.@ScottWalker received a $900 million novelty check from #KochBrothers today in #NH. #nhpolitics #FITN #climate pic.twitter.com/gWOvKTZnM8
— Tyler McFarland (@tmcfarland29) August 3, 2015
This is a truly an epic political prank what got pulled on Scott Walker in New Hampshire.
A police officer in Alabama proposed murdering a black resident and creating bogus evidence to suggest the killing was in self-defence, the Guardian has learned.
Officer Troy Middlebrooks kept his job and continues to patrol Alexander City after authorities there paid the man $35,000 to avoid being publicly sued over the incident. Middlebrooks, a veteran of the US marines, said the man “needs a god damn bullet” and allegedly referred to him as “that nigger”, after becoming frustrated that the man was not punished more harshly over a prior run-in.
The payment was made to the black resident, Vincent Bias, after a secret recording of Middlebrooks’s remarks was played to the city’s police chiefs and the mayor. Elected city councillors said they were not consulted. A copy of the recording was obtained by the Guardian.
………
“This town is ridiculous,” Bias, 49, said in an interview. “The police here feel they can do what they want, and often they do.” Alexander City police chief Willie Robinson defended Middlebrooks. “He was just talking. He didn’t really mean that,” he said in an interview.
………
Middlebrooks, 33, made the threatening comments to Bias’s brother-in-law during a May 2013 encounter at his home, which Bias was visiting. Police came to the home after they discovered an unleashed dog.
A lawsuit from Bias that the city paid to settle before it reached court stated that while Bias remained inside the house and out of earshot, the officer remarked to Bias’s brother-in-law, who is white, that he was tired of “that nigger” being released from jail.
………
The officer did say he had been cleared by a state inquiry into the incident and referred the Guardian to the state bureau of investigation (SBI) and Larkin Radney, the city attorney for Alexander City. A spokesman for the SBI, however, said: “We have no record of us investigating this case.” Radney said: “I really don’t know what he’s talking about.”
During the interview at his office, Robinson said Middlebrooks “was disciplined” when the recording came to light, but declined to elaborate. Asked if the officer was ever suspended from patrols, Robinson repeated: “He got disciplined.” When it was put to him that some agencies might have terminated the officer’s job, the police chief said: “I don’t know what other departments do, but I made that call, and I’m going to live with that.”
Robinson tried to stress that Middlebrooks was in fact proposing that the brother-in-law carry out the killing. “He wasn’t saying that he was going to do that,” said the police chief. “He was talking about the man doing it himself.”
So a criminal conspiracy to commit murder under the color of law is not a grounds to fire this thug?
It turns out that, even though a judge will not allow it to be argued in court, that jurors are free to vote their own conscience, invalidating unjust laws and ignoring judge’s instructions.* (See here)
Prosecutors just charged him with 7 felony counts of jury tampering:
A Denver man has been charged with multiple felonies after he was caught distributing fliers to educate potential jurors about the practice of “jury nullification.”
The Denver Post reported that 56-year-old Mark Iannicelli set up a small booth with a sign reading “Juror Info” outside the Lindsay-Flanigan Courthouse in Denver last week. The Denver District Attorney’s Office charged Iannicelli with seven counts of jury tampering after members of the jury pool were found to be in possession of fliers describing jury nullification.
Jury nullification allows juries to acquit a defendant who they may believe is guilty if they also believe that the law is unjust. The practice has been used by juries in the United States since the 1800s to nullify anti-free speech laws and laws punishing northerners for helping runaway slaves. It has most recently been used in drug cases when juries have viewed laws as discriminatory.
A copy of the criminal complaint obtained by Kirsten Tynan of the Fully Informed Jury Association says that Iannicelli “unlawfully and feloniously attempted directly and indirectly to communicate with” seven jurors.
A probable cause statement added that Iannicelli was accused of “handing out information to potential jurors.”
Tynan pointed out that the complaint “does not accuse Mr. Iannicelli of advocating for or against any case in progress” and “it does not accuse Mr. Iannicelli even of targeting individuals for sharing information with them.”
This is complete bullsh%$, and an abuse of prosecutorial discretion.
Any Colorado lawyers out there who wants to throw a complaint to the Bar Association?
*See the John Peter Zenger libel case from 1735, where the jury ignored the law and said that the truth is an absolute defense against libel, and William Penn’s acquittal for unlawful assembly (even though the judge threatened the jury when they refused to acquit).
It has now been revealed that before he decided to really run for President, he and Bill Clinton discussed this, and Clinton gave him some advice.
Somehow I think that the current situation, where the the bigotry, xenophobia, and ……… well ……… batsh%$ insanity of the Republican base has been revealed as “The Donald’s” poll numbers continue to skyrocket:
You do not have to love Bill Clinton, or even like him just barely, to agree that this right here is amazesauce awesomeballs THE BEST:
Former president Bill Clinton had a private telephone conversation in late spring with Donald Trump at the same time that the billionaire investor and reality-television star was nearing a decision to run for the White House, according to associates of both men.
Four Trump allies and one Clinton associate familiar with the exchange said that Clinton encouraged Trump’s efforts to play a larger role in the Republican Party and offered his own views of the political landscape.Do we think that The Big Dog himself sincerely believes America would benefit from Donald Trump hogging all the Republican primary limelight to proclaim which someones are doing the raping, and how he will make Mexico pay for his fence, by kicking its ass, right in the butt? Or do we imagine the former president making that jerking motion with his hand while he tries not to crack up on the phone as he fondles Trump’s YOOOGE ego right into the race, to the detriment of the GOP, say hello to Madam President? (It’s the second one, we think, what do YOU think?)
………
Guys. GUYS. Do you know what this means? It means we might all owe Bubba, for gently and oh so subtly nudging The Donald in the general direction of the White House, wink wink, and thereby humiliating the entire Republican Party so much, for being Republicans, that even they hate themselves right now.
I am not a fan of Bill Clinton’s Eisenhower Republican policies, but I do have to admit that he is a master of politics and of people.
I believe that Clinton knew that Trump would be the turd in the Republican punch bowl, and he encouraged Trump to run, even while convincing Trump that it was his idea.
Whether intentional or not, this is an Epic troll.
Well played, William Jefferson Clinton, President of Trolls.
Matt Taibbi has come up with what he calls, “The Official GOP Debate Drinking Game Rules.”
This is potentially a VERY hazardous activity.
Hundreds of people perish from alcohol poisoning every year in the United States.
Playing a drinking game based on the level of Republican stupidity in the debates is French kissing cobras, or trusting in the honesty of investment bankers.
I am not going to be watching the debate.
I’m sure that after 5 minutes of listening to them, I would feel compelled to start mainlining bat guano and licking toads by way of self medication.
The CIA’s former executive director (#3 in the chain of command), Buzzy Krongard, has admitted that the CIA tortured detainees:
The CIA tortured terror suspects in its programme of “enhanced interrogation”, the agency’s former executive director, Buzzy Krongard, has admitted to the BBC’s Panorama programme.
The agency’s position has always been that the “enhanced interrogation” techniques it used under George W Bush, did not amount to torture, because they were legally approved by the White House at the time.
………
I asked Buzzy Krongard, the CIA’s former executive director, if he thought waterboarding and painful stress positions were torture:
“Well, let’s put it this way, it is meant to make him as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume for, without getting into semantics, that’s torture. I’m comfortable with saying that,” he explained.
………
A report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released last December highlights a number of unauthorised interrogation techniques that were also used on detainees in the CIA’s secret prisons, including excessive beatings, and ice water dousing and baths.
In a public rebuttal to the Senate committee’s report, the CIA has admitted to significant lapses in the monitoring and development of its initial interrogation activities, including instances of using unauthorized techniques.
I would not expect this level of honesty from a former CIA man, even one who only spent most of his career outside of the agency.
It does kind of f%$# the CIA rebuttal, though.
Living in an America where pretty much every FBI anti-terrorism operation involves paying an informant to entrap some loser, it is heartening that a German prosecutor has been given the sack over investigating journalists for treason:
Netzpolitik.org, the website at the centre of the treason scandal in Germany, is the real winner in the whole furore as a senior German official was forcibly retired over the scandal, editor Markus Beckedahl told el Reg this morning.
Last night, Germany’s chief federal prosecutor Harald Range was given the boot by German Justice Minister Heiko Maas over his handling of the affair. Technically, Range resigned, but it was his decision to pursue Beckedahl and fellow journalist Andrew Meister for treason that led to his downfall.
The journalists, meanwhile, have seen donations to their website come flooding in. The pair were under investigation for treason for supposedly betraying state secrets after they published leaked documents relating to plans to monitor Twitter and Facebook chats, as well as a €2.75m project to process massive online data sets.
This sort of law enforcement and prosecutorial overreach gets promotions in the US.
It’s nice to see that there are countries where this bullsh%$ is not tolerated.
The Department of Justice has just unsealed a criminal indictment naming three close Rand Paul aides conspiracy for fraud and bribery relating to the 2012 Republican primary:
Two top allies of presidential candidate and US Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) were charged with violating campaign finance laws during the 2012 presidential campaign, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.
Jesse Benton, who worked on the presidential bid of Paul’s father, Ron, was named as one of three political operatives in the alleged scheme to conceal payments to an Iowa state senator.
According to a National Journal report last April, Benton was tapped to run a Paul-sanctioned super PAC, America’s Liberty PAC, supporting the senator’s 2016 presidential bid.
John Tate, who is listed as the group’s founder and president, was also named in the charges. The other operative named was Dimitrios Kesari, a former deputy campaign manager on Ron Paul’s campaign.
The indictment was based on six counts, including conspiracy, filing false records, false statements, and obstruction of justice.
Though the indictment did not name which 2012 presidential candidate Benton, Tate, and Kesari worked on, there is little doubt that it is referring to former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Rand Paul’s father.
Note that one of these people, Jesse Benton, is married to Rand Paul’s niece, so it is all in the family.
At the rate that this is going, the Republicans are going to nominate Donald Trump.
Some guy took his early 1980s vintage TRS-80 Model 100 and set it up to surf the net:
The true test of a man’s patience is crimping pins onto the end of a cable that leads to building a custom serial cable—especially if it’s the first time you’ve even handled a serial cable in a decade. So as I searched under my desk, using my phone for a flashlight, I wondered whether I had finally found the IT project that would send me over the edge. On a recent day, I set out to turn my recently acquired vintage Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer into a working Internet terminal. And at this moment, I crawled on the floor looking for a DB-25 connector’s little gold pin that I had dropped for the sixth—or maybe sixteenth—time.
Thankfully, I underestimated my patience/techno-masochism/insanity. Only a week later, I successfully logged in to Ars’ editorial IRC channel from the Model 100. And seeing as this machine first saw the market in 1983, it took a substantial amount of help: a Raspberry Pi, a little bit of BASIC code, and a hidden file from the website of a certain Eric S. Raymond.
I respect how the author has gotten his geek on.
It means that he is doing his bit to prevent overpopulation, because with that under his arm, he is so never going to get his porcupine whacked.
At the Monmouth Park racetrack in New Jersey, Triple Crown winner American Pharaoh won the Haskell Invitational.
The trophy was presented in the winner’s circle, and as soon as Chris Christie, and as soon as he appeared, a deafening chorus of boos erupted from the crowd of more than sixty thousand.
They continued for as long as he was before the crowd, and returned whenever someone mentioned his name:
It was one long happy celebration at Monmouth Park for the great American Pharoah’s latest victory. At least, that is, until Gov. Chris Christie stepped into the Winner’s Circle to present the trophy.
And then, the record crowd of 60,983 booed.
Long.
Loud.
Sustained.
Maybe he should have hung around Bill Murray.
The cheering resumed as trainer Bob Baffert and owner Ahmed Zayat addressed the crowd and talking about their famous horse. Then Christie’s name was mentioned again, and the booing started anew.
So not even the popular Triple Crown winner, which went off as such a heavy favorite that a $2 bet won 20 cents, could improve the popularity of the Republican presidential candidate in his home state.
Christie still believes that he can become President.
He should be figuring out how to stay out of jail, because someone is going to roll over him to the US Attorney, and he is going to be under significant legal jeopardy.
It’s over dude.
You won’t be President, and you won’t win another election ……… Ever,
A federal judge has lifted a controversial ban on undercover surveillance inside Idaho’s factory farms, delivering a significant victory to animal rights’ activists.
Judge B Lynn Winmill ruled on Monday that the state’s so-called “ag gag” law violated the constitutional right to free speech.
“An agricultural facility’s operations that affect food and worker safety are not exclusively a private matter,” said the judge. “Food and worker safety are matters of public concern.”
The agriculture industry’s political allies passed the law last year after an undercover investigator with the advocacy group Mercy for Animals used a hidden camera to expose cruelty and neglect at Bettencourt Dairies, Idaho’s largest dairy factory farm.
The 2012 exposé documented workers beating, kicking and shocking cows, twisting their tails and dragging them with chains attached to their necks.
………
The state’s $2.5bn dairy industry said the sting was an attempt to hurt businesses and rallied legislators in the state capitol to pass a law making it a crime to film inside agricultural facilities. Governor CL “Butch” Otter signed it.
………
Judge Winmill agreed. He said the law violated the first amendment and the equal protection clause because it was motivated in substantial part by animus towards animal welfare groups.
“The effect of the statute will be to suppress speech by undercover investigators and whistleblowers concerning topics of great public importance: the safety of the public food supply, the safety of agricultural workers, the treatment and health of farm animals, and the impact of business activities on the environment.”
Existing laws against trespass, fraud, theft and defamation sufficed to protect the dairy industry from wrongful intrusion, he said. “These types of laws serve the property and privacy interests … but without infringing on free speech rights.”
A well deserved smack-down, but I would also argue that the law violated the constitutional injunction against bills of attainder, as well as the 14ᵗʰ amendment’s injunction against unequal treatment under the law, and this law is specifically formulated to favor just one business activity.
Of course, judges, real ones, not folks like Scalia, Alito and Thomas, try to keep their rulings as narrow as possible, so I understand why the opinion was written that way.
Of course, my opinion is offered with the caveat that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*
*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
Rather unsurprisingly, after a campaign of wage cuts, benefit cuts, and demonization, teachers are fleeing the sinking ship that is Kansas:
Teachers can’t hotfoot it out of Kansas fast enough, creating a substantial shortage expected only to get much worse. Why?
Well, there’s the low pay. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average teaching salary in 2012-2013 (the latest year for which data were available, in constant 2012-2013 dollars), was $47,464, lower than the pay in all but seven states (Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and West Virginia), though not by much in most of them.
Last year, job protections were cut by state lawmakers, who have also sought to reduce collective-bargaining rights for public employees.
Then there’s the severe underfunding for public education by the administration of Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, so much of a problem that some school districts closed early this past school year because they didn’t have the cash to keep operating. This story by Huffington Post, quoted Tim Hallacy, superintendent of Silver Lake Schools, as saying:“I find it increasingly difficult to convince young people that education is a profession worth considering, and I have some veterans who think about leaving. In the next three years I think we’ll have maybe the worst teacher shortage in the country — I think most of that is self-inflicted.”
………
And there’s more. According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Kansas Board of Education decided in July to allow six school systems — including two of the largest in the state — to hire unlicensed teachers to ease the shortage. (Let the irony sink in for a minute.) Specifically, the newspaper reported:The measure will waive the state’s licensure regulations for a group of districts called the Coalition of Innovative Districts, a program that the Legislature established in 2013 based on model legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council.
………
Peter Greene, a teacher who writes the Curmudgucation blog, described it this way:Kansas has taken a bold new step in making their schools Even Worse…. Kansas has entered the Chase Teachers Out of The State derby, joining states like North Carolina and Arizona in the attempt to make teaching unappealing as a career and untenable as a way for grown-ups to support a family. Kansas favors the two-pronged technique. With one prong, you strip teachers of job protections and bargaining rights, so that you can fire them at any time for any reason and pay them as little as you like. With the other prong, you strip funding from schools, so that teachers have to accomplish more and more on a budget of $1.95 (and if they can’t get it done, see prong number one). The result is predictable. Kansas is solidly settled onto the list of Places Teachers Work As Their Very Last Choice. It’s working out great for Missouri; their school districts have teacher recruitment billboards up in Kansas. But in Kansas, there’s a teacher shortage.
Obviously, Sam Brownback is, for lack of a better term, bat sh%$ insane, and he is determined to turn the state of Kansas into Mogadishu, and even by the standards of Republicans, this is rather exceptional.
However, there is a bigger picture, because this reflects a crucial part of American business culture.
Specifically, it is an article of faith in American business these days that managing any sort of endeavor these days must necessarily involve making your employees as miserable as possible.
It’s destroying the country, not just Kansas.
H/t Atrios.
This is the title of a a thought provoking article in Jacobin that needs to be read in its entirety.
A snippet to present their basic thesis:
Here’s my question to the angry commenters: if racial inequality isn’t merely a symptom of economic inequality, what is it a symptom of?
I already feel like I can hear the answer: it’s a symptom of hundreds of years of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid.
Yes. But what were slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and urban apartheid if not extreme forms of economic inequality?
What was the point of England’s colonization of Ireland if not to impose a lucrative “economic inequality” on its victims? Was the urban apartheid of Haussmann’s Paris not the “symptom” of nineteenth-century economic inequality?
It provides a very good historical perspective (as one would expect with the author invoking Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris under Napoleon III) on how bigotry is very much the product of exploitative economics.
It should be noted that Jacobin is an explicitly Socialist publication, and socialism has a long history of viewing pretty much everything in society through the prism of economics,* so this focus is unsurprising.
Still, it is a good read, and very thought provoking.
*In fact, I would argue that the lasting contribution of Marx to the study of society was his focus on the economic. Certainly, the degree to which all aspects of society, whether they be government, judicial, or social are viewed largely through the lens of economics has expanded enormously since Marx published Das Kapital almost 150 years ago.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has been indicted on multiple counts of fraud and financial shenanigans, some of which carry the possibility of life in prison:
Facing three felony counts of securities law violations, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was arrested, fingerprinted and photographed Monday morning for alleged violations that took place when he was a state legislator.
Indicted by a Collin County grand jury last week, Paxton surrendered at the county jail in his hometown of McKinney, avoiding assembled reporters by entering through a side door.
………
The grand jury indictments against Paxton, unsealed shortly after noon, revealed that two first-degree fraud charges were based on Paxton’s efforts in July 2011 — when he was a member of the Texas House — to sell stock on behalf of Servergy Inc., a privately held, McKinney-based tech company.
According to the indictments, Paxton failed to tell stock buyers — including state Rep. Byron Cook, R-Corsicana, and Florida businessman Joel Hochberg, who each purchased more than $100,000 in Servergy stock and were listed as complainants on the fraud charges — that he had been compensated with 100,000 shares of Servergy. Paxton also said he was an investor in Servergy when he had not invested his own money in the company, the charges indicated.
………
Paxton encouraged investors to put more than $600,000 into Servergy, special prosecutor Kent Schaffer told The New York Times last week. Paxton’s role was discovered as part of a Texas Rangers investigation, Schaffer said.
First-degree felonies can be punished by up to life in prison.
Paxton is a wingnut’s wingnut, even by the standards of Texas, which is saying a lot.
The fact that he has been caught red-handed defrauding fellow Republican members of the state legislature makes this whole affair quite ……… entertaining.
I am amused.
As useless as a marzipan dildo.
—Atrios on the general uselessness of the timid wastes of DNA that are New Labour in Britain.
I am so glad I wasn’t drinking something when I read that.
That is f%$#ing genius.
Is the Supposed STEM Shortage a Myth Used to Serve Tech Companies Labor Policies?
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
The slightly longer version of this, as Erik Loomis notes, is that when companies like Qualcomm are calling for a massive expansion in the H1B Gastarbeiter (guest worker) program because of an alleged shortage of skilled workers, while at the same time laying out thousands of skilled workers with US citizen or Green Card status, it is clear that they are trying to engage in labor arbitrage to drive wages down.
There is no STEM shortage.
It has never showed up in any data, and when you talk to tech firms, it becomes clear that they see the Gastarbeiter programs as a way of ensuring that an endless stream of low wage and compliant workers don’t require them to pay a fair market price for skilled workers.
H/T Atrios.
If the U.S. Institute of Peace is just an Orwellian absurdity, then Hadley is an appropriate chairman. If it wants to demonstrate that it isn’t that, Hadley’s resignation or removal would be a step in the right direction,
—Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, on the fact that frothing at the mouth war monger Stephen Hadley is heading the Institute of Peace.
Hadley is a former Bush National Security Adviser who has publicly called for massive military interventions in response to quite literally every foreign policy dispute that he has encountered.
London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated.
—Cory Doctorow on why he and his family are leaving London for Los Angeles
It appears that much of London is being razed in order to construct empty apartments whose sole purpose is to provide a refuge for the parasite high finance class when the revolution hits their home countries.
The state of Georgia has characterized the act of posting its laws online as “terrorism”, clearly this is absurd:
Government officials have threatened “rogue archivist” Carl Malamud with legal action many times for his efforts to make public government documents widely available for free, but the state of Georgia has set a new standard for fighting this ridiculous battle: It’s suing Malamud for infringing its copyright of state laws by — horrors — publishing them online.
The state’s lawsuit, filed last week in Atlanta federal court, accuses Malamud of piracy — and worse, of “a form of ‘terrorism.'” His offense: Through his website, public.resource.org, he provides members of the public access to a searchable and downloadable scan of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated — that is, the entire body of state law. The state wants a court order forcing Malamud to stop.
Georgia and Malamud have been waging this battle for a couple of years, or ever since Malamud sent thumb drives bearing the scans to the speaker of the state House of Representatives in 2013. A cease-and-desist order, which Malamud rebuffed, came virtually by return mail.
This isn’t the first such battle Malamud has waged. For roughly two decades he’s been working to make public laws, codes and court documents, well, public. At almost every turn he’s been fought by government agencies that prefer to extract a fee from taxpayers for access, even though, as Malamud points out, the public pays for the work in the first place, via taxes.
………
The state’s own lawsuit acknowledges that the annotations are “valuable analysis and guidance regarding … state law.” And the core of its case isn’t that the annotations shouldn’t be broadly accessible, only that the state doesn’t want to pay the cost itself. LexisNexis shoulders the cost and in return gets the right to charge users, earning a profit.
If LexisNexis can’t recoup those costs because Malamud is providing a free alternative, the lawsuit asserts, the state “will be required to either stop publishing the annotations altogether or pay … using tax dollars.”
Well, yes. Isn’t that what taxes are for?
This is not something that the the state of Georgia should be playing anyone for this.
The state government has to have a copy of the laws and official interpretations in electronic form with annotations as a part of conducting business.
They don’t need to have LexisNexis extracting tolls from the citizenry to make this public.
The costs here are negligible to non-existent, and the assertion of copyright is absurd.
