Month: March 2015

Protect and Serve, My Ass

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It appears that the New York City police force is way over staffed, because someone has the time to sanitize Wikipedia accounts of New York police brutality victims and other police scandals while on the clock:

IP addresses linked to the New York Police Department’s computer network have been used to sanitize Wikipedia entries about cases of police brutality.

This wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen nefarious alterations to Wikipedia entries, and it won’t be the last. But the disclosure of NYPD’s entries by Capital New York come as the Justice Department announced a national initiative for “building community trust and justice” with the nation’s policing agencies.

As many as 85 IP addresses connected to 1 Police Plaza altered entries for some of the most high-profile police abuse cases, including those for victims Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo, Capital New York said. Edits have also been made to other entries covering NYPD scandals, its stop-and-frisk program, and the department leadership.

One of the most brazen alterations concerned Eric Garner, who was killed by police last year during an arrest that was captured on video by an onlooker. The mobile phone video went viral, prompting widespread protests and a grand jury investigation. On December 3, the Staten Island grand jury agreed not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in connection to Garner’s death, despite the medical examiner ruling it a homicide. The same day as the grand jury announcement, the “Death of Eric Garner” page on Wikipedia was altered from IP addresses traced to 1 Police Plaza. Those alterations can be seen here and here.

Seriously?

This is not taxpayer money well spent by any stretch of the imagination.

Rudolph Giuliani: Making Donald Trump Look Good

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Have you heard Rudy’s latest? He is saying that Barack Obama should be more like Bill Cosby.

He then followed this statement with a noun, a verb, and “9-11”:

Bill Cosby may stand accused of drugging and raping dozens of women, but Rudy Giuliani thinks President Obama could learn a thing or two from the disgraced comedian.

Speaking with talk radio host John Gambling of AM 970 The Answer on Thursday, the former New York City mayor charged that Obama was ignoring “enormous amount of crime” committed by black Americans, citing a recent highly-publicized scuffle at Brooklyn McDonald’s and the shooting of two Ferguson, Missouri police officers early Thursday.

Referring to Cosby’s history of scolding remarks inveighing against black culture, Giuliani said, “I hate to mention it because of what happened afterwards, but [he should be saying] the kinds of stuff Bill Cosby used to say.”

Seriously. This is not The Onion, this is real.

Rudolph Giuliani has based his entire political career on hating on Black people and other minorities.

Can we call him a bigoted nut-job yet?

FCC Net Neutrality Order Rolls Out

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Seriously. What can I do but point you to the telecommunications regulatory deity Harold Feld comments regarding the final rule.

The short version of this is:

  • The rules go to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for a review under the paperwork reduction act, but this likely just a formality, taking 1-2 weeks.
  • The rule should be published in the Federal Register in the next 2-6 weeks.
  • It will technically go into effect 60 days after publication.
  • Law suits will almost certainly be filed after publication in the Federal Register and before it takes effect, and it is also likely that litigants against the FCC would request an injunction.
  • The court hearing this will likely be the DC Circuit.

My guess is that would end up at the Supreme Court, though SCOTUS might simply refuse to hear the case, and let the district or appellate court decision stand.

Fallout from German Intransigence with Greece

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Iceland has been trying to join the EU for the past few decades.

Not any more:

Iceland has announced it is dropping its bid to join the European Union in line with pledges made two years ago by its then-new eurosceptic government.

Iceland first applied for EU membership in 2009 but its foreign minister, Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson, said in a statement that the centre-right government had informed current EU president Latvia and the European Commission of its decision to annul the application.

“Iceland’s interests are better served outside the European Union,” the minister wrote on his website.

Iceland first applied for EU membership under a leftist government in 2009, when the country was badly shaken by an economic crisis that saw the Icelandic krona lose almost half its value, making eurozone membership an attractive prospect.

But the thorny issue of fishing quotas was seen as a key obstacle to joining the bloc, although it was never brought up in the accession talks.

Clearly, a lot of this was a worry about fishing rights, which had in the past resulted in hostilities between Iceland and the UK, and another part of this is the dispute between the UK and Iceland over insurance guarantees for their failed banks, as well as the UK using an anti-terror law to seize the assets of Icelandic banks.

I think that a bigger part is that the people of Iceland saw what was done to Ireland and Greece, and realize that EU accession doesn’t give them much beyond a loss of sovereignty to Germany, which has used its position to exert hegemony over Europe since the financial crisis.

This Sh%$ Just Got Real

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Thank you Victoria Nuland. You got your coup color revolution you wanted, and now the Russians are making noises about deploying nuclear weapons to the Crimea:

Russia has the right to deploy nuclear arms in the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Moscow annexed from Ukraine last year, a Foreign Ministry official said on Wednesday, adding he knew of no plans to do so.

 “I don’t know if there are nuclear weapons there now. I don’t know about any plans, but in principle Russia can do it,” said Mikhail Ulyanov, the head of the ministry’s department on arms control, was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Note that it’s about 1500 miles from Sevastopol to Birmingham is around 1500 miles, so if the Russians just stationed an SSBN there with its 6000+ mile range missiles, a launch could be made covering all of Europe on a depressed trajectory giving something around 5 minutes warning.

Of course, they could also just drive the mobile version of their Topol missile there as well.

Poking the bear with a stick is not a smart foreign policy move.

It really does not feel me with confidence that the US Government’s foreign and military policy establishment is filled with people who take hubris to this level.

This is nuclear weapons, not tiddly winks.

I Has a Sad

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Terry Pratchett, the convention tweaking fantasy author, has died of early onset dementia:

Terry Pratchett, the immensely popular British fantasy novelist whose more than 70 books include the series known as Discworld, died on Thursday at his home near Salisbury, England. He was 66.

 The cause was posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of dementia, Suzanne Bridson, an editor at Transworld Publishers, said in an email.

 An accomplished satirist with a penchant for sending up cultural and political tomfoolery, Mr. Pratchett created wildly imaginative alternative realities to reflect on a world more familiar to readers as actual reality.

 Often spiced with shrewd and sometimes wryly stinging references to literary genres, from fairy tales to Elizabethan drama, his books have sold 85 million copies worldwide, according to his publisher. And though Mr. Pratchett may have suffered from the general indifference of literary critics to the fantasy genre, on the occasions when serious minds took his work seriously, they tended to validate his legitimate literary standing.

 In 2003, the novelist A. S. Byatt wrote that critics were paying attention to the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling but rarely to other fantasists.

 “They do not now review the great Terry Pratchett,” Ms. Byatt wrote, “whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.”

 Mr. Pratchett’s primary setting, Discworld, is a planet of sorts, Frisbee-like in shape and balanced on the backs of four elephants who themselves stand upon the shell of a giant turtle.

 Mr. Pratchett introduced it in 1983 in the novel “The Colour of Magic.” Its protagonist, Rincewind, one of a number of recurring characters in the series, is a feckless wizard-wannabe who was an unsuccessful student at Unseen University, the principal school for wizards in the city-state of Ankh-Morpork.

 ………

 He is survived by his wife, the former Lyn Purves, and a daughter, Rhianna.

 Three Twitter posts on Mr. Pratchett’s account on Thursday described his demise in imitation of his fiction.

 “AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER,” the first said.

 “Terry took death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night,” the second said.

 The third said simply, “The End.”

I would note that The Colour of Magic is responsible for one of my bucket list items:  I want to go to the top of a hill in a thunder storm in full (metal) armor, and shout curses at the gods.*

As a bonus, let me give you my favorite non Diskworld quote:

I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce.

I will miss his writing.

*At one point in The Colour of Magic, the protagonist, Rincewind, is asked what exactly it meant to be a tourist like Twoflower, he explained, “Let’s just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ‘All gods are bastards’.”

When did Evan Bayh Piss in Ezra Klein’s Cheerios?

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I’m not sure when Ezra Klein decided that Evan Bayh done him wrong, but his latest in the Washington Post, titled, “The sad, hypocritical retirement of Evan Bayh, which details the former Senator going deep into the K-Street lobbying scene:

………

But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.

………

In our last interview, Bayh complained of the poor opinion the public had of him and his colleagues. “They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.” Yes. They do. And this is why.

It’s taken Mr. Klein at least 4 years to recognize Bayh as a self absorbed snake oil salesman peddling himself.

I had this figured out well before his abortive 2008 Presidential run.

Still, I wonder why Klein finally notices.

Tech Headline of the Day

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Nine reasons only a tool would buy the Apple Watch.

While Apple has had its share of failures, the Newton comes to mind, but the Apple Watch is the first time I’ve seen an Apple product reviled as lame pander to “Trustifarian” rich kids.

Since the original MacIntosh, Apple has always sold its products on its chic elegance and its tightly controlled (and intuitive) interface, but it has always had a subtext of Apple producing “The Computer for the rest of us.”

This is not “The Computer for the rest of us”.

What has attracted the most attention is the $17,000 (£13,500) solid gold version, and it casts the entire watch product line as a bloated Veblin good.*

People like status objects, but they do not like to be made fools of, and this product screams, “More money than brains.”

*Named after economist Thorstein Veblin, who in his seminal work The Theory of the Leisure Class, coined the term “Conspicuous consumption”, and detailed how some items, like a solid gold Apple Watch, serve no purpose beyond status markers.

It Ain’t Treason. It Does Not Come Close

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So, someone has set up a petition at Whitehouse.gov asking for the 47 Senators* be charged with treason:

More than 155,000 people by Wednesday had signed a petition to the White House urging charges be filed against 47 Republican senators who they say committed “treasonous” offenses by writing Iran’s leaders about ongoing nuclear negotiations.

Lawmakers caused a political furor with their controversial letter Monday that warned an international nuclear deal with Iran could be scrapped by the next US president, particularly if Congress does not give its seal of approval.

The White House has said it responds to such petitions when they reach the 100,000-signature threshold, providing President Barack Obama’s administration with another opportunity to slam a letter that it considers inflammatory.

According to the petition, the 47 senators “committed a treasonous offense when they decided to violate the Logan Act, a 1799 law which forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.”

Critics argue that the lawmakers, including at least three potential Republican 2016 presidential candidates, broke the law, or at least violated the traditions of Congress, by directly engaging a foreign power on US foreign policy.

This is a pet peeve of mine.

Because of hundreds of years of abuse of the treason charge by the British Crown, treason is the ONLY crime defined in the constitution, specifically Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

The letter to Iran is stupid, and is clearly a case of placing sensibilities the Republican primary voter above the interests of the United States, but this is not treason, under US law.

Treason charges, and the abuse of treason charges by the sovereign, has a long and ignominious history, and calling for treason charges runs directly counter to US values and the founding beliefs of our republic.

*People keep saying, “47 Senators,” and I keep hearing, “47 Ronin”. There is something profoundly wrong in my head

Not This Sh%$ Again

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Once again, we have a Hitler of the week selected by the US state security apparatus.

This week, it is Venezuela:

The United States declared Venezuela a national security threat on Monday and ordered sanctions against seven officials from the oil-rich country in the worst bilateral diplomatic dispute since socialist President Nicolas Maduro took office in 2013.

 U.S. President Barack Obama signed and issued the executive order, which senior administration officials said did not target Venezuela’s energy sector or broader economy. But the move stokes tensions between Washington and Caracas just as U.S. relations with Cuba, a longtime U.S. foe in Latin America and key ally to Venezuela, are set to be normalized.

 Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro denounced the sanctions as an attempt to topple his government. At the end of a thundering two-hour speech, Maduro said he would seek decree powers to counter the “imperialist” threat, and appointed one of the sanctioned officials as the new interior minister.

 Declaring any country a threat to national security is the first step in starting a U.S. sanctions program. The same process has been followed with countries such as Iran and Syria, U.S. officials said.

 The White House said the order targeted people whose actions undermined democratic processes or institutions, had committed acts of violence or abuse of human rights, were involved in prohibiting or penalizing freedom of expression, or were government officials involved in public corruption.

 “Venezuelan officials past and present who violate the human rights of Venezuelan citizens and engage in acts of public corruption will not be welcome here, and we now have the tools to block their assets and their use of U.S. financial systems,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement.

A security threat?!?!!?  Seriously?

Venezuela is a mess, and the “Bolivarian Revolution” is arguably the 2nd worst possible potential rulers for the oil rich nation, but they are no more a security threat to the United States than is my cat Meatball.

This Monroe Doctrinesque bullsh%$, where the US seems to see meddling in regime change in the Western Hemisphere to be a God given birthright, needs to stop.

I think that it is clear that the Maduro government won’t be around for a particularly long time, they do not appear to be able to manage their way a paper bag, unless pressure by the State Department, CIA, National Endowment for Democracy, etc. for regime change serves to reinforce their grip on power as it has in Cuba.

And When the Democrats Get Back into Power, They Won’t Reverse This

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Koch sucking Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, just signed so called right to work legislation:

For decades, states across the South, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains enacted policies that prevented organized labor from forcing all workers to pay union dues or fees. But the industrial Midwest resisted.

Those days are gone. After a wave of Republican victories across the region in 2010, Indiana and then Michigan enacted so-called right-to-work laws that supporters said strengthened those states economically, but that labor leaders asserted left behind a trail of weakened unions.

Now it is Wisconsin’s turn. On Monday, Gov. Scott Walker — who in 2011 succeeded in slashing collective bargaining rights for most public sector workers — signed a bill that makes his state the 25th to adopt the policy and has given new momentum to the business-led movement, its supporters say.
“This freedom-to-work legislation will give workers the freedom to choose whether or not they want to join a union, and employers another compelling reason to consider expanding or moving their business to Wisconsin,” Mr. Walker said.

Seeing as how well Walker’s Koch Brothers inspired agenda has worked in Wisconsin (Hint: not at all, compare it to Minnesota, which has taken pretty much the opposite policies), we should not expect to see much job growth in Wisconsin relative to its neighbors.

The obvious question here though is what happens when the Democrats take control of the state house and governor’s mansion again?

If the past is precis, there will be no repeal.

In both the recall campaign, and in Walker’s reelection campaign, the Democratic candidates eschewed calling for a repeal of his law stripping state workers of union rights, so, at least until the pathetic Wisconsin state Democratic party establishment can be put out of its misery, I would expect that both these laws will stay in place.

Basically, Wisconsin Democrats continue to believe that portraying themselves as non or post partisan is a winning electoral strategy, even though it is clear that the modern Republican party has, to quote Digby, “Gone insane and that every incentive and structural political edifice out there made it impossible for them not to be insane.”

Running on PPUS (Post Partisan Unity Schtick) is the same as running on nothing, and the voters will almost always choose a bad something over nothing.

Sedition Anyone?

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A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.

 Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber’s entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.

 “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the senators wrote. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

Foreign policy scholar Daniel Dresner notes that this goes well past what is garden variety trolling by political partisans: (And yes, he uses the world “troll”)

Now, on the one hand, I get what Senate Republicans are trying to do here. They don’t like the contours of the deal that’s being negotiated, and they really don’t like Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for bypassing a truculent Congress via executive actions on Iran. So if the Senate GOP can signal to Iranians that an executive agreement isn’t that much of a credible commitment device, maybe they can scuttle a deal they dislike with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. It’s certainly a better gambit than, say, this ad.

That said, there are still a few confusing aspects about this. First, there’s the question of the law. I don’t think an open letter from members of the legislative branch quite rises to Logan Act violations, but if there’s ever a trolling amendment to the Logan Act, this would qualify.

For those of you who are not up on obscure federal legislation, the Logan Act was passed in 1799(!) and makes it a felony for private citizens to “freelance” in American diplomatic relations:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

So, Nixon queering the peace talks with Vietnam in 1968 would qualify as well, but let’s be clear, no one is going to be prosecuted over this, any more than someone would be prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition acts, which were passed in 1798.   (Most of them have expired, anyway)

They also got schooled by the Iranian FM over the finer points of international law:

Iranian foreign minister and the country’s Chief nuclear negotiator said the recent open letter by a group of Republican senators about Iran’s nuclear talks has no legal value and is just a propaganda ploy.

Asked about the open letter of 47 US Senators to Iranian leaders, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Dr. Javad Zarif, said, “In our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy. It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history. This indicates that like Netanyahu, who considers peace as an existential threat, some are opposed to any agreement, regardless of its content.”

Zarif expressed astonishment that some members of US Congress find it appropriate to write to leaders of another country against their own President and administration. He pointed out that from reading the open letter, it seems that the authors not only do not understand international law, but are not fully cognizant of the nuances of their own Constitution when it comes to presidential powers in the conduct of foreign policy.

Foreign Minister Zarif added, “I should bring one important point to the attention of the authors and that is, the world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law. The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations.”

The Iranian Foreign Minister added that “change of administration does not in any way relieve the next administration from international obligations undertaken by its predecessor in a possible agreement about Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.”

“I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement with ‘the stroke of a pen,’ as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law.”

He emphasized that if the current negotiation with P5+1 result in a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it will not be a bilateral agreement between Iran and the US, but rather one that will be concluded with the participation of five other countries, including all permanent members of the Security Council, and will also be endorsed by a Security Council resolution.

Zarif expressed the hope that his comments “may enrich the knowledge of the authors to recognize that according to international law, Congress may not ‘modify the terms of the agreement at any time’ as they claim, and if Congress adopts any measure to impede its implementation, it will have committed a material breach of US obligations.”

It’s one thing to suggest that an agreement is not valid without Congressional approval,* it’s another to directly conduct the other side in a diplomatic dispute and explicitly state the the word of the US government is meaningless.

47 members of the US Senate, particularly freshman Senator Tom Cotton have one off the f%$#ing deep end.

Welcome to today’s Republican Party, I guess.

*In this case, it appears to have been conducted under the auspices of the UN Security Council, and it appears that it will be approved by the UN Security Council, so there is room for disagreement there, which would suggest that a Security Council vote would be required to amend or abrogate the deal, and not Congress.†
†Yes, I understand how many of the black helicopter one world government nutjobs in Congress would find this objectionable, but f%$# then.  They are stupid and bat sh%$ insane.

Emmanueldämmerung* in Progress

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We have always know that Rahm Emanuel is a bully, who kisses up to his superiors and kicks down at his subordinates, or for that matter anyone he sees as unimportant, but this report seems to indicate that the long time Obama ally is seriously losing his sh%$:

They say old Rahm Emanuel came out last night—or maybe it was the real one hiding in plain sight all the time: a sneering, aggressive pol who went “nose-to-nose” with a mental-health advocate demanding, “You’re gonna respect me!”

The alleged exchange took place off-camera between Chicago’s mayor and Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a member of Mental Health Movement, a group that has been fighting the mayor over the closure of six mental health clinics across the city. Behind a door that separated the mayor from a roomful of constituents at a campaign stop in the Wicker Park neighborhood, Ginsberg-Jaeckle says, he got Rahmbo’d.

 “This is the Real Rahm,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote on Facebook. “Calm and collected in public, raging angry and self-defensive behind closed doors.”

 But Emanuel’s campaign, while not directly refuting the mayor’s alleged call for respect, said the exchange was more cordial than Ginsberg-Jaeckle’s version of events. The mayor’s office has reached out Ginsberg-Jaeckle and Delgado to address their concerns, campaign spokesman Steve Mayberry said in a statement.

“The mayor was eager to get to the substance of the residents’ concerns,” Mayberry said via email. “After respectfully listening to the residents, he asked that they respectfully listen to his point of view. As a result, the meeting ended cordially and the mayor is working with health officials to address the residents’ needs.”


Debbie Delgado, another member of the group, interrupted Emanuel, prompting the behind-closed-doors altercation.

“She told of losing her son to gun violence,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote. “She told [Emanuel] how her other son was holding him as he died. She told about how the city’s Northwest Mental Health Clinic in Logan Square saved their lives, helped her and her son deal with the PTSD and depression. Then she asked why he took that clinic away from her.”

 Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”

 The mayor’s office wouldn’t address the supposed angry exchange.

 “Since it was a non-city event there were no city people there to witness it,” said Chloe Rasmas, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.

 Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”

 ………

 “We delivered 10,000 letters to the mayor’s office in October 2012. They didn’t respond. So, we started sending one email a week. No response. We held forums and protests. The day before a vote on the budget we did a sit-in outside the mayor’s office, and they forced us out by cutting off any access bathrooms,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle said, running down years’ worth of attempts to talk with the mayor.

 “I could go play by play, but long story short we could not get through to this man. Finally, the extreme we reached was crashing his events.”

 That’s what they did Wednesday night, not expecting much other than to be escorted out. Locke said Rahm told police to hold off when Ginsberg-Jaeckle and Delgado rose from their front-row chairs to confront the mayor. It was all cordial, until the trio left the room.

Demanding respect at the top of his voice.

Respect should not be demanded, it should be earned.

Why do I get the sense that Rahm Emanuel is suffering from a really bad case of “Middle Child Syndrome”?

In either case, I hope that the people of Chicago realize that they are dealing with a guy for whom a difficult reelection campaign is likely to make him an even worse mayor than he already is.

I would also one of his supporters, Republican Senator Mark Kirk, is blowing the racist dog whistle by invoking Detroit, while Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is leaning on begging 3rd place mayoral candidate Willie Wilson to endorse Rahm as well.

They wouldn’t be endorsing who is tied in the minds of their base to the “Kenyan Muslim Atheist Radical” Barack Obama unless they were pretty firmly on the same side, and they were worried about his chances.

I am so hoping that he loses the April 7 contest.

*I cannot claim credit for this bon mot. It was coined by Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism.

Not Just Ferguson

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In Wittier, California, police officers have sued over retaliation for reporting illegal quotas:

Six Whittier police officers are suing the city, saying they faced retaliation when they complained and refused to meet alleged ticket and arrest quotas.

Officers Jim Azpilicueta, Anthony Gonzalez, Mike Rosario, Nancy Ogle, Steve Johnson and Cpl. Joseph Rivera say they spoke out against the quotas, which they claim were imposed by the Whittier Police Department in 2008, according to a suit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The officers said their “careers have been materially and adversely affected, and irreparably harmed” by the city.

City Manager Jim Collier and Whittier police spokesman Officer John Scoggins declined to comment and said they had not seen the lawsuit.

“The lawsuit is unfortunate and the city will determine the best course of action once an analysis of the lawsuit is completed,” Collier said.

The officers say the alleged ticket and arrest quotas continue to this day.

The alleged retaliation started after the officers said they complained to their supervisors and the police department’s Internal Affairs Division, the suit claims.

After complaining about quotas, the officers faced a series of disciplinary actions including counseling sessions, unwarranted transfers, increased scrutiny and disparaging comments, the lawsuit said.

………

Imposing arrest and ticket quotas on police officers violates California Vehicle Codes section 41600. The codes makes it illegal for any state or local agency to force officers to meet a certain number of citations or arrests for promotion or disciplinary purposes.

Here’s a thought for initiative petition crazy California:  Someone start collecting signatures for a ballot measure that takes all the proceeds from these sort of offenses, and transfers it to a scholarship program for state schools.

Once municipalities no longer from pulling this sh%$, they will stop pulling this sh%$.

Normally, this Level of Incompetence at this Level of Status Results in a Promotion, not a Demotion

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But it appears that the Norwegian culture is different form ours, as former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has been demoted from his position as head of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

Norway’s Nobel peace prize committee has demoted its chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland, in a move unprecedented in the long history of the award.

The committee, which said the former Norwegian prime minister would remain as a committee member, gave no reason for its decision.

However, the renowned diplomat drew criticism shortly after becoming committee chairman in 2009 for awarding the prestigious Nobel to newly elected US president Barack Obama.

The move stunned the world and the recipient alike, as Obama had been in office less than nine months and the US was waging simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After six years at the helm of the committee, Jagland, 64, will be replaced by deputy chair, Kaci Kullmann Five, the organisation said on Tuesday.

“There was broad agreement within the committee that Thorbjørn Jagland was a good chair for six years,” Kullmann Five told reporters, but declined to comment on the discussion.

Commentators and former Nobel laureates had criticised the committee’s decisions under Jagland’s stewardship.

Hitting back at critics after Obama’s prize, Jagland said the organisation wanted to praise the US leader’s early vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and capture “the spirit of the times, the needs of the era”.

Last year, a federal study estimated that the US will spend $1tn (£649bn) upgrading its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades.

Ohhh ……… Bummer of a birthmnark, Thorbjørn.

Your award recipient is responsible for more spending on nukes than the rest of the world combined.

………

And in 2012 Jagland became the face of a body that handed the award to the European Union for its commitment to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”.

“The EU is clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in an open letter with two other former laureates.

Jagland, a former leader of Norway’s Labour party who has served as prime minister, foreign minister and speaker of parliament, spent much of his career trying to bolster support for Norway to join the EU.

So the that award appears to be an attempt to political agenda that he has personally held for years.  (And then there is the whole thing that the EU seems like the most forceful attempt at German hegemony in Europe since that bloke with the funny mustache)

It is rather unsurprising, that Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu roundly condemned the selection of the EU as, “Clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will.”

Oh Snap.

This is the Least Surprising News Since ……… Ever

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The US Department of Justice has determined that the entire justice system of Ferguson, Missouri discriminates against minorities:

Ferguson, Mo., is a third white, but the crime statistics compiled in the city over the past two years seemed to suggest that only black people were breaking the law. They accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests. In cases like jaywalking, which often hinge on police discretion, blacks accounted for 95 percent of all arrests.

The racial disparity in those statistics was so stark that the Justice Department has concluded in a report scheduled for release on Wednesday that there was only one explanation: The Ferguson Police Department was routinely violating the constitutional rights of its black residents.

The report, based on a six-month investigation, provides a glimpse into the roots of the racial tensions that boiled over in Ferguson last summer after a black teenager, Michael Brown, was fatally shot by a white police officer, making it a worldwide flash point in the debate over race and policing in America. It describes a city where the police used force almost exclusively on blacks and regularly stopped people without probable cause. Racial bias is so ingrained, the report said, that Ferguson officials circulated racist jokes on their government email accounts.

I’m not sure what a final resolution to this should be, but as a start, I would suggest that all fines and court costs in the municipality be placed under the control of a special master and not allowed to accrue to the town treasury.

The town will continue to discriminate so long as it makes a profit from doing so.

People should not hate their own police, but it is the God given right of any free citizen to hate the tax collector, even though it is an essential function.

By turning the Ferguson courts and police into a revenue source it creates a toxic environment.

The people hate the cops. 

The cops hate them back, and come to believe that they are surrounded by the enemy, and not familiar citizens.

Then you get a kid shot and left to lie in the street for hours in plain view as a warning to the community.

I’d also like to see some criminal prosecutions, perhaps under RICO, against those who created, promulgated, and maintained such a system.