Month: January 2013

Quote of the Day

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The only problem is, the suit is being filed by maybe the biggest douchebag of all time, Hank Greenberg (and his company, Starr International), a man who has not only been proven to be corrupt and a fraud, but who perhaps more than anyone else was responsible for the galactic balance-sheet goat-f%$# that caused AIG’s implosion in the first place. If there is such a person as an innocent AIG shareholder who was harmed by the government’s conduct, it sure as hell isn’t Hank Greenberg.

—Matt Taibbi, on Greenberg’s suit against the US because he did not get well paid enough for running AIG into the ground.

(%$# mine)

FWIW, In an unexpected outbreak of sanity AIG has decided not to join Greenberg’s lawauit.

Still, “Galactic Balance Sheet goat f%$#,”  that is good, even by Matt’s high standards.

Go read.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

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This is why privacy, and innocent until proved guilty are important.

If your entire life is available to the state security apparatus, they will find something, and so you had better not be inconvenient to said state security apparatus, because they already have the means to destroy you.

You do not want them to be inclined to actually do so.

It is depressing that the truth tellers in our society are cartoonists and comedians.


Link

I am adding cartoonist Zach Weiner to my list of, “People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.”

A Big F%$# You to Torture Opponents

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After the idea got shot down by opponents of torture in 2009, Obama is nominating highly vocal torture supporter John Brennan:

President Obama plans to nominate top counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan to lead the CIA, a senior administration official said today.

Brennan, a 25-year veteran of the agency, would take the helm of the CIA in the wake of the resignation of former Army Gen. David Petraeus.

I will be calling my Senators (both Democrats) and asking that both of them to filibuster him. (they won’t, but I am asking)

It is very likely, though it is not certain given the veil of secrecy surrounding this matter that Brennan was an active participant in torture.

The most depressing commentary on this is Glen Greenwald’s observation that there is Obama has succeeded in making opposition to torture a fringe political position:

It is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush’s most radical policies is not only Obama’s choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus. Then again, given how the CIA operates, one could fairly argue that Brennan’s eagerness to deceive and his long record of supporting radical and unaccountable powers make him the perfect person to run that agency. It seems clear that this is Obama’s calculus.

I can only conclude that Barack Obama, aka the Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™, is objectively pro torture.

And the morons in Sweden gave him a Nobel Peace Prize.

Just Go Read Matt Taibbi

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He is on fire when writing about the nature of the bank bailouts:

………

Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game – a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will step in to prevent losses. Clearly, a government that’s already in debt over its eyes for the next million years does not have enough capital on hand to rescue every Citigroup or Regions Bank in the land should they all go bust tomorrow. But the market is behaving as if Daddy will step in to once again pay the rent the next time any or all of these kids sets the couch on fire and skips out on his security deposit. Just like an actual Ponzi scheme, it works only as long as they don’t have to make good on all the promises they’ve made. They’re building an economy based not on real accounting and real numbers, but on belief. And while the signs of growth and recovery in this new faith-based economy may be fake, one aspect of the bailout has been consistently concrete: the broken promises over executive pay.

………

The implications here go far beyond the question of whether Dimon and Co. committed insider trading by buying and selling stock while they had access to material nonpublic information about the bailouts. The broader and more pressing concern is the clear implication that by failing to act, federal regulators­ have tacitly approved the nondisclosure. Instead of trusting the markets to do the right thing when provided with accurate information, the government has instead channeled Jack Nicholson – and decided that the public just can’t handle the truth.

………

So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.

Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.

Seriously, just go read, and then scream at your congresscritters.

Maybe Not Unto the 3rd Generation, but More than a Decade

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John Aravosis wondered how long the boycott of Domino’s Pizza should last beyond Tom Monaghan’s sale of the pizza delivery firm:

The thing is, a lot of people are still ticked at Domino’s for the Monaghan years. I know I am. I still avoid Domino’s when possible, even though I “know” Monaghan is gone. (And most of us didn’t even know about the Romney/Bain connection – they owned the company after Monaghan, though they’re now gone too.)

 Like Coors, years after it faced a gay backlash, Domino’s was run by a lot of right-wing jerks during much of its existence, and the company is now trying to figure out how to get rid of some serious baggage. And like Coors, Dominos, Cracker Barrel, Chick-fil-A all give me a bad taste in my mouth, even though the first two have gotten rid of their far-right heritage.

 Are liberals being unfair to Domino’s, or Coors or Cracker Barrel? Once bad people sell a company, is it time for us to let bygones be bygones? If Monaghan continues being a jerk, is it time to stop holding Domino’s response for his ongoing actions?

It’s a legitimate question.

I’m not sure how long a boycott for this sort of sh%$ should last, but it should be at least a decade, and probably at least 2.

This is not about being unwilling to let go, it’s about economics:  If a boycott goes away as soon as the right wing ratf%$# sells out, then he can sell out for more money.

Any protest must continue for a long enough time to ensure there is no easy/lucrative escape hatch.

Yes, I know that this is in response from a post made over 2 weeks ago, I came across this when I was doing some house cleaning.

Heh.

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At the start of a new Congress, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out teabagger membership cards to the Republican Representatives:

As new members of Congress are sworn in on Thursday, Democrats are looking to brand the incoming Republican class early on. The DCCC is sending out the above “Tea Party membership cards” to the offices of 35 freshman Republicans.

 Press releases in their individual districts identify each member as “the newest Tea Party House Republican who will put millionaires ahead of the middle class and dysfunction ahead of progress,” according to DCCC communications director Jesse Ferguson.

This is really what I call “immature College Republican agitprop,” but I still chuckled.

I guess that a lot depends on whose ox is gored.

God Bless America

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The US Treasury is now freezing the accounts of cartoonists of mass destruction:

I went to Congo to write a comic book about a terror group — and ended up being labelled a terror supporter myself by the Treasury Department.

The bizarre tale of my graphic novel Army of God, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a window inside a little-known counter-terrorism campaign that captures more than a few innocents in its wide net.

Nearly 12 years since the massive expansion of federal powers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, OFAC’s collateral damage — myself included — is a reminder that defeating terrorists can come at the cost of our freedom.

It began two years ago. In the fall of 2010 I spent a month in the Democratic Republic of Congo reporting on the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal Ugandan rebel group that was chased from its homeland and has spent the last decade hiding out in the forests of eastern Congo. Led by charismatic madman Joseph Kony, the LRA pillages farming villages for supplies, kills or mutilates the adults and enslaves the children.

………

In early December our agent wired [artist Tim] Hamilton his share of the advance, but the money never reached the artist’s account. After a few weeks the agent made some calls. “He was told that the party holding the funds was the federal wire fraud unit which suspected that they were laundering funds for a terrorist organization,” Hamilton says.

On one level, it may seem as if it is not a big deal, but it is.  

Basically, this means that they can take everything you have with out any recourse at any time, and if they are wrong, or if they are malicious, it does not matter, because they are above the law, because if anything goes wrong, all they need to do is go, “Yadda, yadda, terrorism.”

We have deliberately created a lawless national security state.

Do Responsible Gun Activists Even Exist?

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I’m sure there are a few responsible gun owners out there, but the Gun Nuts With Small Penises™ crowd seem determined to show that there is no such thing as a responsible gun owner:

A suburban New York newspaper that ignited a furor by publishing the identities of thousands of residents who hold gun licenses has hired armed security to guard its staff after receiving an intimidating e-mail, a police report said.

Among a “large amount of negative correspondence” that White Plains, New York-based Journal News has received since publishing permit holders’ names was one e-mail in which the sender “wondered what would get in her mail next,” according to a Clarkstown, New York, police report obtained by Reuters on Wednesday.

The editor, Caryn McBride, told police the newspaper hired a private security company whose “employees are armed and will be on site during business hours,” the report said. The guards are protecting the newspaper’s staff and Rockland County offices in West Nyack, New York.

Police told McBride the e-mail did not contain an explicit threat that could compel authorities to take action against the sender. The menacing e-mail was reported to police on December 28.

Let’s see what happens here.

You have an argument over gun control.

The people gun control advocates call gun rights advocates dangerous and crazy.

The gun control advocates respond by threatening the lives of gun control advocates.

QED, gun control advocates are dangerous and crazy.

But of Course

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The very first person goes to jail over CIA torture, and it’s the whistle-blower:

Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.

In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.

“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.

Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.

Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”

On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.

In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.

This is about scaring people out of being whistle-blowers.

This is about the “most open administration in history” doing its level best to create a completely secret and unaccountable executive.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Richard Nixon was the worst president the US had from 1933 to 1973 1974, and the best president the US had from 1969 through 2013.

If that does not make you depressed, then I want whatever it is that you are smoking.

More Financial Fraud Enforcement Theater from the Obama Administration

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Yesterday, I heard the news that the 271 year old Swiss bank, Weglin, was shut down following a US Department of Justice investigation into their actions supporting tax evasion and money laundering.

It sounded too good to be true, and , as Yves Smith so eloquently points out, it was too good to be true.

The Nickel version is that the bank’s asserts were transferred to another entity, Raiffeisen, and the proceeds likely given to the owners in the weeks power to its being shut down.

Finally, the DoJ is saying NOTHING about whether the got information about the accounts, and the people who used them too avoid taxes.

This its a pretty good tell that they hour no data:  If they had, they would be trumpeting it to the heavens, because they would thereby induce people to turn themselves in.

Go read the while thing, including the reader comments.

Posted via mobile.

More IP Insanity

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In the latest case, we have patent trolls trying to extort money from small businesses for using scanners:

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

………

“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”

t didn’t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:

“So you’re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?” asked Vicinanza. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ And at that point, I just lost it.”

The kicker is that the these folks were using newspapers’ “best places to work” lists to send out dunning letters.

Seriously, we need to just stop issuing patents until the system is fixed.

H/t Kevin Drum.

This is What Happens When You F%$# With User Interfaces, Just Because

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That is what the much loathed ribbon is all about, and now Windows 8, which has managed to underperform Vista’s market acceptance:

Final online usage numbers for 2012 released Tuesday confirmed that Windows 8 failed to match Windows Vista’s uptake pace during its first two months.

Preliminary numbers from Net Applications last week indicated that Windows 8 would end the month behind Vista’s uptake at the same point in its release cycle. Yesterday’s data confirmed the earlier projections by Computerworld.

………

Apple gets that while a smart phone and a tablet are similar things, that neither of them are a PC, so for tablets and iPhones, you have IOS, and for the MacIntosh, they still run OSX, which is a conventional keyboard and mouse Operating system.

Windows may be a good tablet/phone OS, but for a conventional PC, it sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.

Seriously, it’s worse than Google’s light gray on white color scheme that has become their standard.

That’s Gonna Leave a Mark

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One of the “journalists” at Fox News asked a really stupid question alleging that Hillary Clinton was faking being sick to avoid testifying before Congress, and State Department spokesman Phillippe Raines “apologized” for this:

“Toria, can you expand on why Secretary Clinton can’t testify on Thursday about this? It seems that she has not been available to testify on the Benghazi situation on some very key dates, including the Sunday after 9/11 and now this Thursday.”

I just called them and read them the riot act for putting such misleading, accusatory, and absolutely asinine words in your mouth. Because after what we and her doctors explained over the weekend regarding her health, you couldn’t possibly have been insinuating the ulterior motives that question implies. No way. No credible journalist would do that without any basis whatsoever. But even more so, I really went to bat for you with folks here and told them that while I know the media can often be incredibly self-involved, there is no way you, an informed reporter, would equate one’s testifying before the United States Congress – made up of duly elected Senators and Representatives empowered by Article I of our Constitution – with going on tv. I don’t know Chris Wallace all that well, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t place his television show on par with one of the three branches of our government. And therefore, saying that this has happened on multiple ‘key dates’ is simply a blatant lie and grossly misleading to the public.

Anyway, our sincere apologies. If you send us what you really said, I’ll make sure it’s properly reflected.

This is just a thing of beauty.

Republicans are Such Whiny Bitches

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John Boehner has said that that he will no longer negotiation with Barack Obama:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “is signaling that at least one thing will change about his leadership during the 113th Congress: he’s telling Republicans he is done with private, one-on-one negotiations with President Obama,” The Hill reports.

“During both 2011 and 2012, the Speaker spent weeks shuttling between the Capitol and the White House for meetings with the president in the hopes of striking a grand bargain on the deficit. Those efforts ended in failure, leaving Boehner feeling burned by Obama and, at times, isolated within his conference.”

So, Obama made him his bitch repeatedly, and now he’s running back to mommy.

History Repeats Itself………

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They’re Back!!  Yes, the symbol looks very familiar

The Golden Dawn, the resurgent Greek Fascist party.

Rather surprisingly, their increasing popularity in Greece, along with the increasing violence associated with their actions, along with evidence that Greek police are increasingly directly colluding with them.

When you consider the fact EU measures have produced an economic collapse that has women in labor refused admission to hospital, and a descent to a barter economy, you would think that the Greek ruling elite, as well as the Eurocrats in Brussels, along with the Germans who pull their chain, would be running around like their hair was on fire about this.

It’s not happening, because the however uncomfortable the corrupt Greek elites are with Fascists, they hate the Greek left as manifested by SYRIZA, the Greek party of the left, because if they win, they threaten to undermine the kleptocratic duopoly of the PASOK New Democracy party.

On the European Union side, however uncomfortable they are with Fascism, they hate the Greek left as manifested by SYRIZA, and more generally they hate the underlying ideas that the EU bureaucracy should serve the will of the people (witness the gyrations to prevent votes on EU expansion once the referenda started to fail), and that neoliberal bank coddling policies are a bad.

So, why is there the studious ignorance regarding the rise of Fascism in Greece (and in a number of other EU nations)?

Well, when you look at the attitudes of the Eurocrats toward SYRIZA, or the Left Party in Germany, or similar, you see a hell of a lot more alarm at them, but they are not xenophobic violent antidemocratic groups.

I would argue that what we are seeing is a tacit endorsement of the rise in Fascism in Europe, because they are seen as “useful idiots” who can serve to counteract the threat of a resurgent left, either by providing an outlet for nationalist sentiments, or through violence.

Does this sound familiar to you?  It does to me.

In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, industrialists funded Fascists all over Europe, most notably in Germany, because of concerns about potential gains of leftists parties as a result of the economic collapse. (Yes, I know, Godwin’s Law)

I’m wondering when we are going to see the blond boy singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me.

My brother is pessimist.  He expects there to be a collapse the EU and war in the near future.

I am an optimist.  I expect there to be a collapse the EU and cold war in the near future.

Until the Eurocrats are put back under public control, and until Germany realizes that their morality play wet dreams do nothing but kill people, I do not see a better outcome in the next couple of decades.

Stay Classy Scotty Brown

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Yep, the last campaign was about Elizabeth Warren’s belief (probably accurate) that she had some American Indian ancestry, and this time, he’s running again, and he’s leading with an attack on Ed Markey’s Massachusetts residency:

Senator Scott Brown today took on a possible opponent in a special election to succeed his colleague John F. Kerry, questioning whether US Representative Edward J. Markey is actually a resident of Massachusetts.

Markey later hit back, hinting at a reprise of the political nastiness that permeated Brown’s recent election battle against Democrat Elizabeth Warren.

Brown has suggested he would compete in the special election that will be triggered if Kerry is confirmed as President Obama’s second-term secretary of state, but he has not made a formal commitment to a race. Markey has already said he will run.

“I’ll tell you what; They’re making it awfully tempting. You got Ed Markey: Does he even live here any more?” Brown said with a laugh as he called into the “Jim & Margery Show” on WTKK-FM.

“You’ve got to check the travel records. I’ve come back and forth (from Washington to Boston) every weekend, almost, for three years, and I see, you know, most of the delegation, and I have never seen Ed on the airplane – ever,” Brown added.

Markey, a Democrat born and raised in Malden, long called his childhood bedroom in his parents’ house as his Massachusetts residence, even though his wife, Susan Blumenthal, was a doctor at the National Institutes of Health in suburban Washington and the couple owns a home in Chevy Chase, Md. Blumenthal is now a health care consultant.

Seriously, another episode of, “Of course she’s not Indian, look at her?”

I Really do not get this. His primary asset is his appearance of likability, and he’s coming across like an entitled frat boy from the movie Animal House.

This is not just nasty, it’s stupid nasty. I do not get it.

H/t TPM.