Deep Thought

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Lad I don't know where you've been but I see you won first prize.

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has released more of his emails, and it is pretty clear that he knew that he was poisoning the people of Flint, and he did not care:

Gov. Syder released 1.02 GB of emails in pdf form from various departments in his administration. However, none of them are pre-2014, a time period when many of the decisions regarding Flint’s move to the Flint River as its temporary source of drinking water were being made. Still, there is a LOT of new information in these emails and much of today’s news round-up comes from analysis of them by various news outlets. If you have a burning desire to plow through the gigabyte and change of files, here are the links to all of them:

………

In late March 2013, a full year before Flint switched to the Flint River as the source for its drinking water under the order of its Emergency Manager and with sign-off by their boss State Treasurer Andy Dillon, DEQ officials warned them about the potential for problems. In an email sent on March 26th, Stephen Busch, a staffer in the drinking water division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) informed his superiors about problems they could anticipate making the switch. That email was then forwarded up the food chain to Treasurer Dillon. Here’s are some of the warning flags he raised:

………

Mike Glasgow, Flint’s laboratory and water quality supervisor at the time of the switch to the Flint River made it very clear in an email to DEQ officials that the city’s water treatment plant was not going to be ready to treat river water in time for the conversion from water obtained from the Detroit Water and Sewerage (DWSD). However, his superiors were blowing him off:

………

On September 30th, Gov. Snyder finally acknowledged what nearly everyone else already knew: Flint had a problem with poisoned water and his administration had made mistakes, including not properly treating the water to prevent corrosion. However, it took until November 4th for his administration to finally authorize the installation of the corrosion control equipment:

………

Between Gov. Snyder’s admission and the approval of the corrosion control equipment, DEQ director Dan Wyant, a man with no background in water treatment or water regulations, assured the public that corrosion control had been in place the whole time. By the time he got around to approving the equipment, Flint had already switched back to DWSD water (that is already treated with phosphate for corrosion control.)

All of this happened, by the way, months after the EPA had been pushing them to begin phosphate treatment back in August:

The original docs are at the link along with some damning quote.

I want to see some prosecutions for depraved heart murder.

They knew that they were putting people's lives at risk, and they did not care.

I Would Not Expect This from Him

Neel "Cash and Carry" Kashkari, current president of the Minneapolis Bank of the Federal Reserve and former minion of Goldman "Vampire Squid" Sach, has called for a breakup of the big banks and utility style management of essential financial institutions:

What does one make of it when someone whose career has been based on having powerful friends and contacts at the top levels of the financial services industry appears to be acting as a traitor to his class? In this case, the apparent turncoat is one Neel Kashkari, ex Goldman, ex Treasury, ex Pimco employee, now the new President of the Minneapolis Fed, who in his first speech in his new job, said all sorts of unpleasant truths: the financial crisis imposed huge costs on society as a whole, Dodd Frank didn’t go far enough, the authorities won’t be willing to risk using untested new powers in a financial meltdown and will bail out banks again. He also argued that the financial system was now stable enough to make (by implication overdue) transformative changes to end the “too big to fail” problem, such as breaking up banks and regulating them like utilities. Kashkari plans to come up with a comprehensive plan by year end and is seeking public input, including having expert discussions that will be webcast.

………

This is the guts of Kashkari’s speech:

Now is the right time for Congress to consider going further than Dodd-Frank with bold, transformational solutions to solve this problem once and for all. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is launching a major initiative to develop an actionable plan to end TBTF, and we will deliver our plan to the public by the end of the year. Ultimately Congress must decide whether such a transformational restructuring of our financial system is justified in order to mitigate the ongoing risks posed by large banks.

………

I believe we must seriously consider bolder, transformational options. Some other Federal Reserve policymakers have noted the potential benefits to considering more transformational measures.6 I believe we must begin this work now and give serious consideration to a range of options, including the following:

• Breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities.
• Turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).
• Taxing leverage throughout the financial system to reduce systemic risks wherever they lie.

My guess is that this is an attempt to generate some perceived gravitas as a tactic to be used in bureaucratic, though much like Bernie Sanders, I find this a positive development. (Hillary Clinton is on record as not a big fan of breaking up the big banks)

The House of Saud Surrenders………

Russia and Saudi Arabil have cut a deal to limit the supply of oil.

Unfortunately, the ball is still rolling downhill:

Several top OPEC producers made headlines with Russia on Tuesday, revealing that a secret meeting between their respective energy ministers led to a deal to “freeze” production in an effort to boost oil prices.

The agreement is monumental in the sense that OPEC and Russia are poised to agree to cooperate, the first OPEC and non-OPEC deal in 15 years. At the same time, the deal is a half-measure and will likely be inadequate to substantially rescue oil prices from their rock bottom lows.

………

The real problem for this deal, though, is with Iran, who is unlikely to sign on to a production freeze when its output is still close to sanctions-era levels. With substantial gains in production expected for this year, the deal would be harder to swallow than it would for other OPEC members. Saudi Arabia would be willing to freeze its output if it meant burdening its rival Iran. As a result, Iran’s acquiescence is an open question. "We have not yet reached our level of pre-sanctions production. So when we get there, we will be on an equal level, then we can talk," a senior source told Reuters, pouring cold water on the deal. Venezuelan officials believe they can bring Iran on board, but that remains to be seen.

In short, despite Tuesday’s announcement, implementing the deal will be trickier than it sounds.

The current low oil prices are largely an artifact of a Saudi decision to overproduce in an attempt to drive more expensive fracked oil off the market.

Unfortunately for them, with interest rates being near zero, the frackers can still make payments on their loans, and now we have any number of oil producer nations who continue to overproduce because they are too dependent on oil revenues.

It's a vicious circle.

Today's Must Read

In The Grauniad,^* Thomas Frank makes the obvious point about Hillary Clinton.

Specifically, he notes that Hillary is not a corrupt thrall of the malefactors of wealth, she is a malefactor of wealth herself:

Stunned by the rise of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has been at pains to assure the Democratic rank and file that she too understands their concerns; that just like her rival, she is capable of denouncing wealthy interests, of promising to break up big banks and even of hinting that she might prosecute powerful financiers.

After her landslide defeat in New Hampshire last week, she conceded that “the way too many things were going just wasn’t right”. There was a difference between her and the senator from Vermont, however: she was the candidate who would get things done, who could “actually make the changes that make your lives better”.

………

These are noble sentiments. Unfortunately, what voters are rejecting is not Hillary the Capable; it is the party whose leadership faction she represents as well as the direction in which our modern Democrats have been travelling for decades.

………

Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the president’s few failings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one”.

That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.

Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.

………

In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas – that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization – than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of “intelligent design”. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity. Changing what the Democratic party stands for may ultimately require nothing less than what a certain Vermonter is calling a “political revolution”.

Notwithstanding her prodigious abilities and accomplishment, Hillary Clinton is part of a package with Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was not just a member of the (not thankfully defunct) right wing Democratic Leadership Council, he is one of its founders.

It's not that they are bought and paid for by people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, it's that they ARE the people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and unlike, for instance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they are not willing to separate themselves from those people.

^*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It's nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, "The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad."

AFL-CIO Declines to Endorse Clinton

For a while, at least:

In a win for Bernie Sanders, the AFL-CIO is delaying making it's endorsement in the surprisingly close Democratic presidential primary.

………

"Following recent discussion at the AFL-CIO’s Executive Committee meeting and subsequent conversations with many of you, I have concluded that there is broad consensus for the AFL-CIO to remain neutral in the presidential primaries for the time being and refrain from endorsing any candidate at this moment," Trumka said in the email.

Oh to be a fly on the wall for that Executive Committee meeting.

My guess is that committee did not want to deal with a pissed off rank and file, particularly when they want to energize them in the general election.

Also, I think that they are beginning to doubt her inevitability.

The NSA's Whiz Bang is Short on the Whiz, and Long on the Bang

The NSA has a metadata analysis program in South Asia that it used to make up a kill list. It is rather unironically called called SKYNET.

Analysis of the results now indicates that it doesn't work, but drone based terror continues to rain down on innocent civilians:

In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullsh%$." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as "extremists," the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of "20070108" on one of the SKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.

In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that "scientifically unsound" algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.

(%$ mine)

This is why our roving army of flying killing machines is such a bad idea:  If most of the people you kill are innocent, they will have relatives looking to avenge their cowardly assassination.

It's basic human nature.

America's Finest News Source

Obama Compiles Shortlist Of Gay, Transsexual Abortion Doctors To Replace Scalia

Brilliant!

Mount St. Mary's Update: This Is What Happens When You Trust a Finance Guy

William Agee, former CEO of Bendix is a man of many failures, but his destruction of Morrison Knudson is particularly instructive on the skill set of finance types:

………

Mr. Agee further estranged insiders by quietly moving the CEO's office to his Pebble Beach estate, and worse, scoffing at the company's engineer-oriented culture. "You construction guys have been trying to run the company for 75 years," Keith Price, who headed Morrison Knudsen's MK Ferguson unit until he retired in April 1991, recalls Mr. Agee telling him. "Now I'm going to show you how the financial guys do it."

The November letter pointed out just how the financial guy did his numbers. Using numbers available from earnings reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the letter writers pointed out that the percentage of the company's pretax income from nonoperating sources such as asset sales and interest for the five years ending 1993 averaged 43%. In other words, Mr. Agee was sweetening profit reports by selling Morrison off piece by piece, and investing Morrison's cash.

Meanwhile, lease obligations had rocketed. During the five years ended 1993, they had jumped, to $266 million at the end of 1993 from $38 million at the end of 1988. (To shore up cash, Mr. Agee had begun selling assets, such as equipment, and leasing them back, Morrison executives say.)

This is how finance works.  Find out a loophole, and use it to benefit personally, the future be damned.

At Mount St. Mary's, Simon Newman, the recently appointed college President, a hedge fund type, decided to try to expel 5% of the freshman class to create the illusion that the retention rates.

When people complained, he fired them including a tenured professor with no due process.

We are now seeing the push back, with the faculty calling for his resignation by a vote of 87 to 3, which he promptly ignored.

Additionally, the alumni are freaking out, and the The Washington Post condemned the behavior of the President and the Board of Directors in no uncertain terms:

Mr. Newman has only himself to blame for the mess at “the Mount,” as the university is known, despite his and the board of trustees’ despicable efforts to deflect fault to what they regard as a cabal of infidels among the faculty and alumni. It was Mr. Newman who, in a conversation with professors, said that struggling freshmen should be culled in order to improve Mount St. Mary’s student retention rate, which affects its standing in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities.

(Emphasis mine)

When I first posted about this, I jokingly suggested that Newman's plan was to burn down the university for the insurance money.

More and more, it seems like my joke is reality.

Yes

Booman asks the following about the incoherence Conservative ideology which has been limned by the current Republican contest, "Has it always been more a matter of tribalism and a team mentality?"

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

H/t Atrios.

John Oliver Eviscerates Vote Fraud Claims

He comes back from vacation, and he does a deep dive into the mythical voter impersonation problem:



This is some serious whup ass that he unleashes on the new Jim Crow.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We'll Be Lucky to Live through It.

Syria, looks to be going to be going completely pear shaped.

With advances by the Syrian government and by the Kurdish YPG threatening to cut off Turkey's Islamist proxies in Syria, Ankara is shelling the Kurds, attacking what are (for now, at least) US Allies:

France's foreign ministry has urged Turkey to end its assault on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

In a statement (in French) it said it was "worried about the continued worsening of the situation".

On Saturday, Turkey began shelling the militia, which it says is linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The fighters, the YPG militia based in Syria, have rejected Turkey's demand to leave areas it has seized, saying Islamists would return if it left.

Turkey's assault is a new thread in an already-complex conflict that has drawn in competing regional powers.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu insisted on Sunday that Turkey "will not permit the [Kurdish militia] to carry out aggressive acts".

"Our security forces gave the necessary response and will continue to do so," Mr Davutoglu said.

Syria has also condemned the Turkish action as a violation of its sovereignty and asked the UN Security Council to intervene.

What's more, the Turkey machinations in Syria, along with its heavy handed suppression of the Kurds in south east Anatolia has led to a renewed insurgency inside Turkey:

It was midday on a Thursday at the end of December when Rozerin Çukur left her home, supposedly to pick up class notes from a friend. She never returned.

Rozerin wandered through the narrow streets of Sur, the tangled old town neighborhood in Diyarbakir, a city of one million in southeastern Turkey. An attractive 17-year-old, Rozerin was wearing her school uniform and carrying a book and a pen in her bag.

"Just a few hours later," her father says, "my daughter was inside the war." She supposedly joined the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), a group supported by the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and which since September has been fighting against the Turkish army in the streets of Diyarbakir, using Kalashnikovs and booby traps.

Rozerin was killed by a single shot to the head. Since January 8, her dead body has been lying in the sealed-off old town of Diyarbakir. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city's ancient heart has also long been the hub of Kurdish resistance. Rozerin's parents are holding a vigil in a community center in the city together with dozens of other parents whose children have been killed in the most recent civil war in southeastern Turkey. The parents say they only want one thing: to be able to provide a decent burial for their children. But the Turkish state, they say, has made it impossible to recover their children's bodies.

State officials view the dead young men and women as terrorists -- as violent members of the PKK. Parents say they have been told that they can enter the old town in small groups, but that Turkish officials are demanding that they remove the weapons from the hands of the dead. And the parents do not want to touch the weapons. "The soldiers," they fear, "would shoot immediately."

………

The state is using extreme force against the PKK. Indeed, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently announced that he intended to annihilate the fighting force and promised to continue the battle "until the area is cleansed of all terrorists." There is no "Kurdish question," he said, just a "terror problem."

Bitter house-to-house fighting of the kind seen in Diyarbakir is also taking place in other surrounding cities. The PKK focused its earlier attacks primarily on military targets and police stations. But since the state has laid siege to the cities, the radical Kurdish youth movement YDG-H has taken up the fight there as well.

Until recently, the YDG-H was seen as a collection of disillusioned youth who defended themselves from state violence with rocks and Molotov cocktails. But now that the government has set its sights on ridding the cities of PKK sympathizers, the group has armed and organized itself with the PKK's help. They are now fighting on the frontlines while experienced PKK fighters are hiding in the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After nearly 50 years of the "Kurdish problem" Turkey seemed to have come to an accommodation with the Kurds in the late 1990s, and now Erdogan has blown it all up.

And now the Turks and house of Saud are threatening to invade Syria:

The Turkish military has hit Kurdish and Syrian regime targets as Ankara considered a ground assault with Saudi troops, further complicating efforts to end the war just days after the US and Russia agreed on a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria within a week.

………

In an interview with AFP released on Friday, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said he “doesn’t rule out” that Turkey and Saudi Arabia would intervene militarily in Syria, but said his armed forces “will certainly confront it”.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey both staunchly support rebels seeking to oust Assad, and see his overthrow as essential for ending Syria’s five-year civil war that has cost more than 260,000 lives.

They fear the west is losing its appetite to overthrow him on the assumption he is “the lesser of two evils” compared with Isis.

Neither the House of Saud nor Turkey are our allies in Syria.

Riyadh is interesting in extending repressive Sunni hegemony in Syria, and Turkey is interested in reassembling a a sphere of influence in the area of the former Ottoman Empire.

The technical term for the governments in Ankara and Saudi Arabia is f%$#ing nuts.

We should not be on their side in any way shape, or form.

This is Brilliant Politics

Rather unsurprisingly, Bobby Jindal has left the finances of the state of Louisiana in a mess.

His successor, Democrat John Bel Edwards realized that the state needs to raise taxes to fix the mess that he inherited.

He has come up with a new way to sell revenue measures, he's holding the LSU Football program hostage:

Louisiana’s new Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards is pushing for new tax increases to help address the severe budget deficit left behind by former Governor Bobby Jindal. The problem: Voters in Louisiana are allergic to the very word tax.

Edwards took his case to the public in a televised address on Thursday night, warning that inaction on his proposed increases could jeopardize the holiest of all institutions: LSU football.

The state’s higher education commissioner warned this week that unless the legislature acts to provide funding for the public university system, it will have to suspend some classes for the spring semester and give students grades of “incomplete.” Because of NCAA rules, no athlete may compete for his or her team with an “incomplete” on their transcript, meaning that LSU’s football players will be ineligible come the fall semester.

 Nice to know someone who understands his electorate, and is willing to use this effectively.

Trump Goes There

In the last Republican Presidential debate, Donald Trump noted that George W. Bush was President on 911, and that he lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction:

Jeb Bush’s campaign thinks George W. Bush is its not-so-secret weapon in next Saturday’s pivotal primary. Donald Trump couldn’t care less.

Holding a 20-point lead in the state over his nearest rival with a week to go, Trump blasted the former president for the national security record his brother’s campaign plans to tout, blaming him during a GOP debate Saturday night not just for the Iraq War but also for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that," Trump said to the former Florida governor, prompting a long, contentious back-and-forth.

………

In fact, Trump has blamed George W. Bush for 9/11 many times before, just never on a debate stage before a television audience of millions. It started when moderator John Dickerson asked him about a past statement in which he suggested that the 43rd president should have been impeached for lying about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction in order to justify going to war.

While this position may not be popular with mainstream Republicans, with a 20 point lead in South Carolina, I don't think that this will hurt his campaign.

Your Moment of Daily Tyranny

The NYPD wants to make the most transparently corrupt tool of abusive police officers a felony:

On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton urged state legislators to consider increasing the penalty for resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. The change, he argued, would help New Yorkers "get around this idea that you can resist arrest. You can't." It would also give cops an easy way to turn victims of their own worst impulses into the worst class of criminal.

In theory, a resisting arrest charge allows the state to further punish suspects who endanger the safety of police officers as they're being apprehended; in practice, it gives tautological justification to cops who enjoy roughing people up. Why did you use force against that suspect, officer? Because she was resisting arrest. How do I know you're telling the truth? Because I charged her with it, sir.

………

Anticipating criticism, Bratton told the assembled lawmakers that he already had a plan to curb abuse: the department would use its CompStat arrest-tracking system to monitor officers who make lots of resisting charges that are eventually dropped, leaving oversight of the NYPD to the NYPD itself.

Making resisting arrest a felony, which makes it far more likely that people will cop a plea, because the prospect of years in prison, which means that uncovering police misconduct becomes even less likely.

This proposal is an unalloyed evil, which is literally a blue print for a police state.

This is the Best Troll in the History of the Internet

Wading into the sh%$ storm that is the successor of the death of legal hack Anton Scalia, Charlie Pierce has a suggestion for Barack Obama, Anita Hill:

I am all-in for total chaos on this whole Supreme Court thing.

If the Republicans are going to invent a new constitutional tradition on the fly, I say the Republic is best served by making them choke on it. Already, Steve M. is pointing out the shitstorm that would break if the president were to nominate Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mountaineer Mike Tomasky has an interesting suggestion regarding a brilliant young jurist who also would put the GOP deeper in the ha'penny place as regards Hispanic voters. Good. All good. But let me suggest a name as well.

Anita Hill.

I am, as I said, all in for chaos, and this would be the all-timer.

This is quite literally the finest troll I have ever seen.

Mr. Pierce, you are a god among men, and I am not worthy.

The obvious point here is that this brings up Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment of numerous women that he worked with:

Professor Hill is a widely respected scholar of the law. She would be a fine addition to any court in the land. Also, she would make the Republicans eat their own faces, one at a time. Imagine the hearings. The Republicans would have no choice but to bring up the whole Clarence Thomas matter again. Although perhaps, this time, the other women who allegedly were harassed by Mr. Justice Thomas would not be intimidated out of testifying, and the Democratic senators would not be intimidated out of calling them. (Sorry, Joe Biden. That was a bad day for you.) This would be Your Show Of Shows.

This would be so epic.

Obama needs to nominate her.

Not "Flawed", "Fraud"

Morgan Stanley sold worthless bonds, and made a lot of money doing so, and when they got caught, they made what appears to be another "No Declaration of Wrongdoing (DOJ press release) settlement over this, the New York Times described it as Morgan Stanley to Pay $3.2 Billion Over Flawed Mortgage Bonds.

As former S&L crisis investigator notes, these bonds were not flawed, they were fraud.

Throw some banksters in gaol, please.

He Probably Choked on His Own Bile

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at age 79.

I have noted over the past few years (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) excessive levels of bile have appeared to produce neurological complications.

The Republicans are already saying that the next SCOTUS nomination should be put off until after the elections, which is no surprise.

I really do not think that they have anything to worry about though:  I cannot see the Obama administration selecting someone in less than 3 months, at which point there will not be time.

While I do understand that the friends and family of Antonin Scalia, including Justice Ruth  Bader "Notorious RBG" Ginsburg, are mourning their loss, the fact that a partisan hack who had stopped caring has left the court is a net plus for the people of the United States.
 

Not Enough Bullets

It appears that Republican members of Congress made a request to the government of Iran that they not release detained Americans until after the election:

Iran released four US citizens being held in Iran on January 16, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. In return the US said it was offering clemency to seven Iranians being held for sanctions violations and dropped charges against 14 more.

In his first interview with French media, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, who is secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, told FRANCE 24 that US Republicans – wary of allowing President Barack Obama to win a public relations victory ahead of the US presidential election in November – asked for the swap to be put on hold.

“We were carrying out negotiations with the Obama administration, when representatives of the Republican Party got in touch with us,” Shamkhani said. “As a favour, they asked us to do what we could to hinder the talks and to push them back until after the next US presidential elections – in other words, after President Obama's departure.”

………

“It seems that the Republicans relegated humanity to second place after political expediency, which I found very surprising. But we succeeded, and the prisoners were released during Obama’s mandate.”

See also here, here, and here.

Shades of Ronald Reagan's and GHW Bush's deal with the Iranian in 1980, the so-called "October Surprise", where they promised to release military hardware if the Iranians held the embassy hostages until after the elections.

I misspoke in the title though, traitors should be hung, not shot.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Donald Trump

Trump wins Twitter today:

How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2016

Earmning a Capitalism Merit Badge

An enterprising Girl Scout set up shop selling cookies outside a marijuana dispensary:

It's that time of year again. Time when your local market entrances are flooded with Girl Scouts selling boxes of Samoas, Tagalongs and Thin Mints. But one 13-year-old Girl Scout in San Francisco and her mother made a rather business-savvy decision to sell cookies outside of a medical marijuana dispensary.

On Monday, Danielle Lei and her mother set up shop outside the Green Cross store with the cookies. With the store's blessing, Lei sold 117 boxes in two hours.

Holli Bert, a spokeswoman for the Green Cross, said that after just 45 minutes, Lei had to call for backup cookies to replenish her stock.

Future venture capitalist, I guess.

Well, This Explains Why Chris Matthews Has Been Felching* Hillary Clinton on His Show Lately

Did you know that Kathleen Matthews, the wife of MSNBC's Chris "Tweety" Matthews is running to replace Chris Van Hollen in MD-8?

Did you also know that her campaign is getting lots of donations from friends of Hillary?

Funny, that:

After what can only be described as an absolute disaster of an electoral showing in the New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton’s hopes of becoming the Democratic nominee in 2016 increasingly hinge on her support from the Democratic establishment.

The establishment, which is connected to Clinton and her financial backers by ingrown threads of funding and financing, is panicking over the surging campaign of Bernie Sanders. It will turn to its people in the media and party leadership to reverse the trend.

………

Chris Matthews has been under considerable fire from the left recently for what’s been interpreted as “relentless shilling” for Hillary Clinton on his MSNBC talk show, Hardball.

………

His endless devotion to the Democratic Party got Matthews the kind of attention that many people only dream of from party elders. Over the past decade, his name has been bandied about as a candidate for Senate or Governor in his native Pennsylvania. He’s been the subject of a speculative New York Times Magazine cover story on his political aspirations.

But in the end, it appears Matthews is sticking with television. Instead, his wife Kathleen is running for political office as a Democrat, in Maryland, where the Matthews family lives.

And herein lies the crux of the matter. As the Daily Caller reported on February 9, many of the wealthiest Clinton donors are funneling money to the Kathleen Matthews Congressional campaign. This, in turn, makes Chris Matthews’ constant kow-towing to the Clinton campaign suspect at the very least. Although it may just be part of ingratiating himself to the Democratis establishment.

The money trail from Hillary Clinton to Chris Matthews crosses the path of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The support each of the latter gives to the former is a direct by product of that financing.

So not a surprise.

^*If you do not know the definition of the word, "Felch", do NOT Google it.

Quote of the Day

Clinton: “I know I have had a blessed life, but I also know what it’s like to stumble and fall. And so many people across America know that feeling” [WaPo]. No. Wrong. Just wrong. People don’t feel they’ve “stumbled and fallen” (note lack of agency). They feel they’ve been tripped, or had their legs kicked out from under them, or screwed over. That’s not the same thing.

—Lambert Strether at writing at Naked Capitalism

Tweet of the Day

Carly Fiorina is dropping out of the presidential race to pursue kidnapping Dalmations to use fur for coat.

— Michael Blackman (@ParaComedian09) February 10, 2016

About that Congressional Black Caucus Endorsement of Hillary Clinton………

Not so much.

It was the PAC for the organization. Many CBC members were not consulted:

Cong'l Black Caucus (CBC) has NOT endorsed in presidential. Separate CBCPAC endorsed withOUT input from CBC membership, including me.

— Rep. Keith Ellison (@keithellison) February 11, 2016

Funny, that.

Crap

I missed the latest Dem debate.

Remember When I Wrote About a College President Who Described Shooting His Student and Drowning Them Like Bunnies?

Basically, it was his plan to game the college ratings.

Well, as I mentioned in the above link, the President of Mount St. Marys University used these analogies for his plan to artificially boost the retention numbers throwing out higher risk students in the first 3 weeks of class, when they don't count:

You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.

It made the national news, and the college, and its President, former bankster Simon Newman, were held up for condemnation.

Unsurprisingly, President Newman is handling this like the guardian of capitalism that he is: killing he messenger:

When student reporters at Mount St. Mary’s University, a small Catholic institution in Maryland, published an article in January that quoted the university’s president likening struggling freshmen to bunnies that should be drowned, they knew it might get a big reaction.

It finally came this week, it appears — in the form of a pink slip for the faculty adviser of the campus newspaper.

The university informed the adviser, Ed Egan, that he had been disloyal and was now fired, a move seen by many on the campus in Emmitsburg as a retaliatory strike.

The decision, along with other recent punishments of faculty members at Mount St. Mary’s, has triggered outrage well beyond its rural campus in northern Maryland, earning condemnation from thousands of academics across the country as well as national monitors of academic and journalistic freedom.

The article, by Rebecca Schisler and Ryan Golden, was published in The Mountain Echo under Mr. Egan’s tutelage on Jan. 19 and presented two explosive pieces of news.

………

The report said that the administration was planning to cull struggling freshmen from the institution as part of an effort to improve retention numbers — a big factor in rankings published in outlets like U.S. News & World Report — and that the university’s president, Simon Newman, had used disturbing language to sell the idea to a skeptical professor last fall.

“This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t,” Mr. Newman is quoted as saying. “You just have to drown the bunnies.”

He added, “Put a Glock to their heads.”

………

“Ed, as the faculty adviser, could really frame the battlefield, if you will, around what the issue was,” Mr. Coyne said. “We had a president in a private conversation with a colleague says the bad-metaphor-hall-of-fame statement, and that was the story. And the position behind it about a retention program that was never enacted, was suddenly lost in the conversation.”

Mr. Egan and both student reporters, who said they had spent weeks investigating their article, rejected Mr. Coyne’s depiction of editorial manipulation. (The private conversation, the students reported, was relayed by two professors who were there.)

“There was no pressure at all,” Ms. Schisler, a junior, said. “We are a student-run paper. All of the articles are the ideas of students, and all of them are written by students.”

Mr. Golden, a senior who is also The Echo’s managing editor, said the newspaper’s staff members had been blindsided by the administration’s move to fire Mr. Egan, who, he said, had been a staunch advocate of their work.

“We were really appalled by it,” Mr. Golden said. “He’s really a good mentor for a lot of students at this school. He absolutely encouraged us to pursue journalistic integrity, absolutely encouraged us to be ethical, to be fair, to be thorough, to be objective and to do the best work that we could.”

Mr. Newman, a former private equity chief executive, was hired last spring to help raise the college’s national profile and increase its endowment. Some faculty members have since pushed back against what they see as his sharp-elbowed business approach.

Mr. Egan’s dismissal was the third case in less than a week of faculty members’ facing censure from Mr. Newman’s administration. The cases were being portrayed by some professors and alumni as a concerted effort to purge the faculty of those with dissenting views.

There have been two other people fired, including a tenured faculty member, and get a load this bit from his dismissal letter:

“As an employee of Mount St. Mary’s University, you owe a duty of loyalty to this university and to act in a manner consistent with the duty,” read the letter addressed to Dr. Naberhaus and signed by Mr. Newman. “However, your recent actions, in my opinion and that of others, have violated that duty and clearly justify your termination."

Between potential lawsuits, bad PR, and what I am sure is quite a few enraged alumni, Egan is a 2^nd generation alumnus, it does appear that I was being prophetic, and not just sarcastic, when I suggested that when Simon Newman wanted to run the University like a business, it meant, "Burning it down for insurance money."

This is what happens when you hire finance types to do real jobs, BTW.

Ég er Íslendingur

When I heard that Iceland has sentenced 26 bankers to a over 70 years in prison, (total, not each) my first thought was, "What's the Icelandic for, "Ich bin ein Berliner?"

In a move that would make many capitalists’ head explode if it ever happened here, Iceland just sentenced their 26th banker to prison for their part in the 2008 financial collapse.

In two separate Icelandic Supreme Court and Reykjavik District Court rulings, five top bankers from Landsbankinn and Kaupping — the two largest banks in the country — were found guilty of market manipulation, embezzlement, and breach of fiduciary duties. Most of those convicted have been sentenced to prison for two to five years. The maximum penalty for financial crimes in Iceland is six years, although their Supreme Court is currently hearing arguments to consider expanding sentences beyond the six year maximum.

………

Almost eight years later, the government of Iceland is still prosecuting and jailing those responsible for the market manipulation that crippled their economy. Even now, Iceland is still paying back loans to the IMF and other countries which were needed just to keep the country operating.

And how many big banksters have been prosecuted in the United States?

Crickets.

Carly Fiorina has Left the Race

I think that this needs the same musical accompaniment that occurred when her firing from HP was announced:




I am not embellishing here.

When HP finally fired her, groups of people at multiple locations literally started to dance among the cubicles, while singing this song.

I Endorse this Group

The Repair Organization is dedicated to the idea that people have the right to repair the stuff that they own without being locked out through IP protections:

Last summer, when the Copyright Office asked if anyone wanted to defend the right for video game console jailbreakers to mod or repair their systems, no one had a formal legal argument prepared. A new association representing repairmen and women across all industries was just formed to make sure nothing like that ever happens again.

Repair groups from across the industry announced that they have formed The Repair Coalition, a lobbying and advocacy group that will focus on reforming the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to preserve the “right to repair” anything from cell phones and computers to tractors, watches, refrigerators, and cars. It will also focus on passing state-level legislation that will require manufacturers to sell repair parts to independent repair shops and to consumers and will prevent them from artificially locking down their products to would-be repairers.

………

That problem—that manufacturers of everything are trying to control the secondary repair market—has two main sources, Gordon-Byrne said. First, manufacturers use federal copyright law to say that they control the software inside of gadgets and that only they or licensed repair shops should be allowed to work on it. Second, manufacturers won’t sell replacement parts or guides to the masses, and often use esoteric parts in order to specifically lock down the devices.

These problems have been well known in the smartphone, computer, and consumer electronics for years, and it’s why groups like iFixit and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been able to mount successful challenges to the DMCA in recent years. Increasingly, however, these problems are spilling over into just about every other industry.

………

And so The Repair Coalition will primarily work at a federal level to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA, which states that it’s illegal to “circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under [the DMCA].” Thus far, activists have tried to gain “exemptions” to this section—it’s why you’re allowed to repair a John Deere tractor or a smartphone that has software in it. But the exemption process is grueling and has to be done every three years.

………


On a state level, the group will push for laws such as one being proposed in New York that would require manufacturers to provide repair manuals and sell parts to anyone—not just licensed repair people—for their products. The thought is that, if enough states pass similar legislation, it will become burdensome for manufacturers to continue along with the status quo. At some point, it will become easier to simply allow people to fix the things they own.

“We want to become an umbrella organization for repair,” Gordon-Byrne said. “We want to help the small repair technicians that aren’t getting help from anywhere else.”

When the DMCA was passed, we were warned that this would happen.

And now it has.

The law needs to be fixed, though repeal would be a better option.

The Trump and Sanders Campaigns Have Something Very Important in Common

Both of the campaigns are joyous, in contrast to the dour campaigns of the rest of the candidates.

Of course, the joy of the Trump campaign is the joy that one might find amongst the residents of Bedlam.

Even at their most effusive, the other candidates seem to have a stick up their ass.

Feeling the Bern

Both Bernie Sanders and the Donald Trump won big in New Hampshire, with Sanders ahead by 21% (with 82% reporting), and Trump leading by 19%.

Both Sanders and Trump outperformed the most recent polls by a bit.

I will note that this is a different time from 1992, when Bill Clinton came in 2^nd in New Hampshire, because he was so far ahead in fund raising that Paul Tsongas was simply unable to compete in the later primaries and caucuses, particularly Super Tuesday.

Largely due to Act Blue and similar internet related institutions, Sanders has the financial wherewithal to continue on and to compete a number of simultaneous races, particularly given his campaign's significantly smaller burn (Bern?) rate, which means that his cash on hand is in pretty good shape.

On the 'Phant side, Kasich came in a solid 2^nd, which sets him up to be the next establishment Republican "Great White Hope".

This has Gotta Hurt

The mother of British Prime Minister has signed a petition against her son's cuts of children's services:

Among the 10,000 names on a petition against planned cuts to children’s services by a local council is a name that will cause embarrassment to British Prime Minister David Cameron — his mum.

Mary Cameron, 81, told the Daily Mirror newspaper that she had signed a petition to save children’s centers earmarked for closure by Oxfordshire county council, which is run by her son’s Conservative Party.

“My name is on the petition but I don’t want to discuss this any further,” Mary Cameron, a former magistrate, said.

The petition says: “Our children’s centers are a lifeline to new parents who rely on locally accessible advice and support at a time when it is most needed. Cutting these essential services would leave families vulnerable and isolated and fail an entire generation of children.”

………

Mary Cameron has intervened in her son’s career before. In 2013, she was asked about her son’s support for gay marriage despite opposition from Tory grassroots supporters, and reportedly replied: “I know, but David just won’t be told.”

From his mother?  That's harsh.

Today in IP Stupidity

The Harvard Law Review Society publishes a book called the "A Uniform System of Citation," for lawyers.

It's more generally referred to as "The Blue Book", and a group of law students at NYU are publishing a similar set of instructions, which they have referred to as the "Baby Blue".

The response from the HLRS? A cease and desist letter to the students from their lawyer:

War is brewing over the most boring piece of intellectual property imaginable: the “Bluebook,” the 580-page quasi-authoritative source of proper legal citation formats published by the Harvard Law Review, described by Adam Liptak of the New York Times a few months ago as “a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like [that] is both grotesque and indispensable.”

Students at NYU Law School have prepared a new, streamlined, open-access citation system and gotten it ready for publication; but Chris Sprigman, a law prof at NYU, posted this open letter to his “law professor friends” yesterday:

I am writing to ask you to help me with something important. You may know that for the last year, I’ve been working on a public domain implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation.

The work, which I’ve named ‪#‎BabyBlue‬, is now done, but we’re holding it, because the Harvard Law Review Association has hired counsel and is threatening to sue (me, and Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org, the publisher).

………

The conflict has been brewing for a few months — starting with a letter from Harvard Law Review’s lawyers to publisher Carl Malamud of PublicResource.org:

I write concerning . . . your imminent release of an “implementation of the Bluebook’s Uniform System of Citation” called “BabyBlue,” possibly as soon as December 31, 2015. Based on the description of “BabyBlue” … we believe that “BabyBlue” may include content identical or substantially similar to content or other aspects of The Bluebook that constitute original works of authorship protected by copyright, and which are covered by various United States copyright registrations.

………

It’s copyright nonsense, and Harvard should be ashamed of itself for loosing its legal hounds to dispense it in order to protect its (apparently fairly lucrative) publication monopoly.

Here’s a bit of free legal advice: If you want to assert copyright protection over something, don’t call it “A Uniform System of Citation” — because systems are, by definition, unprotected by copyright. Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act couldn’t be clearer:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, [or] method of operation, … regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

It gets even better.

It appears the Harvard Law Review Society is not the creator of this document:

Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable.

The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.” The librarians, Fred R. Shapiro and Julie Graves Krishnaswami, have done impressive archival research and make a persuasive case that their own institution is the guilty party.

“It’s clear that the idea of a uniform citation manual came from Yale, and a lot of the specifics of the early rules came from Yale,” Mr. Shapiro said in an interview. “Harvard entered into the picture later.”

………

The new article ends on a sheepish note.

“Some readers may question whether originating the hyper-complicated Bluebook should be a source of pride for Yale,” it says. “Our response is that, although the Bluebook version that subsequently developed under the leadership of Harvard Law Review currently consists of 582 fairly large pages, the two earliest Yale precursors of the Bluebook were, respectively, one page and fifteen pages long.”

“And these were,” the article says, “very small pages.”

Shades of the song, Happy Birthday to You, where the evidence is fairly clear that the copyright holders never actually wrote the song.

Our IP system is broken, and needs to be fixed.

Actually, it needs to be burned to the ground, because the system has engendered attitudes that lead to this crap.

Well, This Explains Why the Young-Uns Like Bernie

His campaign is the only Presidential campaign that pays its interns.

Unpaid internships are the bane of many people starting off in life:

Employers may argue that professional experience gained via an internship pays for itself - which is hopefully the case, as most of the presidential candidates are not prepared to pay you to work for them.

A new study has revealed that only one presidential hopeful out of a total of 16 candidates pays their interns.

Bernie Sanders, Vermont Senator and Democrat, pays his interns $10.10 per hour, as reported by The Washington Post.

Christina Greer, assistant professor of political science at Fordham University, and Alexis Grenell, a political strategist and columnist, hired a student at $15 per hour to find out how each candidate employs interns.

 BTW, the term for the Sanders campaign is doing is, "Walking the walk."

Tweet of the Day

When the exact same problems crop up in separate campaigns, with different staff, at what point do the principals say, "Hey, maybe it's US?"

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) February 8, 2016

Harsh, but Mr. Axelrod has a point, and in just 140 characters.

Maybe I am a Cynic, but I Think that Hillary was Forced to Do This

You know that if Bernie Sanders were at 10%, Hillary Clinton would not have just pledged never to cut Social Security:

Hillary Clinton promised on Friday that she would not cut Social Security benefits, winning praise from progressive groups that had pressured her to take such a stance -- but drawing questions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who challenged her commitment to the issue.

"I won't cut Social Security," Clinton wrote in an initialed tweet that included a link to her campaign website’s Social Security page. "As always, I'll defend it, & I'll expand it. Enough false innuendos."

The post was a response to something Sanders had tweeted earlier in the day, when he urged Clinton to "join me in saying loudly and clearly that we will never cut Social Security."

Let me make this clear, I am NOT suggesting that Clinton is lying.

I am suggesting that she was dragged into this kicking and screaming.

Back Loaded Bribery

I've always said that much of the corruption in politics is not the result of an explicit quid pro quo, but an understanding that, once your political career is done, if you promulgate the agenda of the malefactors of wealth, you will be taken care of.

It's a lot like being a "Made Man" in the mob.

Case in point, Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner:

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is preparing to borrow from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to help fund his new career in private equity.

Geithner, 54, secured a credit line with JPMorgan, one of the largest banks he oversaw during the financial crisis, to finance personal investments in funds started by his current employer, Warburg Pincus, according to a filing with the New York Department of State. He is borrowing money to invest in a $12 billion private equity fund that the firm raised in November, its first main fund since he joined almost two years ago, a person familiar with the situation said.

………

The regulatory filing doesn’t disclose the size of the loan or the financial terms, such as the interest rate. Warburg Pincus hasn’t said how much Geithner agreed to commit to the new fund, and the filing doesn’t say whether he made use of the credit line to finance it.

Mary Zimmerman, a spokeswoman for New York-based Warburg Pincus, declined to comment or make Geithner available. Officials for JPMorgan declined to comment.

This is the Timothy Geithner who claimed that he was not a banker, after being the fucking President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

It now appears that he was enough of a banker to get a sweetheart loan from JP Morgan for what is probably north of $100 million.

Make no mistake.  This is a payment for his being one of them, and for running the Treasury Department for the banksters benefit.

Today in Historical Illiteracy

At Salon, Andrew O'Hehir takes aim at Marco Rubio, and effectively targets his own foot:

Let me explain “Potemkin Super Bowl party,” because I don’t even know whether that’s a totally obscure reference. In the Soviet Union under Stalin — and Marco Rubio is already deeply unhappy about where I’m going with this — the state built “Potemkin villages,” idealized rural towns full of happy peasants for foreign visitors, while behind those façades the populace lived in misery.

Ummmm...Stalin?

You are only off by almost 200 years, and the reference is only a Google away.

A Potemkin Village was a fake town created by a courtier in the court of Catherine the Great, Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tavricheski, who allegedly created an elaborate fraud to convince the Czarina that the lands in the south of Russia were happy and loyal.

Attributing this to Stalin, when the term literally has its own Wiki page, does not inspire confidence on your grasp of the facts Mr. O'Hehir.

BTW, it appears that after reading comments to his article he corrected that bit, and he should get props for that, but if you have an only vague knowledge of this sort of cultural reference, just f%$#ing Google it.

Eric Arthur Blair Knows the Term for This

Classification stupidity

The prosecutor for the military commission at Guantánamo is retroactively classifying pubic hearings:

The war court prosecutor is arguing that public disclosure of a transcript of a public hearing held at Guantánamo last year could endanger national security in response to a legal motion brought by 17 news organizations protesting pick-and-choose secrecy in the Sept. 11 pretrial hearings.

Army Brig. Gen Mark Martins makes the argument in a filing obtained by The Miami Herald that was still being reviewed for sensitive information on Thursday and not publicly released. At issue is the Pentagon’s decision to black out large portions of a 379-page transcript of an Oct. 30 hearing that included testimony from two soldiers who work at Guantánamo’s most clandestine prison, called Camp 7.

“That this information was uttered in a public session or is reported in news coverage does not render the information unprotected or vitiate the damage further disclosures would beget,” prosecutors wrote Jan. 29 in the 29-page filing in the war court case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other men accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

In defending the decision to censor what was public information, the prosecutors included a less-redacted transcript that showed previously blacked out sentences and in the same filing sealed up a declaration from the Guantánamo prison commander explaining what is at risk.

………

Reporters, Sept. 11 victim family members and other members of the public heard the testimony on Oct. 30 through a 40-second audio delay designed to let the judge or a court security officer mute the sound if anyone spilled national security secrets. No one ever pushed the button. But when the transcript came out weeks later, portions that the Miami Herald had reported in a routine Twitter stream were gone.

Now, a comparison of the two different censored transcripts of the same hearing offer a study in over-classification. Nearly every redaction is refined in the updated version.

The term to describe this sh%$ is "Orwellian".