Iraq has revoked L. Paul Bremer’s grant of immunity to contractors, and so now the contractors in Iraq are considering cutting and running.
This is a good thing. They do more harm than good, they cost too much, and mercenaries are just plain wrong.
Furthermore, this is an action that must have somewhere near 100% support by the Iraqi public, and it useful for the average citizen to see the central government doing something productive.
I happen to think that God does not meddle in sporting events, except when people attempt to set themselves as models of piety as the Colorado Rockies have done.
In any real workplace, the EEOC would be on their asses about creating a hostile work environment, and it’s good to see sanctimonious people lose.
Full disclosure: to the degree I follow Baseball, I am a member of Red Sox nation.
Only, unlike New Orleans, they are not drowning the city in a bathtub, they are burining it in a furnace.
The LA Times has a fascinating interview with the former Fire Chief of San Diego.
Some Tidbits:
As UC San Diego professor Steve Erie puts it:
“It’s paradise plundered,” which happens to be the title of a book he’s finishing “about how developers run this town.”
Erie says that “developers own most of the city councils. In Poway, in Escondido, what they do is put homeowners in harm’s way. They’re able to control zoning processes, and they’re frequently behind initiatives that say no new taxes, no new fire services. It’s insanity.”
It’s not insanity. It’s how Republicans run society, by eating our seed corn.
Good!!!
The Republicans made a decision in 1988 to cut Lowell Weicker loose, and we should do the same with Kerrey. He’s all too often on Fox News, he supports the war, and he wants to privatize Social Security.
We can do without him, and taking the hit on the seat is a small price to pay on this.
Is it any surprise that under the Bush administration’s policies of “self regulation”, that companies would abandon health and safety inspections?
In the months before issuing a massive recall of its frozen hamburgers, Topps Meat Co. curtailed testing of ground beef and skipped other safeguards aimed at preventing contaminated meat from reaching consumers, according to a published report Tuesday.
It may be safer to buy your meat as steaks, and grind it at home…At least then, you can be reasonably certain that you are not getting cow anus in the mix.
The German-based Energy Watch Group has released a study indicating that peak oil has already passed, and production will now decline by 7% a year.
Even if they are only half right, this will not be pretty, and by the end of 2008 we could see $200/bbl oil.
He is co-exeutor of his Uncle’s estate ($25g/year for not doing much) and the properties in Stamford Connecticut that he was supposed to manage were dilapidated, garbage strewn, and occupied by squatters.
To be fair, he did eventually sell his uncle’s property for $17 million, after he had arranged for millions of dollars in earmarks for the Stamford Urban Transitway, which increased the property’s value.
What a prince.
Ummm…I have nothing further to ad about this report.
Sometimes, the headline is all you need.
This woman is going to jail for 10 Years.
Her name is Tiffany Sutton, and she is just 24 years old, basically a kid, and a troubled one at that, and she is going to jail because she ran out of mental health coverage.
The newspaper misses the point and goes with the sensational headline, Woman sentenced in blood-drinking sex case. (Yes, I know that it is a great hed, but still)
Here are the details you really need to know:
Houck [Suttons’s attorney] submitted a memo to the court stating that Sutton suffered physical and sexual abuse from ages 3 to 13, and she has had mental health problems since she was 14.
Sutton improved with mental health counseling and medication up until her insurance ended six months before her February arrests, Houck wrote.
According to prison health records, Sutton thought she was a vampire for the first several weeks she was in jail, Houck wrote.
No health insurance coverage for her meds, so she self medicates, and she and while drunk and stoned, convinces her 46-year old consort to let her tie him up, and then cuts him and tries to drink his blood.
Does it sound like she was in her right mind????
The judge, one David Udall*, decides that the solution is to sentence her to TEN YEARS IN PRISON.
This woman needs help, and she will not get it under the tender confinement of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
*Anyone know if he is related to the late Congressman Morris or his son Congressman Mark Udall?
There is something quintessentially Iowan about the “Butter-Cow Lady” Promoting Obama In Radio Ad.
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
Raymond Chandler, Red Wind
I guess that the Santa Ana winds cause fires too, and pretty bad ones at that. I can’t add much to this news except this picture:
A while back, NASA surveyed 24,000 pilots about safety. The results were grim, with a much higher number of things like runway incursions, etc. than had been previously recorded, so NASA suppressed the survey because it “could materially affect the public confidence in, and the commercial welfare of, the air carriers and general aviation companies whose pilots participated in the survey.”
In other words, it would scare the hell out of people. Sorry, but covering the ass of the Airline industry should not be a reason for an official coverup, except of course when Bush and His Evil Minions™ are in charge, I guess.
Last week there was news that Comcast was blocking traffic from BitTorrent, Gnutella, and other file sharing operations, Comcast has finally responded to these reports. They say that they are not blocking these applications, they are just delaying them.
Speaking on background in a phone interview earlier today, a Comcast Internet executive admitted that reality was a little more complex. The company uses data management technologies to conserve bandwidth and allow customers to experience the Internet without delays. As part of that management process, he said, the company occasionally – but not always – delays some peer-to-peer file transfers that eat into Internet speeds for other users on the network.
Of course, some of these applications have legal uses, BitTorrent was developed to do online software releases, and almost every Linux distro these days uses it, and it is blocking crippling other applications, like Lotus Notes.
While I think that Notes is one of the worst email/groupware packages ever written, and I would not shed a tear to see it gone, it would be inappropriate for me, as an ISP, to block it.
So, not only is Comcast dishonest and hypocritical, they are also incompetent. Who would have expected that from the cable company.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation noticed the same sort of packet forging that the AP did (and that Broadband Reports readers did some time ago), and continued its testing to see if other applications are affected. The answer is a disturbing “yes.” The results of additional testing done by the EFF indicate Comcast is sending forged reset packets with some Gnutella traffic. When the EFF ran a Gnutella node on a Comcast connection, the forged reset packets disrupted communication between the nodes.
What’s particularly insidious about Comcast’s packet forging is that it’s transparent to both its customers and those on the opposite ends of the connection. Applications such as BitTorrent and Gnutella retain some of their functionality, but they’ll also appear to malfunction for no apparent reason.
Even if you accept the argument that all P2P traffic is inherently evil, and that Comcast has the right to disrupt it in order to put a stop to copyright infringement, Comcast’s traffic-shaping efforts have apparently extended beyond the realm of P2P and into good old enterprise groupware. Kevin Kanarski, who works as a Lotus Notes messaging engineer, noticed some strange behavior with Lotus Notes when hooked up to a Comcast connection last month.
When Lotus Notes users attempt to send e-mail with larger attachments over Comcast’s network, Notes will drop its connection. Instead of a successfully sent e-mail, they’re greeted with the error message, “Remote system no longer responding.” Kanarski did some digging and has managed to verify that Comcast’s reset packets are the culprit. Instead of passing the legitimate e-mail through its network, Comcast’s traffic monitoring tool (likely Sandvine) is sitting in the middle, imitating both ends of the connection, and sending reset packets to both client and server.
So there is more than some arcane issue of people wanting their free music and pr0n, through incompetence (remember, this is the cable company), they are blocking legitimate software too,
The SSN Hampton was transferred from the East Coast to the West Coast, and upon arriving, a few weeks ago, there was some sort of investigation with a heavy clampdown on information.
Well, now the veil has been lifted a bit, and it appears that there was some signification violations of safety regulations, along with forged log books.
This is a very serious matter. One of the likely causes of the loss of the USS Scorpion in the 1960s was that they were trying out an austere maintenance program.
However, this is less severe thatn what I when I first heard about the lockdown, I was concerned that it involved another nuke had been mishandled.
Here is the chart: 
As the folks at calculated risk explain, the subprime resets will be done with in a year or two, but then the Alt-A and Option ARM mortgages kick in.
Alt-A may not be that bad, it’s basically the bottom end of prime, kind of like being slightly pregnant, but the Option ARM mortgages are a different story. A lot of these folks are paying the minimum, which means that they are going deeper and deeper into debt as we speak.
This will get uglier before it gets better.
It appears now that Bush and His Evil Minions™ are demanding that anyone who gets to see the domestic sypying documents approve Telco immunity. They only gave docs to the Senate Intelligence committee after arranging a quid pro quo.
The Judiciary committee, particularly Leahy and Spector, are rightly calling bullsh%$ on this.
Someone needs to stand up to Bush and to tell him to pound sand.
While you are at it, go to my Act Blue page (upper right hand corner), and give Chris Dodd some love. Maybe that will convince the Senate Dems that being a fighting liberal is a political win.
Well, it appears that Blackwater is both more crooked, and more stupid, than I had previously thought. They have been classifying their mercenaries as independent contractors for tax purposes.
The rules on this are pretty strict. To be an independent contract, you have to be indepndent, you have to set your own hours, place of works, not be subject to company supervisors, etc. Mercenaries don’t qualify. They are told when and where and with what to fight, and Blackwater supplied them with uniforms, flak jackets, weapons, etc.
These were not freelance illustrators.
Henry Waxman has noticed this discrepancy, and that this does not correspond to the standard practices of other firms, like Triple Canopy and Dyncorp, and further noticed that his testimony did not jibe with direction from the IRS.
They are looking at huge fines. It may not be as satisfying as getting them for being mercs and war criminals, but it worked to get Al Capone.
Here is the first part of Waxman’s letter to Blackwater, which implies tax evasion and perjury before congress:
I have received documents which suggest that Blackwater may have engaged in significant tax evasion. According to an IRS ruling in March 2007, Blackwater violated federal tax laws by treating an armed guard as an “independent contractor.” The implication of this ruling is that Blackwater may have avoided paying millions of dollars in Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and related taxes for which it is legally responsible.
Unlike DynCorp and Triple Canopy, the two other major private military contractors providing security services to the State Department in lraq, Blackwater classifies its armed guards as independent contractors rather than as employees. Under federal tax laws, this classification has important ramifications. Businesses must pay Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment taxes for their employees. They must also withhold federal income taxes on their salaries. By classifying its armed guards and other personnel as independent contractors instead of employees, Blackwater has apparently evaded withholding and paying these taxes.
When you testified before our Committee on October 2,2007, Congresswoman Norton asked you why Blackwater treats its security personnel as independent contractors, while your competitors treat their guards as employees. You responded that Blackwater treats its guards as contractors because you found “it is a model that works” and because your guards prefer the “flexibility” of an independent contractor relationship.
Since the hearing, I have learned that the IRS determined in March – six months prior to your testimony – that your classification of a security guard working in Afghanistan as an independent contractor was “without merit.” The IRS advised that “[y]ou are responsible for satisfying the employment tax reporting, filing, and payment obligations that result from this determination.” By its terms, the IRS ruling applied only to the individual security guard who protested his classification, but the IRS warned that its ruling “may be applicable to any other individuals engaged by the fum.” The logic of the ruling would appear to apply to your entire workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is also evidence that Blackwater has tried to conceal the IRS ruling and the evasion of taxes from Congress and law enforcement officials. The IRS determination was issued in response to an inquiry by an individual security guard who questioned his classification as an independent contractor. In June, Blackwater required this employee to sign a nondisclosure agreement before it agreed to pay the back pay and other compensation that he was owed. The terms of this agreement explicitly prohibited the guard from disclosing any information about Blackwater to “any politician” or “public official.” The agreement further provided: “THE UTMOST PROTECTION AND NONDISCLOSURE OF CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION IS OF CRITICAL IMPORTANCE AND IS THE ESSENCE OF THIS AGREEMENT.“
It is difficult to read the IRS ruling and the nondisclosure agreement and not question Blackwater’s intent and actions. When the IRS issued an alert in 2004 warning employers not to “incorrectly treat employees as independent contractors,” the IRS Commissioner described the “[f]ailure to pay employment taxes” as “stealing from the employees of the business” and said that “those who embrace these schemes face civil or criminal sanctions.” Yet it now appears that Blackwater used this illegal scheme to avoid millions of dollars in taxes and then prevented the security guard who discovered the tax evasion from contacting members of Congress or law enforcement officials.
I believe that Blackwater is completely boned.
Fred Thompson had to pull the plug on his daughter after she overdosed on prescription drugs, and he takes a VERY dim view of how the Republicans acted on the Terri Sciavo matter (here and here):
“I had to make those decisions with the rest of my family,” said Thompson. “And I will assure you one thing: No matter which decision you make, you will never know whether or not you made exactly the right decision.”
Talking to a reporter in Florida, Thompson was harshly critical of the political decisions made in the case, saying that there should not be a role for any level of government beyond the judiciary’s authority to adjudicate disputes.
I have on a number of occasions made light of his campaign, my recurring “clown show” heds come to mind, but what we have here is a candidate with experience on a matter saying what he thinks.
It is interesting that it appears that he had been dodging this question for some time, though I get the sense that this is because it is painful, and not out of political expediency.
No soldier’s child should have to visit his wounded parent in a military hospital. What’s more no soldier’s child should have to die on the way to visiting their dad.
This is tragic, and an avoidable tragedy.
Disciplinary actions have been taken against over 50 military personnel as a result of the nuclear warheads flying to Barksdale from Minot.
I still find it hard to believe that this was not intentional, perhaps a bit of patriotic insubordination from someone who saw that the nukes were being pre positioned to launch a nuclear strike on Iran.