Month: July 2014

Charlie Pierce on a Rant is a Thing of Beauty

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In a post entitled, “Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Mainline Antifreeze, Part The Infinity,” he takes on Politico‘s hosting a fete of, and then writing a fawning article about Papa Dick and Baby Dick Cheney:

Its puerilty has finally crossed over into indecency. Its triviality has finally crossed over into obscenity. The comical political starfcking that is its primary raison d’erp has finally crossed over into $10 meth-whoring on the Singapore docks. Once a mere surface irritation, Tiger Beat On The Potomac has finally crossed over into being a thickly pustulating chancre on the craft of journalism. It has demonstrated its essential worthlessness. It has demonstrated that it has the moral character of a sea-slug and the professional conscience of the Treponema pallidum spirochete. Trust me. Stephen Glass never sunk this low. Mike (Payola) Allen has accomplished the impossible. He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.

It goes on, and most of it near the perfection of, “He’s made Jayson Blair look like Ernie Pyle.“

Read the rest of it, and then someone please nominate Mr. Pierce for a Pulitzer.

104 Prominent Republicans Endorse a Democrat for Governor of Kansas

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They have endorsed Paul Davis because it is Sam Brownback is detached from reality and driving the state into a ditch:

More than 100 Kansas Republican politicians and activists Tuesday threw their collective weight behind Democratic governor candidate Paul Davis, a move designed to inspire other rebellious Republicans to action and weaken the re-election bid of GOP Gov. Sam Brownback.

Public expression of support for Davis by Republicans from across the state at a Topeka news conference exposed anew civil war within the Republican Party between moderates and conservatives. The endorsements also reflected Davis’ effort to frame his campaign in bipartisan tones.

“All of us are proud Republicans,” said Wint Winter Jr., a former state senator. “We came together because of our common love of Kansas, our commitment to Kansas families and our belief in moderate, common-sense leadership. We are deeply concerned by the direction Sam Brownback is taking Kansas.”

………

The 104-person list of Davis backers included former Senate Presidents Bud Burke, Dick Bond and Steve Morris, one-time Kansas House Speakers Wendell Lady, Jim Braden and Robert Miller, former Lt. Govs. Gary Sherrer and Shelby Smith, former U.S. Rep. Jan Meyers, prior Kansas GOP chairman Bill Falstad, Kansas Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger as well as national GOP delegates, local school board members, mayors, and city and county officials.

Rather unsurprisingly, Rick Santorum is campaigning for Brownback in apocalyptic terms, further reinforcing Brownback’s batsh%$ insane conservative street cred.

My guess is that Brownback will win, with the backing of lots of Koch brothers’ money, and we will see that the Kansas as a model for the Koch Brother’s America, which, interestingly looks increasingly like Somolia.

Your Moment of Science Fiction Awesome

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Click on the images for a larger slideshow

Rather unsurprisingly, they both involve Star Trek, the original series.

The first is a photograph of an an enciente Orion slave girl courtesy of Wil Wheaton.

The bottom two pictures are of a remote that is modeled on the original props for the Star Trek phaser:

The Phaser was created from meticulous 3D scans of the last-known TOS hero prop and is a fully functional, gesture-based universal remote control that can be used to control many home entertainment systems and other IR-controlled devices. The 1:1-scale Phaser is equipped with 10 authentic phaser firing sounds, a customizable personal lock code, tactile force-feedback, and it can store up to 36 remote commands.

I’d never thought about it before, but that pistol grip is profoundly non ergonomic.

If you were to use the phaser, it would be hard to hit the broad side of a barn.

It’s 150 bucks for the remote. The pregnant Orion slave girl: priceless.

Un-Dirtyword_Believable

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The German parliamentary committee investigating the NSA may, “may revert to typewriters,” in order to thwart spying from the Americans:

German politicians are considering a return to using manual typewriters for sensitive documents in the wake of the US surveillance scandal.

 The head of the Bundestag’s parliamentary inquiry into NSA activity in Germany said in an interview with the Morgenmagazin TV programme that he and his colleagues were seriously thinking of ditching email completely.

 Asked “Are you considering typewriters” by the interviewer on Monday night, the Christian Democrat politican Patrick Sensburg said: “As a matter of fact, we have – and not electronic models either”. “Really?” the surprised interviewer checked. “Yes, no joke,” Sensburg responded.

 “Unlike other inquiry committees, we are investigating an ongoing situation. Intelligence activities are still going on, they are happening,” said Sensburg.

You know, the magic slate works to.

During the cold war, the members of the American embassy assumed that they were bugged, and they used these 99¢ toys to communicate when they wanted not to be overheard.  (No, this is not a joke)

We live in profoundly strange times.

Bummer of a Birthmark, Rahm………

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In his bid for reelection, Rahm Emanuel is behind his virtually unknown opponents by 22%:

For the past couple of weeks, Karen Lewis has been saying she is “seriously” considering running for mayor.

 It turns out voters are taking the fiery Chicago Teachers Union president’s potential candidacy seriously as well.

 And Mayor Rahm Emanuel probably should, too.

 At least that’s what a surprising new Early & Often Poll suggests.

 If the mayoral election were held today, the lightning rod union leader who was the architect behind a 2012 teachers’ strike would beat Emanuel by 9 percentage points in a head-to-head contest, the survey found.

 Lewis was leading Emanuel 45 percent to 36 percent with 18 percent of the likely voters undecided.

 And Emanuel could face an even steeper hill if he faces Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, long considered his most formidable challenger.

 A head-to-head contest found Preckwinkle in a romp vs. Emanuel by a stunning 24 points.

 Preckwinkle dominated with 55 percent of those surveyed. Emanuel notched just under 31 percent.

I don’t think that Toni Preckwinkle got anything going by way of a campaign right now, but Karen Lewis is, having set up an exploratory committee.

Neither of them have a whole bunch of name recognition beyond the fact that they fought with Rahm, and they are still kicking Rahm’s ass.

The Emanuel campaign is claiming that it is no big deal, but I kind of figure that his

Details below.

The Financial Times Suggests that Private Equity is Screwing their Clients

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No, seriously. It is the Financial Times, and they are suggesting that private equity is fundamentally corrupt in their business practices:

It is too early to say whether the $30bn leveraged buyout of First Data in 2007 on the eve of the financial crash was a bad deal. KKR, the private equity group with a controlling stake, could yet recoup its investment, which it has written down by 20 per cent: the payment processing specialist will attempt to go public, possibly this year.

But one thing is certain: the Atlanta company, which has struggled under $24bn of debt since the KKR acquisition, will have paid its owner more than $100m in fees for a range of advisory, transaction and consulting services – including some that may never be required.

For the past three years alone, total fees to KKR-related parties amounted to $117m, according to First Data’s yearly regulatory filings. The bulk was an annual charge of about $20m that the company has to pay until 2019 for being “monitored”. If KKR, run by Henry Kravis and George Roberts, decides to sell or float its stake before that date, it is entitled to a termination fee.

First Data also paid KKR’s capital markets unit $21m for financing and underwriting services, and $35m for consulting work to Capstone, a company that works exclusively for the New York buyout house.

Such arrangements, struck with companies that can hardly say no to their majority owners, are coming under growing scrutiny by regulators. They are also sparking frustration among some investors, although few have incentives to reform the system.

“Those fees pump substance out of portfolio companies. It is the sort of greed you would typically see in investment banking,” says Georges Sudarskis, an industry veteran who advises Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is taking a hard look at the industry’s fees. Andrew Bowden, a director at the SEC, said in May that his team had identified “violations of law or material weaknesses in controls over 50 per cent of the time” when reviewing payments from portfolio companies to their private equity owners.

(emphasis mine)

I just love the phrase, “It is the sort of greed you would typically see in investment banking.”

BTW, private equity do not deliver higher rates of return that would justify these fees.

I’m beginning to think that if we simply threw everyone who worked on Wall Street in jail, you would have a wrongful conviction rate in the single digit percentiles.

Rick Santelli Gets Told that He Is Wrong About Everything

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I think that his cow-orkers at CNBC are sick and tired of Rick “Tea Party” Santelli’s clown show:

Santelli gets completely owned, even if he doesn’t realize it, when Steve Liesman says, “Rick, it’s impossible for you to have been more wrong. Every single bit of advice you gave would have lost people money, Rick. Lost people money, Rick. Every single bit of advice. There is no piece of advice that you’ve given that’s worked, Rick. There is no piece of advice that you’ve given that’s worked, Rick. Not a single one.“

It’s not often that you hear one employee call out another one on the network as completely incompetent and worthless.

H/t TPM.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

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As a small child, I spent a fair amount of time unsupervised.

As a 20 year old, I took a year off while I changed schools and majors, and saw the (IMHO Ronald Reagan inspired) height of the missing child hysteria in 1981-82.*

So, I am disgusted, but not surprised, that a mom was jailed for sending her 9 year old to play in the park alone, despite the fact that she was sent with a cell phone, and the mother was at work nearby:

Just in case you thought you could parent whatever way you see fit in 2014 America:

A North Augusta mother is in jail after witnesses say she left her nine-year-old daughter at a nearby park, for hours at a time.

Hours at a time? At a park? In the summer? Gosh! That certainly sounds normal and fun like a reason to throw a mom in jail—and place the child in state custody.

Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.

Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.

The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.

Watch the news: It sounds like Debra Harrell committed a serious, unconscionable crime. The reporter looks ready to burst with contempt. But what are the facts? She let her daughter play at the park for several hours at a time—like we did as kids. She gave her a daughter a phone if she needed to call. Any “danger” was not only theoretical, it was exceedingly unlikely.

The danger is vanishingly small.

We are a nation who lives in terror of vanishingly small threats, child abduction, shark attacks, plane crashes, and non existent things, like vaccine related autism, while blithely ignoring greater threats, like driving, guns in the home, crossing the street, and anything that begins with the phrase, “Watch this.”

Have I mentioned that we as a society are both paranoid and insane?

*The people whipping up the hysteria claimed that there were something like 85,000 child abductions a year†. They did this by counting every time a kid was delivered late from visitation, got lost in the mall for 5 minutes, etc.
†Stranger child abduction number significantly less than 100 per year.

Germany Spurns U.S. Offer to Join “The Club”

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In an attempt to ameliorate German concerns over spying on its citizens, Angela Merkel has been offered membership in special intelligence sharing regime occupied by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, colloquially known as the Five Eyes Pact.

She has turned down this offer:

U.S. Ambassador John Emerson made his way to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin armed with a plan to head off the worst diplomatic clash of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship.

Emerson came to the July 9 meeting with an offer authorized in Washington: provide Germany a U.S. intelligence-sharing agreement resembling one available only to four other nations. The goal was to assuage Merkel and prevent the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief of station in Berlin.

It wasn’t enough.

The same morning, across the boundary once marked by the Berlin Wall, Merkel convened her top ministers following the 9:30 a.m. Cabinet meeting on the sixth floor of the Chancellery and resolved to ask the U.S. intelligence chief to leave German soil.

Merkel, who ultimately determined the government’s course, had to act. Public and political pressure after more than a year of accusations of American espionage overreach, stoked by indignation at the lack of a sufficient response from Washington, had left the German government with no alternative.

“We don’t live in the Cold War anymore, where everybody probably mistrusted everybody else,” Merkel, who has previously reserved her Cold War-mentality accusations for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said in an interview with German broadcaster ZDF today.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, we see how, when we allow our state security apparatus to operate unsupervised, those in charge of providing intelligence on our opponents serve their own narrow institutional interests, and not the interests of our nation.

Unfortunately, there currently is no political will to keep our intelligence agencies on a leash.

The Navy’s Mania for Reducing Crewing Bears Bitter Fruit

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The US Navy has discovered that the limits of human endurance have been reached, and surpassed, in the Littoral Combat Ship:

Did you ever work a job that required two people, but your stingy employer insisted that one was enough? Then you understand the problem with the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship.

One of the LCS’s supposed advantages is its much smaller crew compared to other vessels. Where a Navy frigate might have 200 sailors, the frigate-size LCS has just 40—although, to be fair, two different 40-person crews take turns running the ship.

LCS is a jack-of-all-trades warship that can carry different modules for various missions—anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare or mine-hunting.
The idea was that automation would enable fewer sailors to operate the $400-million LCS for all these missions. This saves on manpower costs as well as on precious shipboard space for crew accommodations.

But a new Government Accountability Office report proves what any Burger King worker already knows—cutting your workforce by 80 percent without also decreasing its workload … isn’t always a great idea.

When the GAO studied USS Freedom’s recent 10-month deployment to Singapore, the auditors found that crews worked too hard. “Freedom crews averaged about six hours of sleep per day compared to the Navy standard of eight hours,” the GAO stated.

“Some key departments, such as engineering and operations, averaged even fewer.”
And this happened despite the Navy temporarily adding 10 extra sailors to the crew and sending contractors aboard.

Also note that with short crewing like this, damage control is marginal, there are no reserves to allow the crew to continue operating the ship while performing repairs, so this ship is likely to have a glass jaw.

This is particularly troubling, as it will be operating in coastal waters, the threats are varied, everything from shore based defenses to guys in Zodiacs packing RPGs.

How Barack Obama Made People Stop Believing in Government

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Do you remember the history HARP?

Barack Obama and Timothy Geithner, said that they had a program to help distressed homeowners, when it was actually a program that consistently screwed homeowners in order to “foam the runway” for the banksters by allowing them to puff up their balance sheets.

Well, people remember this, and now that Obama is (allegedly) trying to provide real aid to homeowners, they are finding that have no takers because the homeowners in question do not trust the government to help them any more:

We all remember the fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. The moral of the story: Lie one too many times and nobody will believe you, even when you’re telling the truth. Now we have a case of The Government Who Cried Wolf, showing how the failure of the Obama administration’s foreclosure mitigation programs haunt them to this day.

 The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, wants to help around 676,000 homeowners it has identified as eligible for refinancing under the government’s Home Affordable Refinancing Program (HARP).

 ………

 But these remaining homeowners appear to have no interest in the program, and Watt explained why in Chicago. “We have written to them. We have called them, and they’re saying this is too good to be true,” he said.

 Why would homeowners exhibit so much skepticism in a government program that they feel inclined to turn down thousands of dollars in free money? You can track it back to all the promises made over the past five years to help homeowners, and the unfortunately sorry results.

 In 2009, when the foreclosure crisis was most acute, President Obama promised to save 4 million homes through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Today, only around 900,000 hold active permanent HAMP modifications, while millions of others either re-defaulted or were rejected by the program. Mortgage servicing companies, which had a greater financial incentive to foreclose over modifying home loans, quickly figured out how to game the system, using it to pile more bad debt on borrowers for their own reward.

The process devolved into a horror show for homeowners. Servicers prolonged trial modifications well past the three-month period set out in HAMP guidelines so that they could rack up late fees. They deliberately lost borrower’s income documents to extend the default period, even shredding documents and purging records to do so. They pursued foreclosure while negotiating the modification, against HAMP rules. They granted modifications that folded servicer fees into the principal of the loan, increasing the unpaid principal balance — and thus their profit — while pushing the borrower further underwater. And they trapped borrowers after denying modifications, demanding back payments, missed interest and late fees, with the threat of foreclosure as a hammer.

This sometimes forced borrowers into “private” modifications with the servicer, usually on worse terms than the status quo. Or it led to many of the 5.6 million foreclosures we’ve seen since the collapse of the housing bubble. One set of employees at Bank of America testified that they were given bonuses like Target gift cards for pushing homeowners into foreclosure.

 Subsequent government programs, like the “Hardest Hit Fund” directed at states with the most nagging foreclosure crises, similarly failed to deliver. The failure to restructure mortgages and avert foreclosures is seen as the biggest policy mistake of the Great Recession.

It’s easy to prove to people that government cannot work, you just have to do things like HAMP, and lie to people and design programs to fail when view through the lens of their professed goals.

On the far side, however, when you actually want to help people, they no longer trust you, forever and ever.

Note that Obama and His Evil Minions™ had a completely free hand in designing these programs, so they own the fallou, or as Atrios notes:

Plenty of things are genuinely beyond Obama’s control, but we have an example of something which was 100% in his control. And it was horrible.

Well, It’s a Start

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A Florida judge has two Congressional districts to be illegally Gerrymandered:

In a sharply worded decision, a Florida judge ruled late Thursday that Republicans illegally redrew the state’s congressional districts, saying they “made a mockery” of an amendment meant to inject fairness into a process that has long been politically tainted.

Judge Terry P. Lewis of Florida’s Second Judicial Circuit ordered that two districts be redrawn — one, the 10th District, now held by Representative Daniel Webster, a Republican, and the other, the Fifth District, held by Representative Corrine Brown, a Democrat. In redrawing them, neighboring districts are also likely to be affected.

………

Judge Lewis delivered a blistering, 41-page attack on Florida’s redistricting process, reserving his most scathing criticism for the Republican establishment, including political operatives. He said it was clear that Republican operatives had managed to “infiltrate and influence” the Florida Legislature.

“Republican political consultants or operatives did, in fact, conspire to manipulate and influence the redistricting process,” the judge wrote. At another point, he quoted George Washington, who warned of “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men.”

………

In 2010, Floridians voted to pass two constitutional amendments that required lawmakers to draw congressional and state legislative districts more cohesively and without favoring a political party.

The maps were redrawn in 2012, before the midterm elections. They were approved by the Republican-dominated Legislature and signed by Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican.

During a two-week trial in May and June, a parade of political operatives, lawmakers and legislative staff members took the stand to testify about what they did and did not do during the redistricting process. It turned out that legislative leaders destroyed many documents relevant to the process, a move that Judge Lewis sharply criticized on Thursday.

“You have to wonder,” he said.

Well the judge can wonder, but I don’t.

Of course the ‘Phants engaged in partisan Gerrymandering.

Linkage

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Here is John Oliver on how the Hobby Lobby crowd export homophobia while it becomes unacceptable locally. (Kinda long)

And In Yet Another Case of Our Security State F%$#ing It Up for the Rest of Us

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The CIA hits the trifecta.

First,  we discover that the CIA conveniently forgot to tell Barack Obama about that spy being caught before he talked with Angela Merkel:

When President Obama placed a call to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany last Thursday, he had a busy agenda: to consult with a close ally and to mobilize wavering Europeans to put more pressure on Russia to end its covert incursions in Ukraine.

 What Mr. Obama did not know was that a day earlier, a young German intelligence operative had been arrested and had admitted that he had been passing secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency.

 While Ms. Merkel chose not to raise the issue during the call, the fact that the president was kept in the dark about the blown spying operation at a particularly delicate moment in American relations with Germany has led frustrated White House officials to question who in the C.I.A.’s chain of command was aware of the case — and why that information did not make it to the Oval Office before the call.

You know, sometimes this is judgement call when you tall the boss about a f%$#-up.

When your boss is about to talk to the victim of said f%$#-up, and it is likely that said victim knows, this most certainly isn’t one of these cases.

Heads need to roll at the CIA, and not just Brennan.  You need some of the long time professionals who decided to withhold this information to be gone as well.

But it gets better.  You see, the Germans caught a 2nd CIA mole:

German authorities are investigating the second case of a government employee suspected of spying on confidential government affairs for US secret services within a week.

 Public prosecutors confirmed that the home and office of a defence ministry employee in the greater Berlin area had been searched on Wednesday morning.

 They told the Guardian that a search had been conducted “under suspicion of secret agent activity” and that evidence – including computers and several data storage devices – had been seized for analysis. The federal prosecutor’s office confirmed that no arrest had yet been made.

 According to Die Welt newspaper, the staffer being investigated is a soldier who had caught the attention of the German military counter-intelligence service after establishing regular contact with people thought to be working for a US secret agency.

 The news came just days after a member of the German intelligence agency BND confessed to having passed more than 200 confidential files to a contact at the CIA.

 The new case is not thought to be directly related to that of the BND staffer. However, one government insider familiar with the case told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the new case being investigated was “more serious” than that of the BND spy, in which the sold documents are thought to have been of limited value.

 Last week’s spying scandal gave a detailed picture of how US security agencies manage to recruit foreign agents. The staffer, employed at the German intelligence agency’s department for foreign deployments, had managed to establish contact with the CIA after emailing the US embassy in Germany.

 At a meeting in a Salzburg hotel, the CIA then equipped the BND employee with a specially encrypted laptop, which allowed the agent to keep in touch with the US secret service on a weekly basis: every time he opened a programme disguised as a weather app, a direct connection was established with a contact in America.

 The BND employee, who is said to have a physical disability and a speech impediment, received around 25,000 euros (£20,000) for 218 confidential documents, though sources within the intelligence service told German newspapers that the 31-year-old had been motivated less by financial interests than by a craving for recognition.

 After the CIA had apparently lost interest in him, he had offered his services to the Russian general consulate in Munich, inadvertently catching the attention of the German counter-espionage agency.

And in response to this, Germany has expelled the CIA’s Berlin station chief:

The German government on Thursday demanded the removal of the top American spy in the country, the strongest evidence yet that mounting revelations about widespread American intelligence operations in Germany have gravely damaged relations between once close allies.

The decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel to publicly announce the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Berlin station chief was seen as a highly symbolic expression of the deep anger and hurt that German officials have felt since the exposure of the American espionage operations.

It is likely to force another reassessment inside the C.I.A. and other spy agencies about whether provocative espionage operations in friendly nations are worth the risk to broader foreign policy goals. One such assessment was conducted last summer, when President Obama ordered a halt to the tapping of Ms. Merkel’s phone after it came to light because of the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Current and former American officials said that the Berlin station chief, who works undercover, has been in the position for about a year. It was his predecessor in the job, the officials said, who oversaw the recruitment of the German intelligence officer arrested last week who has reportedly told his interrogators he was spying for the C.I.A., touching off a storm of criticism of the United States. German investigators are also looking at a second case of an official inside the Defense Ministry who may have been working for the Americans.

The expulsion of a C.I.A. station chief — the ranking American intelligence officer in a foreign country — was a staple of the Cold War, but it is a move almost never made by allies. “It’s one thing to kick lower-level officers out, it’s another thing to kick the chief of station out,” said one former C.I.A. officer with extensive experience working on European operations.

The closest precedent may be an episode in 1995, when the C.I.A. station chief in Paris, his deputy and two other agency officers were expelled for trying to pay French officials for intelligence on France’s negotiating position in trade talks. But Thursday’s move is potentially more significant, since the intelligence cooperation between the United States and Germany has historically been far closer than that with the French.

It is almost certain that the BND will be all over the CIA activities in the country for the forseeable future.