Month: April 2015

21 April 2015, 8:14 PM

Today in IP Insanity

Automakers are petitioning the Library of Congress prevent backyard mechanics from repairing their own cars:

Automakers are supporting provisions in copyright law that could prohibit home mechanics and car enthusiasts from repairing and modifying their own vehicles.

In comments filed with a federal agency that will determine whether tinkering with a car constitutes a copyright violation, OEMs and their main lobbying organization say cars have become too complex and dangerous for consumers and third parties to handle.

Allowing them to continue to fix their cars has become “legally problematic,” according to a written statement from the Auto Alliance, the main lobbying arm of automakers.

The dispute arises from a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that no one thought could apply to vehicles when it was signed into law in 1998. But now, in an era where cars are rolling computing platforms, the U.S. Copyright Office is examining whether provisions of the law that protect intellectual property should prohibit people from modifying and tuning their cars.

Every three years, the office holds hearings on whether certain activities should be exempt from the DMCA’s section 1201, which governs technological measures that protect copyrighted work. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for individual rights in the digital world, has asked the office to ensure that enthusiasts can continue working on cars by providing exemptions that would give them the right to access necessary car components.

This is under the anti-counterfeiting provisions of the DMCA, which not only prevents copying, it prevents “unauthorized access”, and the auto industry is attempting to lock down their cars to the backyard mechanic, and possibly the independent mechanics as well.

Do you want to have no alternative to price gouging by the dealer on maintenance?

21 April 2015, 7:55 PM

The Onion Abides………

Man Pleased To Find Most Of His Mid-’90s Anti-Hillary Rant Still Usable

DECATUR, IL—Expressing relief that he would not have to construct an entirely new diatribe from scratch, local man Harold Willis was reportedly pleased Monday to discover that most of his anti-Hillary Clinton rant from the mid-1990s was still perfectly usable.

Unfortunately, the press corps(e) does not see this as an ironic bit of humor, they see this as a model for the next 16 months.

I pray that Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are rendered mute from choking on their own bile.

21 April 2015, 7:49 PM

Way to Overshadow he 70th Anniversary of Hiroshima, Dude!

Jon Stewart’s last day on The Daily Show is August 6.

With all due respect, Mr. Stewart, I’ll not be hosting a goodbye party for you.

It just does not seem appropriate.

21 April 2015, 7:41 PM

The Middle East is a Truly F%$#ed Up Place

You may recall that Palestinian terrorists abducted and killed three Israeli Jewish students, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah a while back.

It was a part of the ostensible justification for the latest military operation against Gaza.

A day after they were buried, Israeli terrorists kidnapped and burnt to death Palestinian teen Mohammed Khudair.

Well, it just got more screwed up, because after the Israeli government placed Khudair’s name on a memorial to terrorist attacks, both Israelis and Palestinians flipped out:

Israel has added the name of a Palestinian teen to its “Monument to the Memory of the Victims of Terrorism”, upsetting the youth’s parents and a group representing families of slain Israelis with both demanding his name be removed.

………

The Almagor Terror Victims Organisation, a group founded in 1986 and representing the families of Israelis killed in Palestinian attacks, demanded the government remove the plaque honoring Khudair.

“(Khudair’s) name on the memorial debases the memory of all the other fallen people,” Yossi Tzur, an Almagor member whose 17-year-old son was killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing in 2003, told Israel Radio.

“He is not part of the Israeli ethos. He is not part of the sacrifice our children made at the altar for the sake of Israel’s establishment and existence,” Tzur said.

Khudair’s parents told Reuters they had not been consulted by Israel about adding their son’s name to the memorial, which lists more than 4,000 people.

“We can’t accept that his name be included among soldiers who killed his relatives in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank,” said Khudair’s father, Hussein.

His mother, Suha, said her son was “a Palestinian martyr, and not Israeli”, and their family felt shamed.

This is incredibly depressing.

This kid is a victim of terrorism, and neither side can move themselves to move past a tribal inability to feel any smidgen empathy for the other.

It’s all degenerated into a contest over whose suffering is more righteous.

20 April 2015, 6:47 PM

And the Biggest Koch Sucker of This Election Season Is………

It is Scott Walker:

Charles G. and David H. Koch, the influential and big-spending conservative donors, appear to have a favorite in the race for the Republican presidential nomination: Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

On Monday, at a fund-raising event in Manhattan for the New York State Republican Party, David Koch told donors that he and his brother, who oversee one of the biggest private political organizations in the country, believed that Mr. Walker would be the Republican nominee.

“When the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” Mr. Koch told the crowd, the billionaire brothers would support him, according to a spokeswoman. The remark drew laughter and applause from the audience of fellow donors and Republican activists, who had come to hear Mr. Walker speak earlier at the event, held at the Union League Club.

Two people who attended the event said they heard Mr. Koch go even further, indicating that Mr. Walker should be the Republican nominee. A spokeswoman disputed that wording, saying that Mr. Koch had pledged to remain officially neutral during the primary campaign.

But Mr. Koch’s remark left little doubt among attendees of where his heart is, and could effectively end one of the most closely watched contests in the “invisible primary,” a period where candidates crisscross the country seeking not the support of voters but the blessing of their party’s biggest donors and fund-raisers.

Not surprising.

The Kochs don’t want to waste money, and Scotty, goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin,^* is already bought and paid for.

^*^*Credit where credit is due. This bon mot was coined by Esquire magazine’s inimitable Charlie Pierce.

20 April 2015, 6:07 PM

It’s 4/20

What is/was your favorite munchie food?

I no longer indulge in “Demon Weed”, but when I did, I favored ice cream sandwiches and Fig Newtons^™.

Of course, I stopped toking before I became even vaguely aware of Ben and Jerry’s^™, and the explosion of gourmet snacks was almost a decade away.

20 April 2015, 5:11 PM

Good News Everyone!!!

Good news everyone!

I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!

It appears that the DoJ’s antitrust division will oppose the Comcast-Time Warner Merger:

Staff attorneys at the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust division are nearing a recommendation to block Comcast Corp.’s bid to buy Time Warner Cable Inc., according to people familiar with the matter.

Attorneys who are investigating Comcast’s $45.2 billion proposal to create a nationwide cable giant are leaning against the merger out of concern that consumers would be harmed and could submit their review as soon as next week, said the people. The division’s senior officials will then decide whether to file a federal lawsuit seeking to block the tie-up.

Even better, it appears that this opposition could have the effect of preventing other mergers in the industry:

………

A rejection would be a blow to Comcast, which would have to give up on valuable cable and broadband assets in major U.S. cities including New York and Los Angeles. The $45.2 billion merger proposal is also a way for Philadelphia-based Comcast to fend off competition from phone companies, satellite providers and Web services like Netflix Inc. that have taken hundreds of thousands of its TV subscribers in recent years.

Another company has a lot at stake: Charter Communications Inc., the No. 4 in the industry. Charter, which counts billionaire John Malone as its largest investor, has agreed to take control of 3.9 million Comcast cable-TV customers to ease approval for the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. If that fails, Charter won’t get those customers. Another Charter deal, the recent agreement to purchase of Bright House Networks, would also be in jeopardy.

The most amazing thing about this is that the push-back seems to come primarily from consumers, driven largely by both Comcast and TW Cable, and the belief that if they are allowed to merge, the suckitude will get only worse.

Remarkably, this is the second time that adverse regulation against cable companies has resulted in a consumer backlash.

The Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 was vociferously opposed by the cable companies, and they plastered their programming with advertising against it.

Once alerted, cable users bombarded Congress with calls and letters supporting the bill, because they figured that if their cable company was against the 1992 Cable Act, they were for it.

19 April 2015, 6:51 PM

Quote of the Day

Alas, reality trumps theory. As we have seen almost every time this thesis has been put into practice, it fails. The tax cuts don’t magically kick the economy into higher gear and the government ends up short of money. Remember former President George W. Bush and his tax cuts? Same deal.

—Barry Ritholtz, on Kansas’ fiscal implosion from worshiping at the alter of supply side economics and tax cuts.

18 April 2015, 7:53 PM

I Now Understand Why Jon Stewart is Leaving The Daily Show

After many years of commenting on cable TV wankitude, he can no longer handle watching Fox News anymore:

………

My biggest objection to Fox News, I say, is not the scaremongering, it’s the way it’s reshaped the Republican party. It will misrepresent social and economic issues, and promote the more extreme elements of the party, politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, in a way that is hugely detrimental to American politics. (For the record, Rupert Murdoch disagrees, and last year claimed that Fox News “absolutely saved” the Republican party.) “Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing,” says Stewart. “I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.”

Now that he is leaving The Daily Show, is there any circumstance in which he would watch Fox News again? He takes a few seconds to ponder the question. “Umm… All right, let’s say that it’s a nuclear winter, and I have been wandering, and there appears to be a flickering light through what appears to be a radioactive cloud and I think that light might be a food source that could help my family. I might glance at it for a moment until I realize, that’s Fox News, and then I shut it off. That’s the circumstance.”

OK, I get it now.

If I had to watch Fox News for a living, I’d be ……… I’d be ………

Hell, I need a full fifth of Jack and a bong full of Maui Wowie to even consider it.

18 April 2015, 7:28 PM

Remember the Brief Kidnapping of Richard Engel by Assad’s Forces in Syria? Not so Much.

It turns out that he was kidnapped by the Syrian opposition, and then freed by the same militias as a part of a false flag operation: (See also here and here.)

NBC News on Wednesday revised its account of the 2012 kidnapping of its chief foreign correspondent, Richard Engel, saying it was likely that Mr. Engel and his reporting team had been abducted by a Sunni militant group, not forces affiliated with the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

In a statement posted on the NBC News website Wednesday evening, Mr. Engel said that a review of the episode — prompted by reporting from The New York Times — had led him to conclude that “the group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia.” He also wrote that the abductors had “put on an elaborate ruse to convince us they were Shiite shabiha militiamen.”

Mr. Engel and his team were kidnapped in December 2012 while reporting in Syria. They were held for five days. Just hours after emerging, they appeared on the “Today” show.

“This was a group known as the shabiha, this was the government militia, these are people who are loyal to President Bashar al-Assad,” Mr. Engel said on “Today,” citing information he had gathered from the group. In that and other appearances on NBC, and in a Vanity Fair magazine article, he said that he had been rescued by Sunni rebels. At least two people died during the course of the captivity, he said in some versions of the account.

Interviews by The Times with several dozen people — including many of those involved in the search for NBC’s team, rebel fighters and activists in Syria and current and former NBC News employees — suggested that Mr. Engel’s team was almost certainly taken by a Sunni criminal element affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, the loose alliance of rebels opposed to Mr. Assad.

The group, known as the North Idlib Falcons Brigade, was led by two men, Azzo Qassab and Shukri Ajouj, who had a history of smuggling and other crimes. The kidnapping ended, the people involved in the search said, when the team was freed by another rebel group, Ahrar al-Sham, which had a relationship with Mr. Qassab and Mr. Ajouj.

Mr. Engel and his team underwent a harrowing ordeal, and it is a common tactic for kidnappers in war zones to intentionally mislead hostages as to their identity.

NBC executives were informed of Mr. Ajouj and Mr. Qassab’s possible involvement during and after Mr. Engels’s captivity, according to current and former NBC employees and others who helped search for Mr. Engel, including political activists and security professionals. Still, the network moved quickly to put Mr. Engel on the air with an account blaming Shiite captors and did not present the other possible version of events.

Of course they, “Did not present the other possible version of events,” they couldn’t present other possible versions, because Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia..

18 April 2015, 6:53 PM

Those Sanctions are Working out Just Ducky

It looks like the Russians are managing lower oil prices and US and EU sanctions reasonably well:

It’s been fascinating to watch the Russian economy adjust to sharply lower oil prices. With a little help from the central bank, the country’s recession might not be as bad as previously thought.

After an initial period in which the ruble plummeted and inflation surged — with food prices up 15.4 percent from a year earlier in December — the Russian central bank’s response is turning things around. A sharp increase in short-term interest rates, currently at 14 percent, has stabilized the ruble and might even be getting consumer prices under control.

The episode has taken a toll on Russian living standards. In the first quarter of 2015, inflation-adjusted incomes were down 1.4 percent from a year earlier. Retail sales dropped 6.7 percent — and individual stores, such as the M Video electronics chain, reported even steeper declines. Imports were particularly hard hit, thanks to the impaired buying power of the ruble: In January and February, they were down 37.9 percent from a year earlier. The government’s finances haven’t fared well, either. Standard & Poor’s predicted Friday that Russia’s fiscal deficit will rise to 4.4 percent this year, higher than the 3.7 percent the government predicts.

Still, there are signs that a cheaper ruble might be helping some Russian producers compete with imports. True, industrial production was down 14.6 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, with the garment industry — which depends heavily on imported inputs — taking the steepest plunge. Yet Russian food production was up 3.5 percent, suggesting that import substitution might not be just President Vladimir Putin’s pipe dream.

Those sanctions are working so well.

It’s gotten to the point that the Russian Central Bank governor has suggested that they will be lowering interest rates to keep the Ruble from appreciating to much.

One important thing to note here is that Russia has some advantages over other sanctions targets, specifically a captive market for natural gas in Europe, and a central bank that has dealt with these problems very competently.

I would argue that much of the reason that the bank has handled this so well is because of their relative lack of independence from the Russian government.

Because they have not been allowed to indulge in free market navel-gazing they have responded aggressively to Russia’s crisis.

18 April 2015, 6:42 PM

To Honor the 70th Anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, the Ukraine has Commemorated Nazi Collaborators………

No, this isn’t The Onion, it’s just the Ukraine being the Ukraine.

They have officially honored Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis:

The U.S.-backed Ukrainian government came up with a curious way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust being brought to an end. The parliament in Kiev voted to extend official recognition to Ukrainian fascists who collaborated with the Nazis in killing Jews.

Though Official Washington and the mainstream U.S. media continue to dutifully ignore the key role played by neo-Nazis in Ukraine’s February 2014 coup and in the post-coup regime’s subsequent military offensives against ethnic Russians in the east, Ukrainian politicians can’t stop their arms from snapping into Heil Hitler salutes like the fictional character Dr. Strangelove. They can’t hold back this reflex even as the world stopped this week to recall the Nazi barbarity that claimed the lives of some six million Jews as well as other minorities.

On April 9, the Ukrainian parliament passed a bill making the ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army eligible for official government recognition, a demand that has been pushed by Ukraine’s current neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist movements, the same forces that spearheaded the overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 and then the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Russians who resisted the new order.

Ukraine’s honor-the-Nazi-collaborators vote came amid increased repression of opposition politicians and journalists who dare to criticize the U.S.-backed regime as it moves to repudiate the political settlement envisioned by February’s Minsk-2 agreement and instead prepares for a resumption of the war to crush the resistance in eastern Ukraine once and for all.

………

During World War II, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, an offshoot of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, collaborated with the Nazis in their orgy of mass murder against Jews, Poles and other minority groups. The UIA also joined with the Nazis in fighting against the Soviet Union’s Red Army, although some UIA elements did ultimately turn against the Germans over their occupation of Ukraine.

Ukraine was the site of several major Holocaust atrocities including the infamous massacre at Babi Yar in Kiev, where local Ukrainian fascists worked alongside the Nazi SS in funneling tens of thousands of Jews to a ravine where they were slaughtered and buried.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Ukraine’s recognition of the UIA as well as a second bill that equated Communist and Nazi crimes.

“The passage of a ban on Nazism and Communism equates the most genocidal regime in human history with the regime which liberated Auschwitz and helped end the reign of terror of the Third Reich,” said Wiesenthal Center director for Eastern European Affairs Dr. Efraim Zuroff, adding:

“In the same spirit the decision to honor local Nazi collaborators and grant them special benefits turns Hitler’s henchmen into heroes despite their active and zealous participation in the mass murder of innocent Jews. These attempts to rewrite history, which are prevalent throughout post-Communist Eastern Europe, can never erase the crimes committed by Nazi collaborators in these countries, and only proves that they clearly lack the Western values which they claim to have embraced upon their transition to democracy.”

You’ve seen a lot of this in the Baltic states, Poland, and the Ukraine.

This is not surprising, as they are ……… the Baltic states, Poland, and the Ukraine.

Note that the US has been aggressively supporting the people who successfully fought for this, the Svoboda party the Pravy Sektor militia, taking it so far as to vote against a measure condemning those who glorify Naziism in the UN.

I do not know if there are any good guys in this conflict, but they ain’t it.

18 April 2015, 6:24 PM

Tweet of the Day

Cruz, Paul and Rubio, all running for President. Hey, I thought I was supposed to write the horror stories.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) April 16, 2015

It appears that I must add Stephen King to the noble and honorable order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.

18 April 2015, 6:17 AM

Snark of the Day

In response to a Michigan auto mechanic saying that he would refuse to serve gays, a lawyer has offered his services.

The kicker is that he is a bankruptcy attorney:

In a mocking open-letter to a Michigan auto repair shop owner following his anti-gay Facebook rant, a Grand Rapids bankruptcy attorney has offered his services to deal with the economic consequences of the business owner’s “inane, incoherent and just plain dumb comments.”

On Tuesday, Grandville auto shop owner Brian Klawiter posted a rambling attack on gays on Facebook, saying he would not service their cars, adding, “Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works.”

………

Sensing a business opportunity, Grand Rapids bankruptcy attorney Jeffrey Mapes, posted an open letter on Michigan Live, saying he too is “white, male, Christian, a business owner, and a gun owner,” and is willing to handle Klawiter’s future needs despite his “inane, incoherent and just plain dumb comments” on Facebook.

………

He then offered words of inspiration in the wake of the Facebook post that has caused Klawiter grief , quoting from the Adam Sandler film, “Billy Madison.”

“What you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Heh.

17 April 2015, 7:04 PM

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizens………

A private bill collector and police conspired to use the threat of immediate arrest to extort cash from poor defendants:

Minutes after a court sentenced Adel Edwards to pay a $500 fine for burning leaves in his yard without a permit, the private probation company tasked with supervising his monthly payments told him he actually owed more than $1,000 and demanded $250 up front. Because Edwards couldn’t pay the full amount on the spot, the company had him thrown in jail for several days until a friend came up with the money, according to a new federal lawsuit.

The suit, filed by the Southern Center for Human Rights, charges that Red Hills Community Probation conspired with local police in two small Georgia towns to jail poor people without any court approval or legal authority, effectively holding them for ransom.

The plaintiffs, who live in Bainbridge and Pelham, GA, were ordered by the court to pay exorbitant fees for misdemeanor offenses. Edwards pleaded guilty to burning leaves, while others were told they needed to pay hundreds of dollars for speeding, failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, and driving with a suspended registration.

At this point, these stories are reminiscent of reports coming out of Ferguson and the surrounding area, where municipalities exploit a murky labyrinth of court fees and traffic tickets to make money off poor defendants. But private probation companies like Red Hills, which are used by more than 1,000 court systems in ten states, further feed on these moneymaking schemes by tacking on their own share of fees. In Pelham and Bainbridge, the suit alleges, the probation firm went even further, committing false imprisonment and fraud, among other charges.

Like Edwards, the other plaintiffs met with Red Hills probation officers, who told each of them they could not leave the courthouse until they paid a certain amount of money that same day. Even though they weren’t legally required to pay the company the same day as their sentencing, the lawsuit states that police officers were stationed at the doors to keep them from leaving. One woman says she was detained in the courthouse while her fiance pawned her engagement ring to come up with the funds the company demanded.

Why am I not surprised that this is going on in what was once a part of the Confederacy?

Silly black folks, justice is for whites.

17 April 2015, 6:58 PM

I Think that Jon Stewart just Accused Dick Cheney of Being an Iranian Agent

Stewart actually makes a remarkably cogent argument for the case that Dick Cheney has been giving more aid and comfort to the Mullahs in Iran than any other American official:

He goes through Cheney’s history, including his disastrous tenure as the CEO of Halliburton (Dresser Industries acquisition and asbestos), and shows how almost every action and statement that Cheney has made in any official capacity with regard to Iran has provided aid and comfort to that theocracy.

Man, this is f%$#ing brutal.

17 April 2015, 6:48 PM

New Jersey Lawmaker Proposes Upping Penalties for Swatting ……… Is Promptly Swatted

This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.

No, I am not kidding here.

It just happened to State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty:

A New Jersey lawmaker who is pushing legislation to combat the trend of swatting — a prank in which anonymous callers phone-in false emergency reports to provoke a large police response — was a victim of the practice himself this weekend.

State Assemblyman Paul Moriarty (D-Gloucester) said he was watching the Masters golf tournament and doing his taxes at home on Saturday afternoon in Washington Township when he got a call from the police.

“The person on the phone says they were calling from police dispatch and wanted to know if everything is OK at my house,” Moriarty said. “I said ‘Yeah, why? They said ‘we have a report of a shooting at your home.'”

The dispatcher then asked Moriarty to describe what he was wearing and step outside.

“I look out my front door. There’s six cop cars. They have the street closed off. They have helmets, flak jackets and rifles,” Moriarty said. “I walk out and walk towards them. They motion me to keep walking towards them. The minute I walked out the door, I was still on the phone with the dispatch person, I said ‘I think I’ve just been swatted.’ It just then occurred to me what happened.”

………

Swatting has its roots in online video game culture. Callers anonymously phone in emergencies to authorities to send them to an unsuspecting gamer’s house — often while the gamer is streaming video of himself playing online.

………

Moriarty’s bill (A3877), introduced in November, would increase penalties for “false public alarm,” upgrading the crime from third degree to second degree, punishable by five to ten year in prison and a fine of up to $150,000.

“I’m thinking someone read about the bill and some sick, evil person thought it would be funny to send the police to my house on one of these false reports,” Moriarty said.

Moriarty is the former mayor of Washington Township and said he knew most of the police at the scene, including the chief. It turned out the department had dealt with at least one similar call in the previous 24 hours, Moriarty said.

“If this is a practical joke, it’s not funny because someone is going to get seriously hurt or perhaps killed in one of these engagements that can go very, very wrong,” Moriarty said. “It’s never fun to walk out your front door and have shotguns aimed at your house.”

Moriarty said it could have gone a lot worse because while doing his taxes he “wasn’t in a good mood to begin with.”

“If the phone wasn’t ringing next to me, I might not have answered it. … And had I not, they probably would have beat down the front door,” he said.

I will note that what Moriarty has proposed is a half measure.

The real problem here is that local law enforcement has become increasingly militarized, and so they tend to respond to this excessively.

Additionally, if “false alarm” gets upgraded, you can be sure that prosecutors will go Aaron Swartz on defendants with this law, in an attempt to extort guilty pleas.

Any time you ad a tool like this to a DA’s arsenal, you can be sure that it will be abused in ways that were never intended.

16 April 2015, 10:22 PM

Things are Getting Very Interesting in New York State Politics

As you may recall, the Speaker of the New York Assembly, Sheldon “Shelly” Silver was indicted for corruption, and it looks like the prosecutors have a pretty good case. (See here)

Basically, Sheldon Silver has been one of the “3 Guys in a Room,” (Governor, the State Assembly speaker and the State Senate majority leader) who have made pretty much all the decisions in Albany for a very long time, over 20 years, and it is pretty clear that he knows where the bodies are buried.

What’s more, it appears that the prosecutor, US Attorney Preet Bharara, is upping the pressure, specifically by indicting his son-in-law for financial fraud:

A son-in-law of the former State Assembly speaker was arrested on Monday and accused of defrauding investors out of $7 million, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court.

The defendant, Marcello Trebitsch, 37, of Brooklyn, told investors that he would use their money to trade in securities through his investment fund, and promised them double-digit returns with very low risk, according to a statement from the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Mr. Trebitsch’s wife, Michelle Trebitsch, is the daughter of Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, the former speaker who has been indicted on corruption charges.

Agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Mr. Trebitsch, and he appeared before a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan. He was charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of securities fraud.

The complaint said that Ms. Trebitsch, a certified public accountant, was a co-owner and managing partner of the investment fund, Allese Capital. She has not been charged.

They don’t need to charge her. (Yet)

The US Attorney can seize Silver’s daughter’s family assets under RICO, and that would have the effect of impoverishing his daughter and his grandchildren.

Also note that Michelle Trebitsch was not just the “Co-Owner” of the firm, she is a CPA, and she did the books, so you can be sure that Shelly is under a lot of pressure to roll over right now.

If Silver rolls on someone to protect himself, his daughter, and his grandchildren, it has to be someone big, i.e. one of the two other “Gusy in a room”, the Senate Majority Leader or the Governor.

We are now getting reports that evidence against Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos is being presented to a federal grand jury.

What’s more, it appears that Skelos’ son is being targeted as well.

So, it appears that the Feds are trying to turn Skelos into a cooperating witness as well.

This would imply that they are after Cuomo as well, and that he may be their ultimate goal.

This is what makes the reports that Andrew Cuomo made a tidy $180 for every copy of his memoir that was sold, interesting:

In the first week after its release in October, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s memoir, “All Things Possible,” sold almost impossibly poorly. According to Nielsen Bookscan, fewer than 1,000 people picked up a copy that week. And as of last month, the grand total of all sales was at 3,008. (Plus 13 audiobooks.)

But before you go complaining that being a writer is unrewarding work, know that Cuomo’s time and effort was worth it — financially, at least.

According to his tax release, made public on Wednesday, Cuomo reported earning $377,000 in income on the book in 2014. That’s apparently on top of the $188,333 he got as an advance that was reported in his 2013 filing, meaning that Cuomo seems to have made north of $565,000 for his book though last month.

Or: Nearly $188 per hardcover book.

While I have no doubt that reporter Philip Bump did his homework on the above story, I have a feeling that someone pointed him in the general direction.

I strongly suspect that whoever it was, they had a close relationship to US Attorney Preet Bharara.

If Cuomo gets indicted, it would amuse me no end.

15 April 2015, 6:58 PM

If You are the Subject of the Sentence, “Some Moron in an Autogyro………,” It Will not End Well

He says that, “No sane person would do what he is doing.”
The insanity defense might be a good idea.

And here is the landing, and the inevitable freakout.

U.S. Capitol Police said that a small gyrocopter with one occupant landed on the West Lawn of the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon.

One person has been detained, Capitol Police spokeswoman Kimberly Schneider said in an e-mail.

Eyewitnesses in Capitol offices reported seeing police run toward the aircraft and take the pilot away. The small craft landed in the middle of the West Front Lawn, where the annual Christmas tree and Fourth of July concert stage are set up.

All was calm as of about 1:45 p.m., but police blocked access to the lawn. Schneider, at about 3:13 p.m., sent out an e-mail saying bomb squad had cleared the craft and was preparing to move it to a secure location.

………

The Tampa Bay Times wrote about Doug Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from Florida, who planned to fly to the Capitol.

From their report:

His stated intent: to buzz through the air at 45 miles per hour at about 300 feet up in an ultralight gyrocopter toward Washington, D.C., toward protected airspace, where, if his plan works, he’ll land on the lawn of the United States Capitol building and deliver the mail.

Of course, Doug Hughes might be shot out of the sky. He knows this. He has thought about it day and night for more than two years, wrestling with the tiniest details of his insane plan.

“No sane person,” he said, “would do what I’m doing.”

Rather unsurprisingly, he is currently in custody.

I don’t expect a long jail sentence, but I would expect that he is likely to be fired by the US Post Office, and his pension might be at risk, and he is going to be in for a world of petty harassment by the authorities.