Fabulous!

If there is a Western European country that I would not have expected to vote for same sex marriage, it is Ireland.

Once again, I am pleased to be proved wrong, as Ireland became the first nation to approve same sex marriage by referendum:

Ireland became the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by a popular vote, sweeping aside the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church in a resounding victory Saturday for the gay rights movement and placing the country at the vanguard of social change.

With the final ballots counted, the vote was 62 percent in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, and 38 percent opposed.

The turnout was large — more than 60 percent of the 3.2 million eligible voters cast ballots, and only one district out of 43 voted the measure down. Cheers broke out among the crowd of supporters who had gathered in the courtyard of Dublin Castle when Returning Officer Riona Ni Fhlanghaile announced around 7 p.m. that the ballot had passed, 1,201,607 votes to 734,300.

Not long ago, the vote would have been unthinkable. Ireland decriminalized homosexuality only in 1993, the church dominates the education system, and abortion remains illegal except when a mother’s life is at risk. But the influence of the church has waned amid scandals in recent years, while attitudes, particularly among the young, have shifted.

This wasn't just a victory, this was a blowout.

The Catholic Church needs to get with the program. If they get blown out in Ireland, in a plebiscite no less, they need to know that they have lost the war.

Rather ironically, at nearly the same time, Northern Ireland just killed same sex marriage:

Politicians in Northern Ireland will face intense pressure from LGBT rights campaigners to “catch up” with the rest of western Europe after the Irish Republic overwhelmingly backed same-sex marriage in a referendum.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions will join Amnesty International and gay rights group the Rainbow Project to hold a mass rally in support of equal marriage rights on 13 June, while a legal test case has also been lodged with Belfast’s courts.

After Friday’s historic referendum, in which the Republic’s voters endorsed same-sex marriage by 2-1, Northern Ireland remains the last country in western Europe where LGBT couples are barred from getting married.

Attempts to legislate to allow gay marriage have been vetoed by the Democratic Unionist party and a majority of Ulster Unionists in the devolved Northern Ireland assembly at Stormont.

An ICTU spokesman said the region needed to catch up with the rest of democratic Europe – and in particular every other part of the UK. “In 1998 Northern Ireland became one of the most advanced places on earth for human rights. Section 75 of the Good Friday agreement dealt with human rights and enshrined the rights of every citizen to be treated equally in Northern Ireland,” he said.

“Since then Northern Ireland has slipped back in terms of the human rights agenda and is now isolated in the UK as the only place where a gay couple cannot get married. The rally will be held in solidarity with the gay community.”

Section 75 of the Good Friday agreement guarantees the right of every citizen to avail themselves of state services in the region. LGBT rights campaigners believe that these services include marriages in civil spaces such as council chambers.

Amnesty’s campaign director in Northern Ireland, Patrick Corrigan, has called for a mass turnout at the rally, which will start from Belfast’s Writers Square at 2.30pm. Corrigan said people in Northern Ireland should show they are “sick of living in a discriminatory backwater for gay people”.

Last month, a Sinn Féin motion on marriage equality fell after 47 Stormont assembly members voted in support while 49 unionists voted against. Even if there had been a small majority in favour, the DUP would have exercised a special veto drawn up under devolution.

So, we have the political wing of the IRA agreeing with Ian Paisley's DUP.

I gotta think that this is more political posturing than anything else.

Basically, no one wants to be a first mover.

Quote of the Day, Fox News Makes You Stupid Edition

“There is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these [factual] questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”

—Obsidian Wings, which linked to former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett, who in turn linked to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll.

And so I Must Add Another to the List of They Who Must Not Be Named………

The Stupid, it Burns Us!

I must add (thankfully former) Twitter "Hashtag activist" Suey Park, who face planted with her #CancelColbert tag about a year ago.

It started with ……… Hell, just watch the attached video.

Short version:

• Football team owner and contemptible scumbag Dan Snyder, facing criticism for his team's name, founds the "Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation" in a ploy that not even his own mother would believe.
• Colbert makes joke about this.
• Comedy Central tweets punchline bereft of context.
• Ms. Park has a Twitter fit, despite never having seen the original joke, which goes viral.
• Colbert answers back (He is actually very gentle to her and savage on the cable news coverage) in the attached video.
• Ms. Park becomes a laughing stock.
• Dirtbag misogynists sent threats of murder and rape to Ms. Park, and she gets doxxed.

We can all agree that nothing that Ms. Park did merited the threats against her person.

What is also clear that, even by the incredibly lame standards of "Twitter Hashtag Activists," Suey Park squandered whatever credibility she once had: She has become a punchline to a very bad joke.

She has made some attempt to rehabilitate her reputation (see link), but, I don't care about her reputation, or how she feels about herself, or how she might have learned from the experience.

Until she does something that affirmatively proves that her opinions have some insight beyond what could be generated with an ELIZA program, she goes on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.

That is all.

Advertisement Octagon. Only One Shall Emerge Victorious!

Coneheads


Brady Bunch

I really like these two ads that invoke classic TV, the Bradu Bunch and the the Coneheads from Saturday Night Live.

They are both brilliant.

Casting Danny Trejo as Marsha and Steve Buscemi as Jan Brady is genius, and their seamless integration into an existing scene is magnificent.

Conversely, the Coneheads commercial splices seamlessly into the already well known "Jake, from State Farm" ad.

I cannot decide which is the better exemplar of the classic TV based advertisement form.

They Who Must Not Be Named

I'm not quite ready to add all reality TV Stars to my list, after all, one such star is now in the US Congress, but it does provide a rich vein of people who should (and will, at least by me) be ignored.

In my case, I am adding the whole Duggar clan to the list.

The problem here is not their choice of lifestyle, it is that we as a society watch this sh%$.

Have a Recursive Cat

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

As Nebraska Goes………

The Nebraska legislature has overwhelmingly voted to abolish the death penalty:

The Nebraska Legislature on Wednesday voted, 32 to 15, to abolish the death penalty, setting up a final showdown between a bipartisan coalition that supported the bill and the Republican governor, who has promised to veto it. No conservative state has banned the death penalty since North Dakota did so in 1973.

If the bill is vetoed by Nebraska’s Republican governor, Pete Ricketts, a vote to override his veto could come as soon as Tuesday. Thirty votes are required to override.

The bill, which would replace lethal injection with life imprisonment, passed the unicameral Legislature on Wednesday after months of debate and lobbying on both sides, with conservative Republicans lining up in opposition to a group of Democrats and moderate Republicans who said they have come to oppose the death penalty for reasons that are moral, fiscal or religious.

Nebraska has not executed an inmate since 1997, leading some lawmakers to argue that the state has ended the death penalty in practice.

This is significant, because, well, it's Nebraska.

Hopefully, this is a part of a trend.

The Most Incompetent Member of the Bush Administration

I think that we have a winner, and despite a spirited competition, Richard Bruce Cheney has won the "most incompetent" crown:

Dick Cheney would like you to believe that he knows more about protecting the nation from terrorism than anyone else. But he actually knows less.

When presented with an actual terror threat — the one that turned into the 9/11 attacks — Cheney thought al Qaeda was bluffing.

No kidding. This is from The Great War Of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism, a new book by former acting CIA director Mike Morell:

The threat reporting continued [in the spring and summer of 2001] — other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” — but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida — purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response.

UBL Threats Are Real. Take a minute and think about that. Think about what would have happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001 if Americans had known that had been Cheney’s attitude just a few months before. Think about how, if he’d been a Democrat, that would have defined liberals as weak, cowardly children for the next 50 years.

So it’s not just that Cheney is cartoonishly evil, it’s that he’s monstrously incompetent; in fact, his monstrous incompetence is a large part of why he’s so cartoonishly evil. He was overwhelmingly powerful, but with no understanding of reality, and so blundered around the world strewing destruction wherever he went.

Dick Cheney initiated the privatization of key military functions as SecDef under Bush 1.

He ignored the threat of  al Qaeda.

His response to the attacks of September 11 was to gin up a war with Iraq, who was secular Arab enemy of Jihadists.

As White House Chief of Staff, he convinced Gerald Ford to dump Nelson Rockefeller as VP for his reelection bid, killing any chance at grabbing a portion of Black vote.  (In 1976, Jimmy Carter was viewed with some suspicion by elements of the Black community)

This is a guy who has failed upward throughout his career.

No wonder that  Harry Whittington who was shot in the face by Cheney, ended up apologizing to Cheney for his being shot in the face. 

It appears to be some sort of twisted Republican imperative.

Seriously, Is Anyone Surprised by This?

In nature, parasites are associated with decreased success of the host, so it should come as no surprise that an IMF study shows that economic parasite, such as a bloated finance industry, also hinders economic success:

As the world has floundered in low growth post-crisis, with advanced economies still suffering with credit overhangs and hypertrophied, largely unreformed financial services sectors, it has become acceptable, even among Serious Economists, to question the logic that a bigger financial sector is necessarily better. Of course, the logic of “more finance, please” was never stated in those terms; it was presented in the voodoo of “financial deepening,” meaning, in layperson’s terms, that more access to more types of financial products and services would be a boon. For instance, one argument often made in favor of more robust financial services is that they allow for consumers to engage in “lifetime smoothing” of spending. That basically means if times are bad or an individual has a big investment they to make, he can borrow against future earnings. But we have seen how well that works in practice. Most people have an optimistic bias, so they will tend to underestimate how long it will take them to get back to their old level of income, assuming that even happens, which makes it too easy for them to rationalize borrowing rather than going into radical belt tightening ASAP. And we’ve seen, dramatically, on how college debt pushers get students to take on debt to “invest” in their education, when for many, the payoff never comes.

Moreover, despite an enormous increase activity and widespread use of technology, costs of financial intermediation have increased, as Walter Turbewille shows, citing a study by Thomas Philippon:



But the recent IMF paper, Rethinking Financial Deepening: Stability and Growth in Emerging Markets, is particularly deadly. Even though it focused on the impact of financial development on growth in emerging markets, its authors clearly viewed the findings as germane to advanced economies. Their conclusion was that the growth benefits of financial deepening were positive only up to a certain point, and after that point, increased depth became a drag. But what is most surprising about the IMF paper is that the growth benefit of more complex and extensive banking systems topped out at a comparatively low level of size and sophistication. We’ve embedded the paper at the end of this post and strongly urge you to read it in full. (at link)

The contribution of the IMF paper is that the authors developed a new index to do a comprehensive job of capturing financial activity. Previous work had tended to look either at the size and sophistication of financial institutions, or the depth and complexity of financial markets. The new index incorporates both aspects of financial activity, as well as incorporating access. The writers concede that their measure is still imperfect, but is an improvement over other approaches. They also stress that they are well aware of the issue of establishing that the relationship between the size and complexity of the financial sector is causal, and not a mere correlation:

Empirically, establishing causality from finance to economic growth has been a key challenge. King and Levine (1993) were the first to address this issue in a cross-country regression context. Their paper found that initial levels of financial depth—approximated by the size of the banking system relative to GDP—could predict subsequent growth rates over extended periods, even when controlling for other explanatory variables. Stock market depth was also incorporated later by Levine and Zervos (1998), with the finding that causality went from finance to growth. These results held up with further refinements of the approach, by using instrumental variables (Levine, Loayza, and Beck 2000). In the 2000s, the empirical work continued to evolve with the application of dynamic panel data techniques, using lagged values of the financial variables as instruments and controlling for other determinants of growth (Beck and Levine 2004). The present paper follows this last approach, using similar control variables and econometric techniques to ensure that the relationship is not one of simple correlations but of causality that goes from finance to growth.

This is the money chart:

I have always maintained that the financial industry should be restricted to the minimum size possible, because anything above the level required to bring the generate capital for the "real" economy is inherently parasitic.

It appears that the IMF agrees with me.

I Finally Have Something Nice to Say about Los Angeles

Kudos to the "City of Angels" which has raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour, including tipped workers:

The nation’s second-largest city voted Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage.

The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wages by ballot initiative.

The effect is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, almost 50 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour. Under the plan approved Tuesday, the minimum wage will rise over five years.

………

Even economists who support increasing the minimum wage say there is not enough historical data to predict the effect of a $15 minimum wage, an unprecedented increase. A wage increase to $12 an hour over the next few years would achieve about the same purchasing power as the minimum wage in the late 1960s, the most recent peak.

Many restaurant owners here aggressively fought the increase, saying they would be forced to cut as much as half of their staff. Unlike other states, California state law prohibits tipped employees from receiving lower than the minimum wage. The Council promised to study the potential effect of allowing restaurants to add a service charge to bills to meet the increased costs.

The restaurant owners can, to quote Bender Rodriguez, "bite my shiny metal ass."

There is no justification to pay slave wages to your employees, and there is no reason for a wait person to have to tolerate bad behavior from a customer because they depend on tips for their livelihood.

If your business cannot make it if you have to pay your employees a fair wage, then your business should not make it, no saving throw.

If You Are a Guy and You Refuse to Go on Your Rescuing-Supermodels Adventure Because Charlize Theron Is Coming with You, You Really Need to Reconsider Your Commitment to Heterosexuality.

Virginia Hey, "Warrior Woman", Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)


Charlize Theron, Furiosa, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

You may be aware that Australian director George Miller has done a reboot of his seminal 1979 film Mad Max.

What you may not be aware of is the fact that various members of the really small penis brigade, aka "Men's Rights Advocates", have called for a boycott of the film.

Over at Unfogged, a guest poster notes:

The new Mad Max movie may be the most guy movie ever made. The plot is literally Tom Hardy (Mad Max) and Charlize Theron (Furiosa) rescue scantily-clad supermodels. If you asked me when I was 15 to list movie ideas, the list would have gone something like: scantily-clad supermodels, 18 wheelers, guys getting shot, guys getting blown up, fist-fights on top of an 18 wheeler, guys with chainsaws, guys getting run over by 18 wheelers, guys with guitars that shoot fire, and cars crashing into 18 wheelers and blowing up. This list is basically the script for Mad Max: Fury Road. The only thing missing is a helicoper piloted by velociraptors crashing into an 18 wheeler. But there's always the chance of a sequel.

He further notes that the this shows just how toxic the "Mens Rights" Movement is. Not only are they demandin "guy films", they are demanding the exclusion of any strong women from the movie, even though the director, George Miller, has a long history of woman warriors in his films.

His closing statement says it all, "If you are a guy and you refuse to go on your rescuing-supermodels adventure because Charlize Theron is coming with you, you really need to reconsider your commitment to heterosexuality."

That's gonna leave a mark.

H/t Brad DeLong

This is a Good Rebuttal of Obama's Pro TPP Arguments

Michael Wessel, who has been deeply involved with trade deals, and who has had access to the classified draft text of the TPP, has basically called Barack Obama over his claims about the trade deal:

You need to tell me what’s wrong with this trade agreement, not one that was passed 25 years ago,” a frustrated President Barack Obama recently complained about criticisms of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). He’s right. The public criticisms of the TPP have been vague. That’s by design—anyone who has read the text of the agreement could be jailed for disclosing its contents. I’ve actually read the TPP text provided to the government’s own advisors, and I’ve given the president an earful about how this trade deal will damage this nation. But I can’t share my criticisms with you.

I can tell you that Elizabeth Warren is right about her criticism of the trade deal. We should be very concerned about what's hidden in this trade deal—and particularly how the Obama administration is keeping information secret even from those of us who are supposed to provide advice.

So-called “cleared advisors” like me are prohibited from sharing publicly the criticisms we’ve lodged about specific proposals and approaches. The government has created a perfect Catch 22: The law prohibits us from talking about the specifics of what we’ve seen, allowing the president to criticize us for not being specific. Instead of simply admitting that he disagrees with me—and with many other cleared advisors—about the merits of the TPP, the president instead pretends that our specific, pointed criticisms don’t exist.

What I can tell you is that the administration is being unfair to those who are raising proper questions about the harms the TPP would do. To the administration, everyone who questions their approach is branded as a protectionist—or worse—dishonest. They broadly criticize organized labor, despite the fact that unions have been the primary force in America pushing for strong rules to promote opportunity and jobs. And they dismiss individuals like me who believe that, first and foremost, a trade agreement should promote the interests of domestic producers and their employees.

I’ve been deeply involved in trade policy for almost four decades. For 21 years, I worked for former Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt and handled all trade policy issues including “fast track,” the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization’s Uruguay Round, which is the largest trade agreement in history. I am also a consultant to various domestic producers and the United Steelworkers union, for whom I serve as a cleared advisor on two trade advisory committees. To top it off, I was a publicly acknowledged advisor to the Obama campaign in 2008.

………

The text of the TPP, like all trade deals, is a closely guarded secret. That fact makes a genuine public debate impossible and should make robust debate behind closed doors all the more essential. But the ability of TPP critics like me to point out the deal’s many failings is limited by the government’s surprising and unprecedented refusal to make revisions to the language in the TPP fully available to cleared advisors.

Bill Clinton didn’t operate like this. During the debate on NAFTA, as a cleared advisor for the Democratic leadership, I had a copy of the entire text in a safe next to my desk and regularly was briefed on the specifics of the negotiations, including counterproposals made by Mexico and Canada. During the TPP negotiations, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has never shared proposals being advanced by other TPP partners. Today’s consultations are, in many ways, much more restrictive than those under past administrations.

………

Only portions of the text have been provided, to be read under the watchful eye of a USTR official. Access, up until recently, was provided on secure web sites. But the government-run website does not contain the most-up-to-date information for cleared advisors. To get that information, we have to travel to certain government facilities and sign in to read the materials. Even then, the administration determines what we can and cannot review and, often, they provide carefully edited summaries rather than the actual underlying text, which is critical to really understanding the consequences of the agreement.

………

In an effort to diminish criticism, USTR is now letting cleared advisors review summaries of what the negotiators have done. In response to a question about when the full updated text will be made available, we’ve been told, “We are working on making them available as soon as possible.” That’s not the case overseas: Our trading partners have this text, but the government’s own cleared advisors, serving on statutorily-created advisory committees, are kept in the dark.

………

Senator Warren should be commended for her courage in standing up to the President, and Secretary Clinton for raising a note of caution, and I encourage all elected officials to raise these important questions. Working Americans can’t afford more failed trade agreements and trade policies.

Congress should refuse to pass fast track trade negotiating authority until the partnership between the branches, and the trust of the American people is restored. That will require a lot of fence mending and disclosure of exactly what the TPP will do. That begins by sharing the final text of the TPP with those of us who won’t simply rubber-stamp it.

(emphasis mine)

What might be useful here is an amendment to any fast track legislation that says that the full and final text of any agreement, along with all side agreements, must be made available to the public in full for some period of time (I would suggest 6 months, which is enough time for lawyers who make their money on gaming this sort of crap to develop loose lips) before it can be taken up by the Congress.

The British Have Their Own Version of the Cadillac Driving Welfare Queen

One of the oft repeated claims in UK politics, are that there are families for whom three generations that have never worked. The quotes have been made by any number of politicians, most commonly Tories, but also Tony "Bush's Poodle" Blaire.

It turns out that no one can find any evidence that even one such family ever existed:

This month I ran a workshop with a group of first year undergraduate sociology students at Teesside University (in the North East of England). Our students tend to be from working-class or lower-middle class backgrounds and often the first in their families to go to university. I’d been invited to give an insight into a ‘real life’ research project, and I began by asking for responses and thoughts about some quotations:

‘Behind the statistics lie households where three generations have never had a job’ (ex-British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, 1997).

‘…on some deprived estates…often three generations of the same family have never worked’ (Iain Duncan Smith, 2009; now British government Minister for Work and Pensions).

‘To reintroduce the culture of work in households where it may have been absent for generations’ (Universal Credit, Department of Work and Pensions, 2010; this is a document that introduces a very major overhaul of UK welfare payments).

‘…there are four generations of families where no-one has ever had a job’ (Chris Grayling, ex-Minister for Work and Pensions, 2011).

The idea that there are families in the UK with three (or four, or five and even six have been claimed) generations where no one has ever had a job is a particularly powerful orthodoxy. It is often repeated, rarely questioned, becoming part of a taken for granted vernacular. I was struck by the students’ comments. One said, ‘well, it must be true if all these [people] are saying it’. Another felt the same because ‘they wouldn’t say it unless there was loads of data to back it up’. Simple ideas boldly spoken (and repeated) by people in authority can carry real weight.

………

But my colleagues and I are social scientists, so instead of relying on ‘personal observations’, Tracy Shildrick, Andy Furlong, Johann Roden, Rob Crow, and I began rigorous research to see if there really were families like this. We have continued thinking, analysing, writing about, and presenting the complexities of the research material that we gathered since then. The research generated other questions, but, unusually for a sociological study, we found a clear and unequivocal answer to this first question: the existence of families where ‘no one had worked for three generations’ is highly unlikely.

We searched very hard to find such families. We chose two extremely deprived working-class neighbourhoods – in Glasgow and Middlesbrough, because we assumed that they were the sorts of places most likely to reveal this phenomenon. Despite deploying all the strategies and tactics we could think of (including financial inducements), we were unable to find any. This does not mean that they do not exist. Some people believe in fairies or Yetis, and one cannot prove they do not exist. We can say, however, that it is highly improbable that they do. Or, if they do, their numbers are infinitesimally small. Other research drew upon the best available secondary statistics and concluded that less than half of one per cent of all workless households in the UK might have two generations where no one had ever had a job. Households with three generations that have never worked are, logically, going to be far, far fewer in number than even this tiny fraction.

This was, actually, a quite predictable conclusion. A little socio-economic history helps. How long is ‘three generations’? Maybe sixty years, so back to the 1950s, or earlier. The proposition is that there are families where no one has had a job since the 1950s. The UK welfare state has become tougher and tougher over this period, particularly in the last few years. We have very tight ‘conditionality rules’ and ‘activation tests’; recipients of unemployment benefits must provide evidence of their worthiness for these on a weekly basis. It is difficult to imagine a person being able to defraud the state for the whole of his/ her working life – and then his/ her son or daughter doing the same and then his/ her son or daughter after them, for sixty years.

So this family appears to never have existed, but that didn't stop various people, including the Smiler (Blair) from using it on the stump.

To be fair to Ronald Reagan, (I f%$#ing cannot f%$#ing believe that I f%$#ing just said that) in his case, he was referring to one individual, Linda Taylor ((AKA Connie Walker, AKA Linda Bennett, AKA Linda Jones, AKA Connie Jarvis, AKA Martha Louise Miller, AKA Martha Louise White), who did use a number of aliases to defraud social welfare programs, though it appears this was only one of many criminal endeavors.

Ms. Taylor appeared to be a veritable criminality, with allegations of a lot of other crimes, including kidnapping, baby trafficking, and murder.

Quote of the Day

Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance

—Daniel Davies

H/t Paul Krugman,  who mentions this when he skewers William Daley's prevarications on the TPP.

I Feel so F%$#Ing Old

Pete Townshend is 70 years old today.

Deep Thought

John McCain has lost what little he had of his mind.



H/T Digby.

Our Private Little War Is Going so Well

ISIS just took over Ramadi, the capital of al Anbar provice:

Islamic State fighters used a sandstorm to help seize a critical military advantage in the early hours of the terrorist group’s attack on the provincial Iraqi capital of Ramadi last week, helping to set in motion an assault that forced Iraqi security forces to flee, current and former American officials said Monday.

The sandstorm delayed American warplanes and kept them from launching airstrikes to help the Iraqi forces, as the Islamic State fighters evidently anticipated. The fighters used the time to carry out a series of car bombings followed by a wave of ground attacks in and around the city that eventually overwhelmed the American-backed Iraqi forces.

Once the storm subsided, Islamic State and Iraqi forces were intermingled in heavy combat in many areas, making it difficult for allied pilots to distinguish friend or foe, the officials said. By that point, the militants had gained an operational momentum that could not be reversed.

“The dust storm at the very least neutralized capabilities that could have been decisive,” said one former senior military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential battle assessments.

Translation, the Iraqi army cannot find its ass with both hands, and needs extensive air support not to fold up like overcooked cabbage.

There is a reason that, "A column of 3,000 Shiite militia fighters, many supported by Iran, has arrived at a military base near Ramadi as part of the effort to reclaim the city," because the US trained army lacks the competence, leadership, and toughness to successfully prosecute this conflict.

Bush's folly continues.

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

6 months after 12 year old Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police, and neither the cop who gunned him down nor his partner have been questioned:

Mother Jones has learned that the two officers involved in the shooting—Timothy Loehmann, who fired the shots, and Frank Garmback, who drove the police car—still have not been interviewed by investigators from the sheriff's department. According to an official familiar with the case, investigators have made more than one attempt to interview Loehmann and Garmback since the Cleveland Police Department handed over the case in January. (Read more about why the sheriff's department took over the investigation here .)

A county official familiar with the case told Mother Jones that the criminal investigation is focused solely on Loehmann. Garmback, who pulled the police car to within a few feet of Rice right before Loehmann stepped out and shot Rice almost instantly, is currently not under criminal investigation by the sheriff's department, the official said.

In the surveillance footage, both Loehmann and Garmback can be seen standing around after the shooting while Rice lies bleeding on the ground. About a minute and a half after the shooting, Garmback can be seen tackling Rice's 14-year-old sister as she tries to run to her wounded brother. Four minutes go by during which Loehmann and Garmback make no attempt to give Rice first aid. An FBI agent in the area then comes to the scene and begins to tend to Rice before an ambulance arrives to take him to the hospital (where he died the next day).

The fact that neither Loehmann or Garmback have been interviewed is a disgrace.

No doubt they have lawyered up, and they won't be saying anything, but to not even try to interview the officers is mind boggling.

Governor Ratf%$# Will Veto This, of Course

A bill has passed the Maryland legislature which would grant ex-offenders the right to vote while on parole of probation.  It now goes to the desk of the newly elected Republican Governor Larry Hogan.

Gee, a restriction on voting that applies largely to communities of color that vote for Democrats.

Any guess as to what hizzonner will do?  He's already trying to defund education in Baltimore City and Prince Georges County, so I don't think that he is counting on getting much in the way of the Black vote the next time around.

He has until May 30 to veto the bill.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Of the more than 100 reforms proposed in the Missouri state legislature, only one passed:

The Missouri legislature ended its session Friday night having passed virtually none of the reforms activists sought in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown.

Activists had been tracking more than 100 bills related to criminal justice and policing, but just one of substance had made its way out of the legislature, they say.

“This was such an opportunity for the Missouri legislature to step up and do the right thing. The people of the state called on our lawmakers to fix this broken system,” said Denise Lieberman a senior attorney for the Advancement Project, a civil rights group, and co-chair of the Don’t Shoot Coalition, a group formed to address policy reform after Brown’s shooting.

………
The scores of bills — introduced mostly by the legislature’s few Democrats — offered a menu of reforms. They would have developed standards for eyewitness identification, required body cameras, restricted police from racial profiling, required diversity and sensitivity training, and modified state rules governing the use of lethal force, something Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon threw his support behind in his State of the State address.

The legislature did pass one bill advocates had been calling for, which was aimed at limiting municipal reliance on fines for revenue, a practice highlighted in a scathing Justice Department report on Ferguson released earlier this year. The bill lowers the cap on how much revenue a municipality can generate from traffic tickets from 30 percent to 20 percent statewide and to 12.5 percent in St. Louis County, which is plagued by excessive traffic violations and is home to Ferguson. The bill also bans courts from throwing individuals in jail over minor traffic offenses.

Weak tea.

What a surprise.

I will note that without the protests, even this small bit of reform would never have happened.

Unless you make the Powers That Be profoundly uncomfortable, you will never see any reform.

Whiny Bitches

Republicans are furious that business lobbyists are not countering the actions of labor unions, environmentalists, and liberals on trade agreements:

Top House Republicans believe the business community is blowing its chance to clinch a trade deal.

Unlike unions, they say, Big Business advocates aren’t flooding Capitol phone lines. They’re not winning over skeptical Republicans. And they haven’t made much headway with business-friendly Democrats who are considering voting for the package, either.

That threatens to create a dangerous reality for supporters of a sweeping trade deal with Pacific Rim nations: that it will become more politically tenable for Republicans to be against trade promotion authority legislation than for it.

The chorus of GOP complaints — striking considering the typically close ties between Republican leadership and Big Business — is coming from all over the Capitol. But it’s loudest on the House side.

David Stewart, a top aide to Speaker John Boehner, voiced the frustration of Boehner’s office during a meeting Friday with officials from business lobby groups, telling them their effort is falling short. During the meeting at the offices of the Business Roundtable, Stewart said unions are outworking the business groups on calls to GOP lawmakers’ offices.

“The lobbying effort on the Hill has been abysmal,” one senior GOP aide said. “Calls and letters into member offices are running 10 to 1 against TPA. This is an uphill fight already given the lack of trust in the president and the general unpopularity of TPA, and the current lobbying effort has not made it any easier. If TPA passes in the House it will be despite the downtown coalition and the president, not because of them.”

Of course, trade politics are tricky — the debate over TPA has triggered concerns ranging from job losses in individual House districts to currency manipulation — and it’s not just the business community that’s struggling. President Barack Obama hasn’t yet been able to build enough Democratic support to get the fast-track bill across the finish line. He faces a big obstacle in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is vehemently opposed to the legislation as it’s currently written.

Gee, do you want some cheese with that whine?

More important, the big business lobbyists have limited effect on the Teabaggers in the base, and the wackdoodle base cannot deal with being on the same side of an issue as a black President.

If anything, the Republican base is even more opposed to TPP and fast track than the Democratic base.

Considering the number of scalps that the Teabaggers have accumulated in primaries, it's no wonder that big business lobbyists are having difficulty moving the needle.

Russia Resets its Armor

Click any Image for Popup Slideshow
T-14 Armata Tank, Side View 1	T-14 Armata Tank, Front Qurter View 2
T-14 Armata Tank, Rear Quarter View 3	T-14 Armata T-72 Size Comparison 4
Medium IFV, Kurganets-25 5	T-15 Heavy IFV 6
T-14 vs T-72 on Parade 7	AMX-13 with bustle for autoloader for comparison 8
T-14 Armata Tank, Labeled 9	T-15 Armata IFV,  Labeled 10
New Wheeled "Boomerang" 8X8 11	Koalitsiya-SV Self Propelled Artillery 12
T-15 Engine and Drive Detail 13	T-15 Engine and Drive 14

Nothing has gotten more buzz across the military journalism sphere than the 75^th May 9 VE day parade in Moscow.

It appears that Russia is going with completely new designs for pretty much all of its armor.

There appear to be a completely new tank, a heavy IFV (a vehicle that has never before been in the Russian/Soviet inventory), medium IFV, wheeled IFV, and SP Howitzer.

It appears that the Russians are upgrading their entire armored inventory, with the exception of the light airborne elements, over the next few years.

The T-14 Armata tank is perhaps the most significant departure from past practice, dispensing with a crewed turret, and placing the crew, commander, gunner, and driver, in the hull.

Of note is the rather large bustle on the back of the turret. (Picture 1)

It looks rather, like the bustle arrangement for AMX-13 light tank of the 1960s (Picture 8), but it appears even less integrated.

In the AMX-13, the bustle was used to accommodate magazines for the auto-loader, but there does not appear to be enough volume for this application with Russian 125mm rounds.

My (not particularly educated) guess is that the structure accommodates the mechanism for the auto-loader.

I would also note that the turret has an unfinished appearance to it, and I'm wondering if discussions are still ongoing regarding the level of armor on the turret.

Even with the possibilities for space savings from the new configuration, the T-14 is larger than the T-72 family it succeeds.

My guess it is being driven by the following factors:

• The platform will be used on a new heavy APC/IFV, the T-15.
• Additional ground clearance allows for greater resistance to mines and IEDs.
• More space for survivability, particularly in terms of separating ammunition storage from critical components and crew.
• Improved crew accommodations and comfort.

Among other things, I think that the new platform indicates a focus on counterinsurgency, particularly as it applies to the T-15, which is a vehicle that has not existed in the Russian arsenal before.

The T-15 is in many ways similar to the Israeli Namer IFV, which is derived from the Merkava main battle tank.

One significant difference though is that it appears that the platform has been turned around for the T-15:  The engine and drive sprockets are in the front for the T-15, and in the rear for the T-14.  (Pictures 1, 6, 10, 13, & 14) (The Merkava and Namer both have front mounted engines and drive sprockets)

The T-15 likely reflects a new strategic vision:  A heavy IFV does not gain one a lot in "Fulda Gap" scenario, where tanks would still likely be able to take them out with impunity, but it would be useful in counterinsurgency and occupation scenarios.

The new medium IFV, in the 25 ton class, is the Kurganets-25, and once again, it is larger than its predecessor, though it carries the same remotely operated turret as the T-15.

It is larger than its BMP predecessors, and has greater ground clearance as well as greater height, indicating easier entrance and egress from the vehicle, which in turn suggests that the vehicle is likely to be deployed like an IFV than an APC.  (Basically troops in the vehicle until much closer to the line of battle)

Like its larger sibling, and unlike the BMP, the engine will be front mounted, which should further aid in deploying troops.

For lighter deployments, the Russians appear to be replacing their BTR with the "Boomerang".

Much like the other IFVs, the engines have been moved forward to allow for rear dismount, and much like its western counterparts, and unlike the BTR, it has a deep "V" hull for better resistance to mines and IEDs.

Finally, there is the Koalitsiya-SV self propelled howitzer.  It is the only one of the new tanks that is derived from an existing platform, specifically a chassis from the T-80, which is shares with its predecessor, 2S19 Msta-S.

It has an auto-loader, and it is reported to have some sort of fractional propellant system, which could allow for simultaneous rounds on target.

What may be most telling is what we did not see.

Specifically,  the absence of updated airborne armor indicates that the strategic view of the Russian armed forces is significantly different from that of the Soviet ones.

They clearly do not expect to project power much beyond countries on their boarders, which, for example, a heavy IFV makes sense.

If you are looking for world wide operations, the heavy IFV does not make a whole lot of sense, which is why the US Military, which these days is an imperial military, screwed the pooch with their now-abandoned Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV).

As an aside, there is a big difference between a 45-50 ton heavy IFV (the T-15) and a 65-75 ton IFV (GCV) in terms of cost, logistics, maintenance, and support as well.

This is a remarkably ambitious program for the Russian military, and the fact that they actually have something resembling functional hardware in public is remarkable.

In comparison to my experience with the Future Combat Systems Manned Ground Vehicles (MGV), where much of the time was spent on (I am not kidding here) dealing with General's demands that the PowerPoint slides protection color coding be made more consistent (really, not kidding here) until after more than a decade, it was canceled, the Russians seem to have achieved a remarkably competent military design and procurement process.

Various links I used below, in no particular order:

A Journalistic Vacuum so Perfect That There Is a Nobel Prize in Physics Buried in It

Judith Miller Interviews James O'Keefe. Seriously 

They had a discussion on the sanctity of journalism and journalistic ethics.

Reality beats The Onion.

This is surreal at a mind-f%$#ing level.

We are F%$#ed

The massive Larsen C ice shelf is predicted to collapse by 2010 2020:

It has been a really bad week for the ice shelves of the quickly warming Antarctic peninsula, the part of the vast frozen continent that extends northward toward South America.

Earlier this week, we learned that the gigantic marine-based Larsen C ice shelf, which is almost as big as Scotland, has several worrisome vulnerabilities — including a growing rift across it. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and several other research centers say this could pose an “imminent risk” to its stability.

And now, NASA scientists are giving an even worse verdict for the remnants of the nearby Larsen B ice shelf, much of which already disintegrated back in 2002. Back then, the shelf lost a region larger than Rhode Island, but there are still 618 square miles left of it — for now.

However, in a new study in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California at Irvine say that this remnant now faces its “approaching demise.” In a news release, NASA adds that the ice shelf “is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.”

If these two research teams are right, then the coming years could see major ice calving events off of the Antarctic peninsula — especially for Larsen B.

“What might happen is that for a few years, we will have the detachment of big icebergs from this remaining ice shelf, and then at one point, one very very warm summer, when you have lots of melting of the surface, the whole thing will just give way, and will shatter into thousands of smaller icebergs,” says the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Ala Khazendar, lead author of the new study.

Clearly, anthropogenic climate change is a myth.

Note that this is an ice shelf,  and as such, is already supported by the ocean so the impact on ocean levels is effectively nil, but this will change the environment and albedo (reflectively) which will likely increase the flow of glaciers into the ocean.

Prediction made by climate experts have consistently been exceeded by what is really going on.

Not good.

Bad Day at the Office

Click for slideshow

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Yes, I think that this is a class 1 mishap

I think that this is the wing

Because of some as yet undetermined braking issue, a Hungarian Gipen overran the runway at the Lion Effort 2015 military exercise: (Google Translate, original here)

Air base in Caslav Gripen crashed Hungarian army. He slid off the runway and ended up in a field. The pilot ejected. Both are fine. The army said that the aircraft not brake, but it is not clear whether it was pilot error or a technical fault to blame. Damaged aircraft is probably damaged beyond repair.

"At this moment I can say that the aircraft slid off the runway. Pilots are in accordance with the provisions ejected. If the machine is uncontrollable and threatens serious accident, they must leave the plane. Both, however, are in order and nothing dramatic happened in the outcome, "said iDNES.cz Defense Ministry spokesman Petr Medek.

Airport spokesman Tomas Maruscak on Czech Television said that the aircraft not brake. "At the moment it is not possible to say whether it is to blame pilot error or a technical failure," he said. According to him, the aircraft ended up in a field.

The airplane rolled out of the runway at approximately 13:40. Until the sixteenth hour airport was closed because of an accident and other flights are diverted to the airport in Pardubice. "Aircraft accidents being examined by the Commission of the Department of Military Aviation Section of Supervision and Control of the Ministry of Defense," said Magdalena Dvorakova of the Communication Department of the General Staff.

The fact that both men escaped without injury, it is not obvious. Ejection from an aircraft that is on the runway, is a very difficult matter. "Ejection at zero altitude for pilots is a big adrenaline rush when I say it in quotation marks," he told ČTK former military pilot Jan Vachek. According to him, it can only seat state of the art, which are equipped with Gripen fighters.

According to another expert, who asked not to be named, the Gripen crashed beyond repair. Damage could increase antenna systems located at the end of the runway, which is likely to aircraft at high speed when landing entered.

In Caslav held an international exercise Lion Effort 2015, air exercise States whose armies have any versions of the JAS-39 Gripen. Outside the Czech participates just Hungary, and Sweden. The Kingdom of Thailand participating without their aircraft.

Martin Baker ejection seats save another two unlucky aircrew.

I Have Never Watched Mad Men

And I really do not give a sh%$ about the series finale.

Except for the whole DB Cooper theory.

I spent my high school years in the Pacific Northwest, and it imbued me with a fascination with all things DB Cooper.

BTW, I never watched Breaking Bad either. 

I am so out of touch with the media habits of America's glitterati.

I Have Not Electrocuted Myself

The light switch in the bathroom went bad, so I replaced it.

I went with a simple switch, instead of the current dimmer, because:

• I can use LED and compact fluorescent bulbs now.
• Why the f%$# would anyone ever want to dim the light in the bathroom.

It actually went pretty smoothly.

I would like to offer my most sincere thanks to whoever invented the wire nut.

I had Charlie in the basement so I could check if I got it right without running up and down stairs.

Some Other Folks Feel the Same Way about the Media's Response as I Do

There have been two cogent and well written critiques of the generally dismissive response of the mainstream media to Seymour Hersh's story which claims to show that the official narrative of the Osama bin Laden killing was largely untrue.

The first, from the Columbia Journalism Review is likely to gain the most currency. It's a fairly conventional analysis, and notes that Hersh's critics have been lazy and knee jerk in their dismissal of his latest story:

Seymour Hersh has done the public a great service by breathing life into questions surrounding the official narrative of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Yet instead of trying to build off the details of his story, or to disprove his assertions with additional reporting, journalists have largely attempted to tear down the messenger.

Barrels of ink have been spilled ripping apart Hersh’s character, while barely any follow-up reporting has been done to corroborate or refute his claims—even though there’s no doubt that the Obama administration has repeatedly misinformed and misled the public about the incident. Even less attention has been paid to the little follow-up reporting that we did get, which revealed that the CIA likely lied about its role in finding bin Laden, which it used to justify torture to the public.

Hersh has attempted to force the media to ask questions about its role in covering a world-shaping event—but it’s clear the media has trouble asking such questions if the answers are not the ones they want to hear.

Hersh’s many critics, almost word-for-word, gave the same perfunctory two-sentence nod to his best-known achievements—breaking the My Lai massacre in 1969 (for which he won the Pulitzer) and exposing the Abu Ghraib torture scandal 35 years later—before going on to call him every name in the book: “conspiracy theorist,” “off the rails,” “crank.” Yet most of this criticism, over the thousands of words written about Hersh’s piece in the last week, has amounted to “That doesn’t make sense to me,” or “That’s not what government officials told me before,” or “How are we to believe his anonymous sources?”

………

Largely ignored in this is debate is the opinion of longtime New York Times Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent Carlotta Gall, who has more knowledge of the region in one finger than most of Hersh’s critics put together. She wrote in the Times this week that she “would not necessarily dismiss [Hersh’s] claims immediately” and that “he is following up on a story that many of us assembled parts of.” Of his claim that an informant, rather than a courier, led the CIA to bin Laden, Gall wrote that “my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s.”

………

Within months, of course, Hersh’s stories would be on the front page of The New York Times. He soon started reporting on intelligence agencies. In 1974 he broke the story that the CIA was systematically spying on Americans in violation of federal law. The rest of the media ridiculed it. They questioned his sourcing while calling the story “exaggerated” and “overwritten and under-researched.” A year later, CIA director William Colby was forced to admit to Congress that it was all true.

Over at Pando, the redoubtable Mark Ames focuses more tightly on the 1970s CIA spying revalations, which to my mind makes for a more compelling critique of the recent press wank-fest, if just because the reaction seems identical to the last time:

………

Hersh has pissed off some very powerful people and institutions with this story, and that means the inevitable media pushback to discredit his reporting is already underway, with the attacks on Hersh led by Vox Media’s Max Fisher, CNN’s Peter Bergen, and even some on the left like Nation Institute reporter Matthieu Aikins. Yesterday Slate joined the pile-on, running a wildly entertaining, hostile interview with Hersh.

Such attacks by fellow journalists on a Sy Hersh bombshell are nothing new—in fact, he used to relish them, and probably still does. He got the same hostile reaction from his media colleagues when he broke his biggest story of his career: The 1974 exposé of the CIA’s massive, illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, which targeted tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Americans, mostly antiwar and leftwing dissidents.

Hersh is better known today for his My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib exposés, but it was his MH-CHAOS scoop, which the New York Times called “the son of Watergate,” that was his most consequential and controversial—from this one sensational exposé the entire intelligence apparatus was nearly taken down. Hersh’s exposés directly led to the famous Church Committee hearings into intelligence abuses, the Rockefeller Commission, and the less famous but more radical Pike Committee hearings in the House, which I wrote about in Pando last year. These hearings not only blew open all sorts of CIA abuses, assassination programs, drug programs and coups, but also massive intelligence failures and boondoggles.

………

And it was the Washington Post that led the attacks on Hersh’s reporting. In early January 1975, the WaPo ran an editorial, “The CIA’s ‘Illegal Domestic Spying,’” attacking Hersh for relying on anonymous sources—this from the same paper that relied on the most famous anonymous source in history, Deep Throat. The WaPo editorial went on:

“While almost any CIA activity can be fitted under the heading of ‘spying,’ and while CIA activities undertaken on American soil can be called ‘domestic spying,’ it remains to be determined which of these activities has been conducted in ‘violation’ of the agency’s congressional charter or are ‘illegal.’”

………

A common line of attack was to call Hersh’s series “overwritten and under-researched.” Gossip in the Washington press corps at the time claimed that WaPo’s famous editor Ben Bradlee denounced Hersh’s stories as “overwritten and under-researched”; and when Hersh was passed over for the Pulitzer that year, to everyone’s surprise, one columnist wrote Hersh didn’t deserve it anyway, calling his MH-CHAOS exposes “overwritten, overplayed, under-researched and under-proven.”

………

Hersh might’ve been buried by his own press colleagues, who were only interested in discrediting his reporting, if not for CIA director William Colby’s testimony before the Senate in mid-January, 1975. Hersh himself reported it for the Times, which led:

“William E. Colby, Director of Central Intelligence, acknowledged at a Senate hearing today that his agency had infiltrated undercover agents into antiwar and dissident political groups inside the United States as part of a counterintelligence program that led to the accumulation of files on 10,000 American citizens.”

After the CIA chief’s confirmation of Hersh’s story, his media detractors had no choice but to grudgingly walk back their criticism. Quoting again from Kathryn Olmsted’s book, after Colby’s admission,

“The Washington Post reported that Colby’s disclosure had ‘confirmed major elements’ of Hersh’s stories, and Newsweek agreed that Colby’s testimony had substantiated ‘many basic elements of the original story if not all the adjectives.’”

Today we’re seeing some of the same grudging, qualified acceptance of Hersh’s Bin Laden bombshell from the establishment press.

Later in 1975, the great Bill Greider—who was then an editor at the WaPo—summed up the attitude of the press to Hersh’s revelations:

“the press especially tugs back and forth at itself, alternately pursuing the adrenal instincts unleashed by Watergate, the rabid distrust bred by a decade of out-front official lies, then abruptly playing the cozy lapdog.”

My how we’ve grown so much in the 40 years since.

I don't know how much of Hersh's story is true, but the press response at this point seems to exquisitely lame.

Background, and underlying story here.

Lawsuit Filed in Japan Against TPP

This is actually a not a tinfoil hat thing.

The lead plaintiff in this lawsuit against the TPP is a member of the Japanese Diet (Parliament) and former agriculture minister, and the the legal argument addresses a huge flash point in Japanese culture:

More than 1,000 people filed a lawsuit against the government on Friday, seeking to halt Japan’s involvement in 12-country talks on a Pacific Rim free trade agreement, which they called “unconstitutional.”

A total of 1,063 plaintiffs, including lawmakers, claimed in the case brought to the Tokyo District Court that the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership would undermine their basic human rights under the Constitution.

The lawsuit is led by Masahiko Yamada, 73, a lawyer who served as agriculture minister in 2010 as part of the Democratic Party of Japan government.

“The TPP could violate the Japanese right to get stable food supply, or the right to live, guaranteed by Article 25 of the nation’s Constitution,” Yamada, who abandoned his party in 2012 over then-Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s push to join the TPP talks, said Thursday before the court filing.

The envisaged pact would benefit big corporations but would jeopardize the country’s food safety and medical systems, and destroy the domestic farm sector, according to the plaintiffs.

One of the consistent concerns of Japanese society is food security, a rather unsurprising fact given that the nation is both densely populated and highly populated, placing arable land at a premium.

Particularly when juxtaposed with the Soybean Bounce of the 1970s, when the US abruptly embargoed soybean exports in response to a spike in livestock feed prices, which sent Japan scrambling for alternate sources of their dietary staple, this is is a big deal.

Even if the case gets laughed out of court, it will be a lightning rod for opponents of the deal.

Boston Bombing Victims Brought Back to Life

Of course, they have not been brought back to life.

Neither have lost limbs, damaged hearing, or brain injuries been fixed.

All that happened was that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced to death:

Two years after bombs in two backpacks transformed the Boston Marathon from a sunny rite of spring to a smoky battlefield with bodies dismembered, a federal jury on Friday condemned Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for his role in the 2013 attack.

In a sweeping rejection of the defense case, the jury found that death was the appropriate punishment for six of 17 capital counts — all six related to Mr. Tsarnaev’s planting of a pressure-cooker bomb on Boylston Street, which his lawyers never disputed. Mr. Tsarnaev, 21, stood stone-faced in court, his hands folded in front of him, as the verdict was read, his lawyers standing grimly at his side.

No one is made whole by this, and no one would be if there still weren't years of appeals ahead.

I do not support the death penalty. It amounts to little more than a thrill killing conducted by the state.

Quote of the Day

In Bushworld, in other words, playing a central role in catastrophic policy failure doesn’t disqualify you from future influence. If anything, a record of being disastrously wrong on national security issues seems to be a required credential.

—Paul Krugman

'Nuff said.

Senate Dems Don Spelunking Helmets

They just caved on fast track:

Senate leaders, after personal intercessions by President Obama, reached an agreement Wednesday on a path to grant the president accelerated power to complete a sweeping trade accord ringing the Pacific Ocean — just a day after fellow Democrats had blocked him.

The larger aim is to secure a 12-nation agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, spanning the Pacific from Canada and Chile to Japan and Australia and encompassing 40 percent of the world’s economic output. Mr. Obama sees the pact as a central part of his economic legacy, the largest trade deal in two decades and the realization of his foreign policy pivot toward Asia.

It also means money. Major American business interests, from Nike to Boeing and Hollywood to Silicon Valley, want the deal badly. Labor and environmental groups see it as a threat to American workers at the expense of profits.

A series of trade-related votes will begin Thursday and stretch well into next week. The trade promotion authority would give the president the ability to move more quickly on the deal, leaving Congress with the power to vote up or down on the agreement but with no ability to amend it.

I had hoped that they would have at least made it a full day,

Amtrak Train Crash Just Got Weird

It appears that a short time before the Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia, two other trains on the same track were hit with ……… Something:

Just before Tuesday's deadly Amtrak derailment, both a SEPTA commuter train and another Amtrak train in the same corridor were hit by projectiles, one which crashed through the engineer's window.

An Amtrak spokesman could not be reached regarding Amtrak Acela Train 2173, which passengers said was struck at about 9:05 p.m. A SEPTA train was struck by a projectile at about 9:10 p.m., according to a SEPTA spokeswoman, who said there is no indication the incident is connected to the derailment, which happened at about 9:30 p.m.

………

SEPTA northbound Train 769, en route to Trenton on tracks on the Northeast Corridor beside the Amtrak rails, was approximately four miles from the derailment site when it was struck at about 9:10 p.m. SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams said an "unknown projectile" broke the engineer's window.

No injuries were reported and the train was held on the tracks ahead of the North Philadelphia station. The 80 passengers were transferred to buses.

Amtrak's northbound Train 188 derailed on the Northeast Corridor tracks, killing at least seven and injuring scores. The cause of the derailment is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Railroad Administration.

I'm wondering if some kids having "fun" with cinder blocks on an over pass, or some nut with a firearm, was playing a really stupid game that night.

Obama Claims That Fast Track Will Not Kill Dodd-Frank. Canadian Files NAFTA Complaint to Kill Volker Rule

Obama calls the claim lubricious, but the government of Canada has moved to exempt its own bonds from the Volker Rule:

In her attacks on Obama’s pending trade deals, Elizabeth Warren has argued that could undermine US financial regulations like Dodd Frank. The Administration has taken to trying to dismiss Warren as not knowing what she was talking about. More skillful defenders of the traitorous trade deals took the tact of saying that Warren could in theory be right, but the odds of her fears playing out were so remote as to not be worth worrying about.

In a long, careful article in the Nation yesterday, George Zornick explains even with the limited information that we have now about the contents of proposed treaties like the TPP and its ugly European step-sister, the TTIP, Warren’s worries are valid. ………

………

But an example of Warren’s concerns came out of left field yesterday, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:

A U.S. rule that prohibits banks from taking risky bets with their own money violates the North American Free-Trade Agreement because it bans U.S. banks from trading triple-A-rated Canadian government debt, Canada’s finance minister said Wednesday…
Canadian concerns about the Volcker rule’s treatment of sovereign debt aren’t new. In 2012, Canada joined European countries and Japan in raising concerns about the law’s reach..

Mr. [Joe] Oliver noted that the Volcker rule reflects concerns about the credit standing of some foreign securities. That concern doesn’t apply to Canada, he said, because Canada’s credit rating is better than the U.S. government and U.S. municipalities…

“I believe—with strong legal basis—that this rule violates the terms of the Nafta agreement,” Mr. Oliver told a securities industry audience in New York that included the U.S. ambassador to Canada, Bruce Heyman. “I hope the United States administration sees that changing the Volcker rule is in its own best interests and that of its biggest trading partner.”

Yep, clearly Obama was right to portray Warren as a hysterical woman over the possibility of the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process will never be used to roll back financial regulations.

When juxtaposed with how Mitch McConnell crowing about how a future Republican President will use Fast Track to run impose the Republican agenda:

If we had a Republican president right now, not a single Democrat would vote for Trade Promotion Authority. So what I’ve said to my members, if we want the next Republican president, who we hope will be sworn in less than two years from now, to have a chance to do trade agreements with the rest of the world, this bill is about that president as well as this one.

Fast Track, the TPP, and the TTIP are seen by the Republicans as a weapon to weild.

Achilles Emerges from His Tent

Russ Feingold will run for his old seat in 2016:

Saying his "desire to serve is stronger than ever," Democrat Russ Feingold announced Thursday a bid for his old U.S. Senate seat against the Republican who defeated him four and a half years ago — Ron Johnson.

A Johnson-Feingold race would be a rare rematch of Senate opponents, offer voters a stark ideological contrast and easily rank as one of the top Senate races in the country in 2016, fiercely contested by both parties.

Feingold made the announcement in a short video shot at his Middleton home, saying he wanted to "bring back to the U.S. Senate strong independence, bipartisanship and honesty."

He did not mention Johnson in the video or lay out his campaign message in any detail. He said he was focused on the worries people in Wisconsin have about "their economic well-being." He also raised a familiar Feingold theme — the role of money in the political process.

"People tell me all the time that our politics in Washington are broken and that multimillionaires, billionaires and big corporations are calling all the shots. They especially say this about the U.S. Senate. And it's hard not to agree," Feingold said.

I would expect a Democratic pickup here.

Ron Johnson won in a Republican wave year, and he was to some degree an unknown quantity.

Now, he is known as one of the stupidest guys in the Senate, as well as being a teabagger.

Feingold should have run against Walker in the recall, but he was brooding in his tent at the time.

Sy Hersh's Bin Laden Story Is Looking a Bit Less Fantastical

I mentioned yesterday that Seymour Hersh's account of the killing of Osama bin Laden, which is at siginficant variance with the official "Zero Dark Thirty" version was a potential bomb shell, but (at least initially) it was a bit light on sourcing.

Well, today, we have some more data points that seem to point to his story being accurate, at least in part.

First, we have a report from NBC saying that there was a Pakistani source inside the country's state security apparatus:

Intelligence sources tell NBC News that in the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a retired Pakistani military intelligence officer helped the CIA track him down.

While the Pakistani intelligence asset provided vital information in the hunt for bin Laden, he did not provide the location of the al Qaeda leader's Abottabad, Pakistan compound, sources said.

Three sources also said that some officials in the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.

The asset was evacuated from Pakistan and paid reward money by the CIA, sources said. U.S. officials took pains to note he was one of many sources who provided help along the way, and said that the al Qaeda courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, remained the linchpin of the operation.

The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking the courier.

The new revelations do not cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency's operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission.

NBC qualifies as a reputable source, and this appears to be confirmation of a part of Hirsh's story.

It should be noted though, that this omission from the official story might very well be an issue of "Sources and Methods" as well as diplomatic reality, both of which would mitigate against revealing the complicity of Pakistani security.

What's more, this is precisely the sort of stuff that Hersh would uncover.

It's significant, and embarrassing, and makes authorities look far less heroic, which history shows to be Hersh's favorite kind of reporting.

Another interesting data point is that another reporter,  R. J. Hillhouse, is claiming that he took her story without attribution:

Seymour Hersh's story, "The Killing of Bin Laden," in the London Review of Books has a fundamental problem: it's either plagiarism or unoriginal.

If it's fiction--as some have implied, it's plagiarism. If it's true, it's not original. The story was broken here on The Spy Who Billed Me four years ago, in August 2011:

"Bin Laden Turned in by Informant -- Courier Was Cover Story"

"Questions Raised by Real Story of How US Found Bin Laden"

On August 7, 2011, I wrote, among other things:

………

I have had great respect for Seymour Hersh, arguably one of the greatest investigative journalists of our time. I do not believe his story is fiction. I trust my sources--which were clearly different than his. I am, however, profoundly disappointed that he has not given credit to the one who originally broke the story.

Hillhouse has writeen extensively on the US state security apparatus, including stories on outsourcing of intelligence activities that have drawn responses from the Director of National intelligence.

So, we have confirmation from NBC that someone inside Pakistan's intelligence establishment came to the administration at least a year before the raid, and two very similar accounts of the events of May 2, 2011 which appear to have been derived from different sources.

What's more, according to what appears to be an interview with Hillhouse in The Intercept, the account of SEALS throwing bin Laden's body, or body parts, out of a helicopter because they believed that the official story was going to be a drone strike, was something that she had been told by one source, but could not confirm, which provides some additional credibility to both accounts:

Hillhouse also claims that one of her sources told her a particular detail that she did not include in 2011 because she could not confirm it: that the Navy SEALs threw bin Laden’s body out of the helicopter while traveling over the Hindu Kush mountains from Pakistan to Afghanistan. Hersh’s story includes an assertion from his main source that “during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains.” While this seems bizarre in retrospect, it would be plausible if the SEALs had believed at the time that the Obama administration planned to say publicly that bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike.

Hillhouse believes that “Everything that [Hersh] has said has been spot on” but “You can’t help but notice that everything he is saying in the story, which is true, was first broken by me.”

So this account is definitely plausible.

The journalist "debunking" at this point seems to be loosely sourced accusations that Hersh has gone off the deep end.

The lesson here is that blithely dismissing reporting from Seymour Hersh is not a good idea.

His reporting, at the very least, merits serious due diligence by anyone following that event.