have been feeding the press) regarding the San Bernardino shooters, and there was no proclamation of support for ISIS or any other terrorist group on social media:

There is no evidence a married couple who killed 14 people in California this month were part of a terrorist cell, the head of the FBI said on Wednesday, echoing investigators' views that the pair were inspired by, rather than organized by, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

………

However, he said that while the perpetrators of the Dec. 2 shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. — Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29 — had expressed support for "jihad and martyrdom" in private communications, they never did so on social media.

Just days after the attack, authorities said they were looking into an apparent Facebook post in which Malik had pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Multiple U.S. media outlets reported Malik had expressed "admiration" for al-Baghdadi, but it was under an account that used a different name. The messages were reportedly deleted before the attack, and Facebook quickly removed the account in the wake of the shooting.

Seriously, why does the press continue acting as the FBI's stenographer when the senior officials who leak this crap could not be trusted if they said the sky was blue?

When you get repeatedly burned by a source, they are no longer a source, they are just a random asshole for whom you refuse to take off the record statements.

Can Someone Please Hang Him from the Empire State Building by His Underwear?

Martin Shkreli is at it again:

After dropping $2 million on a Wu-Tang Clan album, the pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has found a new project: making an essential treatment unaffordable for poor immigrants from Latin America.

Shkreli, otherwise known as “pharma bro,” gained notoriety earlier this year when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, increased the price of a drug used to treat AIDS patients from around $13.50 to $750. He’s now the CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, which recently announced its plans to submit benznidazole, a treatment for Chagas disease purchased earlier this month, for Food and Drug Administration approval next year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 300,000 people in the United States have the deadly disease. Most of them are immigrants from Latin America, where as many as 8 million people are infected.

………

Right now, doctors in the U.S. obtain benznidazole free of charge through the CDC. According to Rachel Cohen, the regional executive director of the Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative in North America, the drug sells in Latin America for somewhere between $60 and $100 for each course of treatment. Both of these would change the moment the FDA approved benznidazole from any company—and Shkreli, in particular, seems determined to price this drug out of reach of the people who need it. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, KaloBios wrote that it expects to price the Chagas drug similarly to antivirals for Hepatitis C, which can cost almost $100,000 for a single course of treatment in the United States.

………

The CDC currently purchases benznidazole from a Brazilian company. They used to send less than a dozen treatments a year to physicians across the country, according to Susan Montgomery, who leads the epidemiology team at the CDC’s Parasitic Diseases Branch. But after blood banks started testing people for Chagas in 2007, that number spiked.

In theory, FDA approval for benznidazole would make it more accessible to patients: Right now, because benznidazole isn’t approved, a patient who needs the drug has to be enrolled in a clinical trial in order to receive it from the CDC. In practice, though, the current plans for pricing will negate any good that could come from removing the drug’s “experimental” label.

………

Recently, the FDA added Chagas to a special program for neglected diseases. If a pharmaceutical company submits a drug for a disease on the program’s list, the FDA gives the company a “priority review voucher.” That voucher lets companies bring another drug to the FDA for expedited review, usually around six months between submitting the application and receiving a decision (a process that usually takes years. The hope is that the program will incentivize companies to invest in new treatments for neglected diseases that afflict the poorest regions of the world. But companies aren’t required to come up with new drugs to get those fast-track vouchers. The drugs only have to be new to the FDA. (Companies can also sell those vouchers for big money—last August, for example, United Therapeutics sold its voucher for $350 million.)

Last month, Doctors Without Borders, joined by a number of other public-health organizations, asked the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to amend this voucher program. The groups argued that companies should be eligible only if they actually invest in researching and developing new treatments for neglected diseases, and that they should be required to submit a strategy for how they would keep the drugs accessible for patients.

“If this price hike were to happen, it would be a complete disaster for Chagas patients in the United States,” Cohen said. “People affected by this disease in the United States are poor, are marginalized, have very limited access to health care to begin with. It would be catastrophic.”

2 years ago, on the occasion of actor Jack Klugman's death, I noted that one of the things that he was lauded for was lobbying for the Orphan Drug Act of 1983.

I took issue, and said that the effect of the act was to manufacture non-patent monopolies that primarily served to raise the cost of drugs through rent-seeking behavior.

The IP restrictions and incentives that are a part of the US medication development regime are killing and impoverishing us.

How about price controls and compulsory licensing?  That sounds good.

Umm ……… Stephen, We Need to Talk

Click for Full Size

---

The resemblance is striking

It appears that you closely resemble a scientific reconstruction of the appearance of Jesus.

You are a bit paler, but summers in Seattle would do that to you.

Perhaps you should consider a career as a false messiah.

As L. Ron Hubbard once said, "If you want to get rich, you start a religion."

CalPERS Blinks

After an increasing chorus of criticism the largest pension fund in the nation, CalPERS, has abandoned its plans to relax standards in order to favor private equity:

The state’s biggest public pension fund has repeatedly missed a key performance goal for its controversial private equity investments.

But a CalPERS committee said Monday that the fund’s staff could not strip language from a written policy that required them to aim to meet that benchmark – returns roughly 3% higher than the stock market to compensate for private equity’s risk.

By voice vote, the committee defeated the proposal to change the policy so that the new objective would have been simply “to enhance” the pension fund’s private equity returns.

………

The suggested policy change had been criticized by financial experts who said it would clear the way for CalPERS to continue to invest in the complex Wall Street sector – the buying and selling of companies -- without requiring higher returns to compensate for the added risk.

"This is outrageous," Eileen Appelbaum, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank, said before the meeting. "CalPERS can't get over the goal, now plans to do away with goal post.”

………

The proposed policy change came after many years where CalPERS failed to meet the so-called "risk-adjusted" benchmark.

For the year ended June 30, for instance, private equity earned a seemingly healthy 8.9%, but that was lower than the 11.1% goal.

A recent report by a CalPERS' consultant acknowledged that the private equity investments had also failed to beat benchmarks over the last three, five and 10 years.

Appelbaum said that CalPERS would have made the same amount over the last 10 years if it would have just invested in the stock market – but without the added risks or high fees.

(emphasis mine)

I would note that the abuse of private equity by CalPers, and the increasing furor over its backflips to favor private equity is a direct result of the investigations, and aggressive use of freedom of information act requests, by Yves Smith and the Naked Capitalism team, who have been on this like white on rice.

One think that I have not figured out yet is why CalPERS has been so insistent in pursuing a failed strategy.

The cynic in me assumes that there is some sort of corruption involved.

The realist sees this being driven by blind panic as a historically underfunded institution flails around searching for a magic bullet.

I'm not sure which analysis frightens me more.

Predictably Depressing

It appears that the overwhelming majority of Americans now consider mass shootings to be a regular fact of life:

A new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a whopping 71% of Americans surveyed believe the many shootings and other acts of mass violence in we've seen in 2015 are now a permanent part of life in our country.

That's compared with just 21 percent of Americans who think the violence this year -- from Charleston, S.C., and Oregon, to the terrorist shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. -- has been unusual and won't happen as often in the future. 

America is broken.

Well, This Explains a Lot

It turns out that some police departments reject candidates for being too smart:

A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test.

“This kind of puts an official face on discrimination in America against people of a certain class,” Jordan said today from his Waterford home. “I maintain you have no more control over your basic intelligence than your eye color or your gender or anything else.”

He said he does not plan to take any further legal action.

Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.

Whistleblowers are not ordinary people.  "Good Germans" are ordinary people.

My guess is that the cops found that a high score was too tightly correlated to people who would make waves or turn whistleblower.

Deep Thought

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

I Think that We Just Had an Outbreak of Sanity at Foggy Bottom

In a major policy shift Secretary of State John Kerry has just specifically stated that regime change in Syria the US is not seeking regime change in Syria:

Secretary of State John Kerry pressed ahead on Tuesday in the effort to organize a new round of talks aimed at ending the Syrian civil war that could also align the United States and Russia more closely in strategies for fighting the Islamic State.

After an extended trip to Paris for climate talks, Mr. Kerry met for nearly four hours on Tuesday evening with President Vladimir V. Putin in the Kremlin, in talks intended to smooth differences over a planned round of Syria negotiations scheduled to take place in New York on Friday.

The United States and Russia have long been at odds over Syria, with Russia standing firmly by President Bashar al-Assad and the United States backing the rebels seeking his ouster. A previous attempt to broker a solution to the conflict failed, and it remains unclear whether the two sides will reach a compromise this time.

Among the issues to be decided in the run-up to the proposed talks is which of the dozens of militias fighting in Syria should speak for the Syrian opposition, and which should be designated as terrorist organizations.

On Tuesday, the diplomats said they had narrowed a gap on defining which Syrian militias belonged on a terrorist list. A final list may be ready Friday, Mr. Kerry said.

………

Mr. Kerry appeared, more carefully than on previous occasions, to couch America’s insistence that Mr. Assad leave office as a recondition of any settlement.

The United States, he said, was not seeking Mr. Assad’s ouster per se, but rather considers it unlikely that he could preside over a successful settlement.

“The United States and our partners are not seeking regime change in Syria,” Mr. Kerry said. Syrian opposition groups arriving for talks Friday in New York should not demand as a condition of sitting down that Mr. Assad depart immediately, Mr. Kerry said, a position Russia calls a nonstarter for negotiations.

“We see Syria fundamentally very similarly,” Mr. Kerry said. “We want the same outcomes, we see the same dangers, we understand the same challenges.” He added that the countries are “honest with differences.”

(Emphasis mine)

It's nice that the US is finally distancing itself from the destructive and dangerous agenda of the House of Saud and the rest of the petty Persian Gulf monarchs, if only a bit.

Hard Core Badass!

Charlie, my son, and section leaders for the percussion section, was practicing in band for this Thursday's concert.

He was playing the bongos, and there was an incident.

I got the following texts:

I pulled a Pete Townshend.

………

I was playing the bongo part when I looked down and saw pink on one of the heads. I played too hard and the skin came off one of my knuckles.

I replied:

Thank God you didn't pull a Keith Moon.

We would have to pay to rebuild the f%$#ing stage.

No worries, 'Tis but a scratch.

He's still good for the concert.

David Whorowitz Strikes Again

In case you are unaware, David Whororitz is a self styled expert on the Middle East and Islam.

He's a nut and a bigot.

It's kind of like Nathan Bedrord Forrest claiming to be an expert on Civil rights.

Well, he's come up with a list of the 10 most anti Semitic and pro-Muslim colleges in the country, and one of them is a complete mind f%$#, Brandeis University.

That's right, he's calling what is arguably the most Jewish non-sectarian school in the nation a den of anti-Semitic Muslim extremists:

David Horowitz used to hang at the Café a lot. In fact, when we first opened, he was here for lunch every day. [Charle's Pierce's, have some stupid for lunch cafe] We haven't seem much of him, largely because he'd been obscured by the lunch rush of customers that we now get every day. So it was nice to see him pop up in his old booth today. Edroso, our brilliant daytime bartender, spotted him first.

Harvard, Columbia, and Brandeis are among 10 leading American universities named by the David Horowitz Freedom Center as being the "most friendly" to radical Islamic propaganda and anti-Israel incitement.

Contemptible, bigoted, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

MERS is In the News Again.

I am referring to the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, not Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

To refresh your memory, it is an electronic registry created by the big banks.

They created it to evade registry fees when they sliced and diced mortgages, and sold them to greater fools.

Additionally, it creates a shell game where all sorts of skulduggery is hidden in a labyrinth of obfuscation.

The banks, and MERS, have claimed that it does, and does not, own the mortgage, and now the Tennessee Supreme Court has ruled that they have no property interests in the mortgages that they transfer:

Chattanooga, Tennessee — The Chattanoogan.com news site is reporting that in a lawsuit filed to set aside a tax sale of mortgaged land in Hamilton County, the Tennessee Supreme Court has held that Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. was not entitled to prior notice of the sale because MERS did not have an interest in the land that is protected under the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution!

READ THE OPINION HERE: MERS v DITTO_TN Supreme Court rules against MERS! The Tennessee Supreme Court is the first to rule in such a manner!

The site is reporting that the purchaser of the Hamilton County land borrowed money from a MERS member lender, signing a promissory note secured by the property by a deed of trust, which was recorded in the Hamilton County Register of Deeds office. The deed of trust described MERS as “a separate corporation that is acting solely as nominee for [the lender]” and said that MERS was the beneficiary of the deed of trust “solely as nominee” for the lender and any successor to the lender. As is customary in the MERS® System, the originating lender sold the note to another lender. Subsequent to that, the property owners failed to pay their 2006 property taxes, so Hamilton County initiated tax foreclosure proceedings.

The county sent notice of the foreclosure and the tax sale to the borrowers and to the original lender, but not to MERS. Eventually, the property was sold at a tax sale to Carlton Ditto. Just like in the Cabrera, Robinson and Johnston cases in California, after learning of the action, MERS filed a lawsuit to set aside the tax sale, naming Hamilton County and Mr. Ditto as defendants. MERS argued that Hamilton County violated its constitutional right to due process of law by selling the land without notifying MERS. This crap is the same argument propounded in the California cases, where MERS claimed that the deed of trust gave MERS its own independent interest in the Hamilton County property, so it was constitutionally entitled to prior notice of the tax sale. In California, MERS also wanted the courts to rule that the California Quiet Title Statutes were unconstitutional and that the judges who rendered the quiet title judgments in all three cases were civil co-conspirators, something this blogger has learned has infuriated the state judges! (I sure hope MERS doesn’t show up in front of one of them any time soon! LOL)

………

The Supreme Court considered whether Hamilton County was required to give MERS prior notice of the tax sale. The Court recognized that the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution generally applies when the government sells a taxpayer’s land to satisfy unpaid taxes, so if the government fails to give the taxpayer such notice, the sale is unconstitutional and void. The Court then considered whether MERS had an interest in the land that was protected under the Constitution. The Court first noted that the deed of trust for the Hamilton County transaction used contradictory language to describe the role of MERS in the property loan transaction; it described MERS as a “beneficiary” but also said that MERS acted “solely as nominee” for the lender. Considering the parties’ roles in the loan transaction, the Court also held that MERS was not in fact a beneficiary but only an agent for the true beneficiary, the note holder, and that MERS acquired no independent interest in the Hamilton County land. Because MERS did not have an interest that was constitutionally protected, Hamilton County was not required to give MERS notice before it sold the land to pay the unpaid tax obligation. For this reason, the Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s judgment in favor of Hamilton County and the tax sale purchaser, Mr. Ditto.

………

From gandering at the opinion issued by the Court, it appears they quoted MERS’s own counsel on company policies! Many attorneys have told me, as have certain legislators in DC, that just because MERS has a “business model” doesn’t mean: (1) it’s perfectly okay to rip off 3,007 counties across America in denying fees while obfuscating the real parties in interest from the borrowers; and (2) it should be accorded the same interests as the Lender, especially when the Lender doesn’t have a recorded (perfected) interest that still could be challenged.

(emphasis original)

Mortgage and property law has developed over hundreds of years through trial and error.

This process was pushed along by the very real need for property owners, lenders, and local governments to have certainty and protections on a process that would otherwise be rife with criminality and risk.

MERS was developed to short circuit that process, and it's nice that some courts are recognizing that just because someone in Wall Street comes up with a way to make money, it doesn't mean that it is legal.

FYI, you can also read a somewhat more sedate account of these cases, you can go here.

It's Back

After having their plans to thwarted by activists, CISA is back:

US librarians have joined with a host of civil liberties groups to condemn a cybersecurity bill now passing through Congress they claim will be both “unhelpful” and “dangerous to Americans’ civil liberties”.

The American Library Association, the world’s oldest and largest library affiliation, has joined with 18 other groups including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and FreedomWorks to issue a letter to the White House and Congress urging lawmakers to oppose the final version of a bill they claim will dramatically expand government surveillance while failing to tackle cyber-attacks.

Politicians from both sides of the House have been pushing for stronger cybersecurity measures in the wake of the Paris attacks and the recent San Bernardino shooting.

Republican House speaker Paul Ryan has been leading the charge to push through legislation and reconcile two bills, the Protecting Cyber Networks Act (PCNA) and the National Cybersecurity Protection Advancement with the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (Cisa), a controversial bill that passed a Senate vote in October.

The speed with which Ryan is trying to push through a compromise has worried privacy activists. “We’ve just learned that the Intelligence Committees are trying to pull a fast one,” Nathan White, senior legislative manager at digital rights advocate Access, said in a recent email to supporters. “They’ve been negotiating in secret and came up with a Frankenstein bill – that has some of the worst parts from both the House and the Senate versions.”

• According to the letter’s signatories, the proposed “conference” legislation would:
• Create a loophole that would allow the president to remove the Department of Homeland Security, a civilian agency, as the lead government entity managing information sharing.
• Reduce privacy protections for Americans’ personal information.
• Overexpand the term “cyber threat” to facilitate the prosecution of crimes unrelated to cybersecurity.
• Expand already broad liability protection for information disclosure.
• Pre-empt state, local or tribal disclosure laws on any cyber-threat information shared by or with a state, tribal or local government.
• Eliminate a directive to ensure data integrity.

They are going to keep trying until we put a stake through the heart of the surveillance industrial complex.

Nice Work if You Can Get It

The lobbying operation Purple Strategies is lobbying for the NRA and for the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety:

The growing frequency of mass shootings has done little to change the political stalemate over guns in Washington, with gun rights and gun control groups each declaring that the latest massacre — for now, the one in San Bernardino — supports their diametrically opposed arguments.

In this environment, no one can predict the future of gun policy in America. But at least one thing is certain: The team of political consultants at Purple Strategies will get paid.

The partners at Purple Strategies — a bipartisan lobbying firm and consulting agency formed in 2008 through a merger of Issue & Image, a Democratic-led company, and National Media, a Republican campaign firm — have developed business relationships on both sides of the gun control debate, working with both the National Rifle Association and Everytown for Gun Safety, the umbrella organization for pro-gun control advocacy groups.

Everytown did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Officials from the NRA declined to provide a comment for this article — although they did ask us for more information about Everytown’s ties to Purple Strategies.

A spokesperson for Purple Strategies denied that the firm has relationships on both sides of the gun policy debate.

………

We had asked Morgante to describe what appeared to be a close relationship between Purple and National Media, Red Eagle Media Group, and the American Media & Advocacy Group, all of which had done work for the NRA.

“The founding partners of Issue & Image and National Media Public Affairs founded Purple, however, Purple Strategies operates independently and does not share clients or employees with any other company that you referenced,” Morgante wrote.

Notwithstanding Morgante’s claims, however, documents and business filings reviewed by The Intercept show considerable overlap between National Media and Purple Strategies when it comes to clients, staff, office space, and leadership.

Consider how this works for gun-related clients:

Everytown and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, two groups heavily funded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg to enact gun restrictions, have relied on Purple Strategies’ Margie Omera and her firm, Momentum Analysis, for multiple polling services in 2014 and this year. Momentum Analysis was acquired by Purple Strategies in 2013. In a memo to Everytown, Omera identified herself as working for Purple Insights, “the in-house opinion research group at Purple Strategies.”

The NRA’s relationship with Purple and National Media is obscured through a network of affiliate companies. But documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission show that the NRA regularly buys political advertising through American Media & Advocacy Group and Red Eagle Media, two firms that share an address in Alexandria, Virginia, with Purple Strategies and National Media.

Records maintained by the Alexandria Circuit Court reveal that Red Eagle Media is an “assumed or fictitious” business created and owned by National Media. Robin Roberts, a co-founding partner of Purple Strategies and the president of National Media, registered the name.

They are laughing their way to the bank.

We are So Going to Get Hammered Later this Winter

It's December 14th, and it is 65°F (18°C).

This is crazy, and we WILL pay for this on January and February.

Posted via mobile.

Sharia Law in Murfreesboro, Tennessee

It looks like the religious nut-jobs in the Murfreesboro district attorney's office have turned a personal tragedy into an The Handmaiden's Tale by charging a woman who attempted to abort her fetus with first degree murder:

A woman who attempted to perform an abortion with a coat hanger six months into her pregnancy has been indicted on a first-degree attempted murder charge, Murfreesboro Police reported.

Anna Yocca, 31, of 1939 Swindon Circle, was arrested Wednesday at Juvenile Court by Detective Tommy Roberts after the December session of the Rutherford County grand jury issued an indictment on the charge, according to the report. An employee at the Amazon fulfillment center in Lebanon, she was booked into jail on a $200,000 bond.

Roberts began investigating the case in September when evidence showed Yocca went to her upstairs bathroom, filled the tub with water, got in and tried to "self-abort" her pregnancy using a coat hanger, the report shows.

She became "alarmed and concerned for her safety" when she saw a great deal of blood in the tub, and her boyfriend took her to St. Thomas Rutherford Hospital emergency room. From there, she was transported to St. Thomas Mid-Town in Nashville where staff members saved "Baby Yocca," the report shows.

This is the world that anti-abortion forces want.

We've already seen a woman jailed to compel her to carry her fetus to term, a woman charged with murder for taking an abortion drug, prosecuting a mother for helping her daughter obtain an abortion, and passing laws making some miscarriages murder, among other cases in the past few years.

These folks won't be satisfied until every woman in America is back in chains.

(on edit)

The irony here is that a few years back, Murfreesboro was trying to prevent a mosque from being built in the area.

Taliban, Talibaptist, there is no difference.

Good News, at Least in the Short Term

The right wing National Front, after scoring a stunning win in the initial round of regional elections in France, struck out in the 2^nd, and final, round of elections:

France’s far-right Front National has failed to win control of any regions in the final round of local elections despite a historically high score in the first-round when it was ranked as the most popular party in France.

The defeat of FN was down to mass tactical voting, an increase in turnout and warnings by the left that what it called the “antisemitic and racist” party would bring France to its knees. All this combined to stop FN translating its huge first-round score of nearly 28% into the overall control of any region.

After big gains by the Front National in regional elections, leftwing voters in some areas are being asked to vote for the rightwing Les Républicains party

But the far-right party still won a record number of votes in the final round: at least 6.6m, handing a significant boost to the party leader Marine Le Pen’s bid to run for president in 2017.

………

Exit polls on Sunday night showed that, with less than 18 months to go until the next French presidential election, the nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-European FN still gained hundreds of regional councillors across France — tripling its presence on regional councils and extending its nationwide reach, cementing its grassroots powerbase and boosting its quest for power nationwide.  

………

Addressing her supporters, Le Pen presented her party as the victim of “calumny and defamation” by the government who she said had “intimidated and infantilised” voters by teaming up with its rivals on the right to keep FN out of power. She said her party’s rise was inexorable.

She said the tactical voting by leftwingers who chose Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing Les Républicains party in order to put up a “barricade” against FN had already played into her claim that she and her voters were the victims of an elitist system that persecuted them. She vowed during the campaign that her voters would take their revenge by turning out in even greater numbers during the presidential campaign.

Le Pen herself failed to capitalise on her high first-round score in the vast northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, after the Socialist party pulled out of the race and made an extraordinary plea for its voters to choose Sarkozy’s candidate Xavier Bertrand just to stop Le Pen. First estimations showed that Bertrand, Sarkozy’s former employment minister, won with a resounding 57% of the vote, with Le Pen taking 42.8%.

Right wing populist parties, like the FN, live off feelings of betrayal by the "elites", and this election, where Socialist candidates withdrew from the elections to provide a firewall against the FN, plays into this narrative.

I expect for Marine Le Pen to make it into the 2^nd round of the Presidential elections next time around as a result of this.

Considering that both current President Holland and former President Sarkozy are both about as popular as as a case of the Clap, we are going to see a lot more nose holding of voters in upcoming elections.

The Stupid, It Burns Us!!!!!!

The good people of Woodland, North Carolina have defeated a solar power plant in their community, because they don't want it sucking the sunlight away from the crops.

No, I am not joking:

The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don't want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off the kids. "All the young people are going to move out," warned Bobby Mann, a local resident concerned about the future of his burg. Worse, Mann said, the solar panels would suck up all the energy from the Sun.

Another resident—a retired science teacher, no less—expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would block photosynthesis, and prevent nearby plants from growing. Jane Mann then went on to add that there seemed to have been a lot of cancer deaths in the area, and that no one could tell her solar panels didn't cause cancer. “I want information," Mann said. "Enough is enough."

These comments were reported not in The Onion, but rather by the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald. They came during a Woodland Town Council meeting in which Strata Solar Company sought to rezone an area northeast of the town, off of US Highway 258, to build a solar farm. The council not only rejected the proposal, it went a step further, voting for a complete moratorium on solar farms.

To quote the movie Billie Madison, "What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response, were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Antonin Scalia is Too Extreme for ……… Donald Trump?

This is strange beyond belief:

GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump says he does not agree with comments from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia questioning the efficacy of affirmative action.

“I don’t like what he said, no, I don’t like what he said. I heard him, I was like, ‘Let me read it again,’ because I actually read it in print, and I’m going, I read a lot of stuff, and I’m going, ‘Woah,’ ” Trump said in an interview televised Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The billionaire said he thought Scalia’s comments were “very tough to the African-American community.”

Trump, who has supported affirmative action in the past but declined to say whether he was in favor of it today, said he has great friendships with black people.

“I have great African-American friendships,” he said. “I have just amazing relationships. And so many positive things have happened.”

We f%$#ing live in f%$#ing Bizarro World.

I think that this was an authentic statement from Trump, but honestly, I'm not sure when he is sincere, and when he is just trolling.

Will Ferrel Does George Bush on SNL, and it is Brilliant

He lambastes the GOP field.

Best quote, "You gotta admit it's a pretty good plot twist that I turned out to be the smart one."

Quote of the Day

I'm sure there are a lot of "good cops." The people I knew from high school who became local cops were bullies and assholes in high school. Maybe they became good cops, too. None of us were exactly perfect in high school. That they were assholes then doesn't mean they stayed assholes. Still, the high school asshole to cop career trajectory was telling.

—Duncan "Atrios" Black

To the degree that I recall what lines of work that my high school classmates went into, I concur on this observation.

Not sure how to fix the fact that police work tends to attract bullies, though.

Nope, No Appearance of Corruption Here

The New York Times has revealed the connections between Joe Biden's lobbyist son, Hunter, and a Ukrainian oligarch:

When Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traveled to Kiev , Ukraine, on Sunday for a series of meetings with the country’s leaders, one of the issues on his agenda was to encourage a more aggressive fight against Ukraine’s rampant corruption and stronger efforts to rein in the power of its oligarchs.

But the credibility of the vice president’s anticorruption message may have been undermined by the association of his son, Hunter Biden, with one of Ukraine’s largest natural gas companies, Burisma Holdings, and with its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, who was Ukraine’s ecology minister under former President Viktor F. Yanukovych before he was forced into exile.

Hunter Biden, 45, a former Washington lobbyist, joined the Burisma board in April 2014. That month, as part of an investigation into money laundering, British officials froze London bank accounts containing $23 million that allegedly belonged to Mr. Zlochevsky.

Britain’s Serious Fraud Office, an independent government agency, specifically forbade Mr. Zlochevksy, as well as Burisma Holdings, the company’s chief legal officer and another company owned by Mr. Zlochevsky, to have any access to the accounts.

But after Ukrainian prosecutors refused to provide documents needed in the investigation, a British court in January ordered the Serious Fraud Office to unfreeze the assets. The refusal by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office to cooperate was the target of a stinging attack by the American ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, who called out Burisma’s owner by name in a speech in September.

………

But Edward C. Chow, who follows Ukrainian policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the involvement of the vice president’s son with Mr. Zlochevsky’s firm undermined the Obama administration’s anticorruption message in Ukraine.

“Now you look at the Hunter Biden situation, and on the one hand you can credit the father for sending the anticorruption message,” Mr. Chow said. “But I think unfortunately it sends the message that a lot of foreign countries want to believe about America, that we are hypocritical about these issues.”

………

Ms. Bedingfield said Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine with his father. She also said that Ukrainian officials had never mentioned Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma to the vice president during any of his visits.

“I’ve got to believe that somebody in the vice president’s office has done some due diligence on this,” said Steven Pifer, who was the American ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. “I should say that I hope that has happened. I would hope that they have done some kind of check, because I think the vice president has done a very good job of sending the anticorruption message in Ukraine, and you would hate to see something like this undercut that message.”

And people wonder why our heartfelt appeals to end corruption in foreign governments are not well received.

Not a Good Sign

One of the features of Obamacare is the not for profit co-ops that are supposed to find an alternative to for profit insurers.

Many of them have failed, and now what is arguably the most successful co-op, Maine's Community Health Options, has shut down individual enrollment:

Community Health Options, a not-for-profit co-op insurance company based in Maine that also sells health plans in New Hampshire, will limit individual enrollments later this month because of “higher-than-expected claims costs.”

It's an inauspicious sign for the company, which was one of the few successful co-ops created by the Affordable Care Act. Twelve of the ACA's 23 co-ops have folded or are in the process of closing down, all of which occurred this year.

Community Health Options is one of three insurers selling individual plans in Maine and one of five insurers in New Hampshire. Both states use the federal HealthCare.gov website for enrollment. The co-op will stop directly enrolling people in individual coverage on Dec. 15, and people who are signing up for its plans through HealthCare.gov will only have until Dec. 26, the co-op said on its website Wednesday.

The decision to halt enrollment early will not affect current members, and Community Health Options still plans on pursuing small employers into next year. “We aim to resume individual enrollment as soon as possible, but in the meantime continue to focus on group business,” CEO Kevin Lewis said in an e-mail Wednesday.

Community Health Options, which has 76,000 members, was one of the only ACA co-ops that didn't lose money out of the gate. Several of the failed co-ops—written into the ACA as an alternative to the so-called public option—lost millions of dollars due to costly claims. Many older and sicker members chose the co-ops during the first two open enrollments due to their low premiums, but they also used a lot of healthcare services, which crushed the co-ops and their limited financial reserves.

The co-ops were supposed to be two things, a weak tea alternative to a public option, and to provide some cost competition with the for profit insurers who dominate their respective markets.

They are failing, and the largest insurer in the US,  UnitedHealth is threatening to leave the exchanges completely.

We are not yet in an adverse selection death spiral, but this is troubling.

It's Tough When Your Sick Fantasy is Revealed as a Sick Fantasy

I am, of course, referring to the "Good guy with a gun" myth.

Jordan Klepper at The Daily Show looks at the efficacy of that mythical figure in some paint ball scenarios.

It ain't pretty.

He gets shot by the gunman, shoots innocent students, and finally gets shot by the police.

Way too many of the ammosexuals have this fantasy of finding a bad guy and shooting them.

That crazy woman who unloaded a clip at a bunch of fleeing shoplifters is a classic example: It wasn't about her trying to help, it was about her seizing an opportunity to go Rambo with her pistol.

Because Comedy Central vids autoplay on some platforms, I have put the video after the break:

Drip, Drip, Drip………

And now the second of Albany's "3 Men in a Room" has been convicted of corruption:

Dean G. Skelos, the former majority leader of the New York Senate, and his son were found guilty of federal corruption charges on Friday, a quick and devastating follow-up punch to the State Capitol, which has seen two entrenched leaders convicted and removed from office in less than two weeks.

The jury in Federal District Court in Manhattan took roughly eight hours over two days to reach its verdict against Senator Skelos, 67, and his son, Adam B. Skelos, 33, finding them guilty of all eight bribery, extortion and conspiracy counts.

The Skeloses were undone by the perversion of a simple fatherly impulse: There was little that the elder Skelos would not do, or ask, for his son. They used the father’s position as majority leader to pressure a Manhattan developer, an environmental technology company and a medical malpractice insurer to provide Adam Skelos with roughly $300,000 via consulting work, a no-show job and a direct payment of $20,000.

Dean Skelos, a Republican from Long Island, had been one of the most powerful men in state government until his arrest this year, and his conviction — along with the conviction of his former colleague, the longtime Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat — is sure to have repercussions beyond the courtroom. As in Mr. Silver’s case, which ended on Nov. 30, the verdict resulted in Mr. Skelos’s expulsion from the State Legislature, where both men had served for more than three decades.

I cannot imagine that UU Attorney Preet Bharara does not his sights on the Governor's office after all of this.

F%$# Donald Trump for Making Boris Johnson Look Wise

The fact that Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who can best be described as little more than a life support system for his hair, can appear wise when talking about Donald Trump is an indication of just how wrong and disturbing the whole phenomenon of Trump's political ascendance is:

London's mayor, the conservative politician Boris Johnson, also chimed in.

"As a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, London has a proud history of tolerance and diversity and to suggest there are areas where police officers cannot go because of radicalization is simply ridiculous," he said.

"The only reason I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump," Johnson quipped.

We live in Bizarro World.

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

Daniel Holtzclaw will likely spend the rest of his life in jail:

After listening to several weeks of testimony and four days of deliberating, a jury has found a former Oklahoma City police officer accused of sex crimes guilty on 18 counts.

Daniel Holtzclaw is accused of sexually assaulting 13 women while on duty as an Oklahoma City police officer.

In August 2014, the state charged Holtzclaw with 36 felony counts of rape, sexual battery, indecent exposure and forcible oral sodomy after the 13 women came forward, claiming the officer assaulted them while they were in custody or inside his police car.

In all, the jury heard 13 accusers’ stories of assault.

………

After four days of deliberating, the jury found Holtzclaw guilty on 18 counts.

They recommend he be sentenced to a total of 263 years.

This is not what I expect from an all white jury in Oklahoma.

Good for the jurors and the prosecutors.

5 Years ago, they probably would not even have charged the guy.

We chan thank Black Lives Matter for this change in attitude.

Seriously Neat Tech

Do you know how GPS works?

Basically, the satellites broadcast the time using very accurate clocks, and the differences in times received from various satellites in different positions allow a receiver to determine its positions.

Well, it looks like someone is on the cusp of using a natural clock to do the same thing, using pulsars: (paid subscription required)

Celestial navigation was a mainstay in the early days of aviation, and astronavigation is still used in nuclear bombers to overcome jamming. Now a European research project has shown the feasibility of employing pulsars for aircraft navigation that is independent of ground- or space-based equipment.

The PulsarPlane project is investigating the use of pulsar signals for real-time navigation and timing, to overcome the vulnerabilities of global navigation satellite systems and reduce operating costs for aviation in the second half of this century.

Begun in 2013 and funded by the European Union’s Framework 7 research program, the project is coordinated by the Dutch aerospace laboratory NLR and involves universities in the Netherlands, Finland, Portugal and Bulgaria.

Pulsars are fast-rotating neutron stars that emit stable, fast electromagnetic pulses with unique periods between 1.4 millisec and 5 sec. and unique shapes. Pulsars are visible from everywhere on Earth and across a wide band of frequencies.

This is insanely cook cool.

And I Sit in Front of My Monitor, Looking lIke a Cow That Just Stepped on Its Own Udder

I've just discovered that, among the international sports federations, the world Soccer organization FIFA is the 2^nd Least corrupt:

A study conducted by Play the Game/Danish Institute for Sports Studies, and published in October 2015, found that on the basic criterion of good governance, Fifa ranks second among the 35 Olympic international sports federations with a Sports Governance Observance index of 67.8 percent.

Yes, the same Fifa that was raided by the police for the second time on Wednesday, resulting in more arrests of its officials. The same Fifa against whose officials US government officials revealed a new indictment that alleges “an even more extensive network of criminal behaviour across dozens of countries and that involved some of the most powerful people in international soccer,” according to The New York Times.

What the f%$#ing f%$3?

We are living in Bizarro world.

H/t Naked Capitalism. 

Today in Stupid

In Marshfield, Wisconsin, a school board member is trying to ban a Muppet book:

File this under "Why even local elections are important."

In Marshfield, Wisconsin, the school board decided last summer to slightly change the curriculum to include kindergarten teachers to read a Muppets-themed book called "For Every Child A Better World." Per the Amazon description of the book, it is about this:

The familiar character of Kermit the Frog teaches young readers about the plight of young children who lack the basic human necessities and the efforts of the United Nations to provide such essentials as housing, water, food, and medical aid.

The goal of reading this book was to help make the little tykes better citizens, something that this world does desperately need.

But one of the school board members, Mary Carney, had a complete breakdown about this book and threatened to not send her kids to her school district. Carney's beef was that she felt that the new curriculum downplayed "American exceptionalism":

As near as I can determine, Marshfield is a place for people who aren't cool enough to live in Wausau, Wisconsin.

Maybe He Will Go to Jail After All

It looks like Andrew Cuomo got a $700,000.00 advance from a subsidiary of News Corp, and then they got a multi-million dollar subsidy:

New York’s state government has committed millions of dollars in taxpayer support to News Corporation for a real estate deal -- less than three years after a subsidiary of that company gave New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo a book deal worth up to $700,000. The commitment was disclosed in documents released by the Port Authority -- an agency jointly controlled by Cuomo and New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

The documents say the Port Authority, News Corporation and 21st Century Fox “have received commitments from New York State” for a “one-time payment of $15 million in 2016 and the utilization of a $15 million” state tax credit as part of the agency’s push to make the companies “anchor tenants” for 2 World Trade Center. The documents say the transactions are part of an initiative to reduce News Corporation’s and 21st Century Fox’s rent payments at the new building by $155 million.

The Cuomo-appointed executive director of the Port Authority, Patrick Foye, told International Business Times Wednesday night that he is recommending that the Port Authority’s board approve the package because, he said, the agency will get significant bang for its buck. “That is objectively a good deal, a good transaction for the Port Authority and the region,” he said.

This is not a surprise.

Murdoch has a long history of using political connections for business advantage, and Andrew Cuomo swims in the sea of corruption that is Albany like a fish.

Be Afraid. Be Very, Very Afraid

Over at the Washington Post, Paul Schwartzman and Jenna Johnson look at the Trump Campaign, and they discover that there is actually a very sophisticated and measured messaging process, not the shoot from the lip perception of "The Donald":

He referred to Mexicans as “rapists,” questioned Sen. John McCain’s status as a war hero, ridiculed the physical appearance of his opponents, falsely claimed that “thousands” in New Jersey cheered as the World Trade Center fell and, this week, called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States.

Despite predictions that such searing, divisive rhetoric and the resulting outcry would cripple his campaign, Donald Trump’s insults and controversial proposals have propelled him to the forefront of the 2016 presidential race — and kept him there.

And while it may seem like a lurching, chaotic campaign, Trump is, for the most part, a disciplined and methodical candidate, according to a Washington Post review of the businessman’s speeches, interviews and thousands of tweets and retweets over the past six months.

Trump delivers scores of promises, diatribes and insults at breakneck speed. He attacks a regular cast of villains including undocumented immigrants, Muslims, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, his GOP rivals and the media. He keeps the narrative arc of each controversy alive with an endless stream of statements, an unwillingness to back down even when he has misstated the facts — and a string of attacks against those who criticize him.

All the while, his supporters see a truth-talking problem solver unlike the traditional politicians who have let them down. Spending remarkably little, he dominates yet another news cycle, and his Republican rivals languish in his shadow.

………

The Post’s analysis found several qualities to Trump’s approach. First is a pattern of experimentation that suggests that he is testing his insults and attacks as he goes along. Like a team of corporate marketers, Trump understands the value of message-testing — but he appears to do it spontaneously, behind the lectern and on live television.

It appears that there is a method to this madness.

To me this is a hell of a lot scarier than him being some loud mouth who accidentally captured the Zeitgeist of the Republican Party, because it means that the next time, it could be worse.

They Don't Even Care How it Looks

The Senate Intelligence Committee issued its torture report.

The unclassified summary was released redacted to the point of incoherence.

The full report was sent to the wWhite House which promptly locked it away and forbade anyone from reading it, regardless of their security clearance.

It's the equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear saying, "La, la, la, I can't hear your!"

One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a highly redacted executive summary of its investigation into the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The 525-page summary was shocking in many of its details, revealing the torture and rape of detainees held in CIA custody and encompassing treatment far in excess of even the torture techniques formally authorized by the Bush administration.

Despite the passage of 12 months, the actual report, comprising 6,700 pages, still has not been made publicly available. In fact, reading it appears to be prohibited among officials in the executive branch. Nearly a month and a half after the report’s initial release, it had not even been taken out of the package in which it was delivered to the Department of Justice and Department of State, according to government lawyers. Even the organization that was the subject of the report, the CIA, tightly controlled internal access and made “very limited use” of it, as had the Department of Defense, the lawyers said in a court filing.

That shunning of the torture report appears to be ongoing and very much by design: It turns out the Department of Justice has “refuse[d] to allow executive branch officials to review the full and final study,” Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy wrote in a letter last month to the attorney general and FBI director, urging that they or their “appropriately cleared” underlings read the full report.

“The legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of executive branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it,” they added.

Elizabeth Beavers, a policy coordinator focusing on torture at Amnesty International, believes that no one in the Obama administration, including at the Department of Justice, has read the full report. “They appear to be taking a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ [stance] with regards to the proof of criminal acts it may contain,” she said. But “for the administration not even to read the whole report, and to look the other way while it is possibly buried or even destroyed, sets a dangerous precedent by excusing major crimes like torture and forced disappearance.”

It appears that Obama is still insisting on ignore the most depraved excesses of the state security apparatus, and someone in his administration is trying to insure that they never have direct knowledge of what was done.

They must think that they won't be subject to the International Criminal Court if they are willfully blind.

Admittedly, my knowledge of international law is limited, but I do not think this argument would wash in The Hague.

There is No Moderate Opposition in Syria

In looking for rebels to supply, the government seems to be unable to fine forces that are not affiliated with terrorists:

Last July, an ultraconservative Islamist rebel group made a splash by publicly offering to work with Western powers to resolve the Syrian civil war and build “a moderate future,” a surprising overture from a force that regularly fights alongside al Qaida loyalists.

But the very next month, the same rebel group eulogized Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban chief who sheltered Osama bin Laden before and after the 9/11 attacks, as a steadfast warrior who embodied “the true meanings of jihad and sincerity.”

The mixed messaging from Ahrar al Sham poses a serious dilemma for the Obama administration and its allies as they determine which rebel militias are acceptable partners in a revived diplomatic effort to resolve the Syrian conflict.

Ahrar al Sham is one of Syria’s largest and most effective rebel forces, and its involvement in – or exclusion from – peace negotiations could determine the viability of any settlement hatched from a new series of negotiations in Vienna. The group is too important to exclude from talks on the country’s future, say officials and analysts who monitor the conflict.

We have created a situation where the government of President Bashar Assad is the closest we have to a non terrorist non jihadi alternative.

We have lost.  Let's cut our losses and get the f%$# out.

Quote of the Day

Here’s what U.S. state and city pension funds are getting this year for the hundreds of millions of dollars in fees they’re forking over to hedge funds: almost nothing.

—Bloomberg Business

Private equity and hedge funds have earned lots of money capitalizing on the panic of underfunded public pensions seeking higher returns to deal with chronic under-funding.

There have been no higher returns, but Wall Street has gotten its vig, some of which, of course, gets recycled back to the campaign funds of politicians who might otherwise provide oversight of the pension funds.

As Yves Smith is wont to say, It's a, "Self licking ice cream cone."

Of Course, Jeb(!) Bush Floats a Conspiracy Theory. That's All He Has Left.

It appears that in an attempt to regain relevance, Jeb(!) Bush has made the accusation that Trump's campaign is a rat-f%$#ing orchestrated by Hillary Clinton:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush responded to a poll promoted by Donald Trump -- which showed the billionaire holding on to 68 percent of his supporters if he ran as an independent -- by floating the theory that the GOP frontrunner's candidacy might be a false flag operation planted by Hillary Clinton.

The tweet may have been in jest, and otherwise Bush has been one of the more vocal critics among the 2016 field of Trump's hardline stances that including banning Muslims from entering the U.S. (Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus -- who persuaded Trump to sign a loyalty pledge to the GOP -- said he didn't agree with the Muslim ban, but refused to criticize Trump further.)

Maybe Donald negotiated a deal with his buddy @HillaryClinton. Continuing this path will put her in the White House. https://t.co/AlvByiSrMn

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) December 8, 2015

Hillary and her Evil Minions^™ aren't that smart.

More importantly, they are not tight lipped enough to pull it off.

If Clinton had done this, someone in her campaign would have already gone to the press claiming that they were the genius behind this.

It Appears That Antonin "Fat Tony" Scalia Thinks That Blacks Are Too Stupid for College

Yes, he actually said that during an affirmative action argument before the Supreme Court:

In the oral arguments Wednesday for a Supreme Court affirmative action case, Justice Antonin Scalia—a well known critic of affirmative action—suggested that the policy was hurting minority students by sending them to schools too academically challenging for them.

Referencing an unidentified amicus brief, Scalia said that there were people who would contend that "it does not benefit African-Americans to -- to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less -- a slower-track school where they do well."

He argued that "most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas."

"They come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they're -- that they're being pushed ahead in -- in classes that are too -- too fast for them," Scalia said.

Remember when I said that I was ready for Scalia to choke on his own bile?

It's not gonna happen.

If it could, he would have been taken to hospital in an ambulance today.

In fact, half the court would have had to be treated for bile suffocation just from the amount that he spewed.