Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.
― Richard P. Feynman
Year: 2015
Governor Ratf%$# Outdoes Himself
Our Governor, Larry Hogan, wants to kill the Purple Line light rail line that will run east and west north of the District.
He thinks that it is too expensive, but he wants to drop $10 billion on a 500km/h magnet levitation line:
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan campaigned on cutting costs. Since taking office, however, he’s expressed interest in throwing big money at numerous transportation programs—just not the transit lines that actually work and which businesses and residents want. His latest big spending idea: A $10 billion maglev between DC and Baltimore.
Hogan is in Japan right now on a trade mission, and according to WAMU’s Martin di Caro, has agreed to work with Japan and seek federal funds for a study of what it’d take to build a maglev line here at home.
The Federal Railroad Administration has $27.8 million available for a maglev study, but Maryland is the only state in the nation that’s interested in seeking the money. Japan is offering $5 billion in loans to help make the line happen, but that money would still have to be paid back.
The maglev line could run over 300 miles per hour and, di Caro reports, possibly go from DC to Baltimore in 15 minutes (though time estimates for transportation facilities often are rosier, before the gritty details come in).
However, to run that fast, the tracks would have to be very straight. There’s no place to put very straight tracks right through the mostly-suburban area in between; instead, maglev supporters expect the line to be mostly in a tunnel. According to contributor and maglev supporter Peter Dovak, Japan’s maglev (which is different from its well-known “Shinkansen” high-speed trains) will run in a tunnel for 85% of its length.
That makes it very expensive.
This guy is a complete tool.
Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen
We now learn that you can go to jail for clearing your browser history, even if you are unaware of any law enforcement investigation:
Khairullozhon Matanov is a 24-year-old former cab driver from Quincy, Massachusetts. The night of the Boston Marathon bombings, he ate dinner with Tamerlan and Dhzokhar Tsarnaev at a kebob restaurant in Somerville. Four days later Matanov saw photographs of his friends listed as suspects in the bombings on the CNN and FBI websites. Later that day he went to the local police. He told them that he knew the Tsarnaev brothers and that they’d had dinner together that week, but he lied about whose idea it was to have dinner, lied about when exactly he had looked at the Tsarnaevs’ photos on the Internet, lied about whether Tamerlan lived with his wife and daughter, and lied about when he and Tamerlan had last prayed together. Matanov likely lied to distance himself from the brothers or to cover up his own jihadist sympathies—or maybe he was just confused.
Then Matanov went home and cleared his Internet browser history.
Matanov continued to live in Quincy for over a year after the bombings. During this time the FBI tracked him with a drone-like surveillance plane that made loops around Quincy, disturbing residents. The feds finally arrested and indicted him in May 2014. They never alleged that Matanov was involved in the bombings or that he knew about them beforehand, but they charged him with four counts of obstruction of justice. There were three counts for making false statements based on the aforementioned lies and—remarkably—one count for destroying “any record, document or tangible object” with intent to obstruct a federal investigation. This last charge was for deleting videos on his computer that may have demonstrated his own terrorist sympathies and for clearing his browser history.
Matanov faced the possibility of decades in prison—twenty years for the records-destruction charge alone.
Federal prosecutors charged Matanov for destroying records under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law enacted by Congress in the wake of the Enron scandal. The law was, in part, intended to prohibit corporations under federal investigation from shredding incriminating documents. But since Sarbanes-Oxley was passed in 2002 federal prosecutors have applied the law to a wider range of activities. A police officer in Colorado who falsified a report to cover up a brutality case was convicted under the act, as was a woman in Illinois who destroyed her boyfriend’s child pornography.
Prosecutors are able to apply the law broadly because they do not have to show that the person deleting evidence knew there was an investigation underway. In other words, a person could theoretically be charged under Sarbanes-Oxley for deleting her dealer’s number from her phone even if she were unaware that the feds were getting a search warrant to find her marijuana. The application of the law to digital data has been particularly far-reaching because this type of information is so easy to delete. Deleting digital data can inadvertently occur in normal computer use, and often does.
How the F%$# are they using Sarbanes f%$#ing Oxley on this?
The practice of overcharging by prosecutors by “innovative” application of the law is a cancer on the justice system.
Yet Another Reason to Not Give to the Red Cross
In addition to killing off most of the hemophiliacs in the United States because of their unwillingness to test blood for HIV and discard HIV tainted clotting factor, of course.
It turns out that the America Red Cross raised $½ Billion for post earthquake aid to Haiti, and built just 6 homes:
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.
Today, not one home has been built in Campeche. Many residents live in shacks made of rusty sheet metal, without access to drinkable water, electricity or basic sanitation. When it rains, their homes flood and residents bail out mud and water.
The Red Cross received an outpouring of donations after the quake, nearly half a billion dollars.
The group has publicly celebrated its work. But in fact, the Red Cross has repeatedly failed on the ground in Haiti. Confidential memos, emails from worried top officers, and accounts of a dozen frustrated and disappointed insiders show the charity has broken promises, squandered donations, and made dubious claims of success.
The Red Cross says it has provided homes to more than 130,000 people. But the actual number of permanent homes the group has built in all of Haiti: six.
After the earthquake, Red Cross CEO Gail McGovern unveiled ambitious plans to “develop brand-new communities.” None has ever been built.
Aid organizations from around the world have struggled after the earthquake in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. But ProPublica and NPR’s investigation shows that many of the Red Cross’s failings in Haiti are of its own making. They are also part of a larger pattern in which the organization has botched delivery of aid after disasters such as Superstorm Sandy. [They f%$#ed up Katrina and 911 too, and my father’s recollections of their help during the Anchorage earthquake in 1964 is similar. He remembers the Salvation Army outperforming them by all metrics] Despite its difficulties, the Red Cross remains the charity of choice for ordinary Americans and corporations alike after natural disasters.
One issue that has hindered the Red Cross’ work in Haiti is an overreliance on foreigners who could not speak French or Creole, current and former employees say.
In a blistering 2011 memo, the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, wrote that the group was failing in Haiti and that senior managers had made “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees. St. Fort, who is Haitian American, wrote that the comments included, “he is the only hard working one among them” and “the ones that we have hired are not strong so we probably should not pay close attention to Haitian CVs.”
The Red Cross won’t disclose details of how it has spent the hundreds of millions of dollars donated for Haiti. But our reporting shows that less money reached those in need than the Red Cross has said.
Lacking the expertise to mount its own projects, the Red Cross ended up giving much of the money to other groups to do the work. Those groups took out a piece of every dollar to cover overhead and management. Even on the projects done by others, the Red Cross had its own significant expenses – in one case, adding up to a third of the project’s budget.
The American Red Cross has a long history of over promising, excessive fund raising, and under delivering.
This is not a well run organization in my lifetime.
If you want to give blood, find a local non profit blood bank.
If you want to donate money to the victims of a disaster, find a bit less ponderous and self-aggrandizing organization.
*http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-29/news/mn-63591_1_blood-banks
People Who Should Have Been Drowned at Birth
The Los Angeles Times editorial board, who are calling for the prosecution of Edward Snowden:
They praise the fact that his leaks created some reforms in our state security apparatus, and then they say that he should go to jail, because, (I guess) confidential press sources and whistle blowers are bad people who should be tortured.
It is an incontrovertible fact that if Snowden returns, and if he is tried, he will be placed in solitary confinement for years, even if just while awaiting trial. One need only look at the case of (innocent) Wen Ho Lee, who was held in solitary for over a year in an attempt to extort a confession.
It has been the universal conclusion of all civil society organization that have chosen to study this issue have declared extended solitary to be torture.
The LA Times which covered the Lee matter extensively knows this, but even knowing this, they are calling for Snowden to be prosecuted for under an archaic law, and tortured in the process, even if he is eventually found not guilty:
Yet there are serious arguments against a pardon. One is that, in a society of laws, someone who engages in civil disobedience in a higher cause should be prepared to accept the consequences. A stronger objection, in our view, is that Snowden didn’t limit his disclosures to information about violations of Americans’ privacy. He divulged other sensitive information about traditional foreign intelligence activities, including a document showing that the NSA had intercepted the communications of then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a Group of 20 summit in London in 2009. A government contractor who discloses details of U.S. spying on another country is not most Americans’ idea of a whistleblower.
A pardon for Snowden now would be premature. But if he were to return to this country to face the charges against him, the fact that he revealed the existence of a program that has now been repudiated by all three branches of government would constitute a strong argument for leniency. Snowden should come home and make that case.
Otis Chandler would be spinning in his brave.
Journalistic Wank of the Day
I do understand how it is necessary to investigate candidates, particularly Presidential candidates, but a whole article on the traffic tickets of Marco and Jeanette Rubio is an exercise of the highest wankitude:
Senator Marco Rubio has been in a hurry to get to the top, rising from state legislator to United States senator in the span of a decade and now running for president at age 44.
But politics is not the only area where Mr. Rubio, a Republican from Florida, has an affinity for the fast track. He and his wife, Jeanette, have also shown a tendency to be in a rush on the road.
According to a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets, the Rubios have been cited for numerous infractions over the years for incidents that included speeding, driving through red lights and careless driving. A review of records dating back to 1997 shows that the couple had a combined 17 citations: Mr. Rubio with four and his wife with 13. On four separate occasions they agreed to attend remedial driving school after a violation.
Mr. Rubio’s troubles behind the wheel predate his days in politics. In 1997, when he was cited for careless driving by a Florida Highway Patrol officer, he was fined and took voluntary driving classes. A dozen years later, in 2009, he was ticketed for speeding on a highway in Duval County and found himself back in driver improvement school.
Things got more complicated in 2011 when Mr. Rubio was alerted to the fact that his license was facing suspension after a traffic camera caught him failing to stop at a red light in his beige Buick. His lawyer, Alex Hanna, paid a $16 fee to delay the suspension and eventually it was dismissed.
So, Marco has gotten a traffic ticket about once every 4 years, and his wife has gotten one about once every 1½ years.
This is news? In the f%$#ing New York Times?
Puhlease.
The coverage of the 2016 campaign is going to be a horror show.
I May Actually Start Reading Gawker Now
Their writing staff just voted to unionize, marking the first time that a digital news site has assumed the union label:
Wednesday night, Gawker Media voted to unionize. The stats: 107 of 118 eligible voters cast secret ballots, 80 of whom voted yes. Just like that, Gawker will become the first digital-only news site to have a union.
Hamilton Nolan, longtime Gawker writer, announced the editorial staff’s decision to organize in a post this April. At the time, he listed the motivations: that a union “is the only real mechanism that exists to represent the interest of employees in a company,” the continued pursuit of fair and transparent salaries, and the ability to make a little history as the first major site of its kind to organize.
According to Gawker senior writer Sam Biddle, who answered questions via email, “The origin of the union isn’t any particular grievance or crisis—we all love our jobs and our workplace, and thought a union would be a great way to protect that, and make it even better for ourselves and our colleagues.” In his five years at Gawker, he doesn’t recall unionizing being “seriously discussed.”
“I think it happened now because the [Writers Guild of America, East] was so enthusiastic about making this happen for us,” he said. “It didn’t take very much convincing, to be honest.”
One hopes that this jumps to HuffPo, which is according to some comments to a Gawker post, such a bad place to work that, a former assistant to Hunter S. Thompson only lasted two weeks.
We May Be Seeing the Beginning of the First Pandemic Caused by Patents
We are seeing a major Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in Korea:
Two men have died of Middle East respiratory syndrome in South Korea, officials said Thursday. Theirs were the third and fourth confirmed deaths in what has become the largest outbreak of the virus outside the Middle East.
As fear spread, the government of President Park Geun-hye was accused of not doing enough to contain the outbreak and of endangering the public by withholding information about it.
At a news conference on Thursday, the influential mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, castigated the national authorities for not disclosing that a doctor at a Seoul hospital who was quarantined on Sunday with symptoms of the syndrome, known as MERS, had attended a gathering of more than 1,500 people in the southern part of the city only the day before.
More than 1,160 schools and kindergartens in South Korea have been shut down temporarily, and many Koreans are wearing surgical masks in public.
It has a fairly high mortality rate (about 40%, down from earlier estimates of over 50%), largely due to “co-morbitities” (Things like diabetes, heart disease, asthma, COPD, etc.). The mechanism seems to involve a phenomenon known as HLH, which is one of the cytokine storm syndromes (the immune system going haywire), which causes edema in the lungs, and things like secondary pneumonia.
Historical note: The lethality of Spanish Influenza was also largely caused this cytokine storm/pneumonia mechanism. (Got your attention now?)
Note also that the cytokine storm tends to effect young adults more than the rest of the population. (I definitely have your attention now.)
One problem with dealing with what is (at this time) a small problem, is that, using purloined samples, the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam sequenced the virus, and filed a patent on the genome, preventing timely research on things like vaccines and antiviral medications:
In the ongoing investigation of the MERS virus, a team from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam received two patient samples from Dr. Ali Mohamed Zaki, an Egyptian scientist working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. After sequencing the MERS DNA, EMC claimed ownership of the samples. EMC now requires scientists hoping to work on the MERS problem to sign legal agreements with Erasmus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is still waiting to receive samples of MERS for testing that were collected in October 2012 because the legal teams from the CDC and Erasmus cannot negotiate agreeable terms for a material transfer agreement. As a result of these legal delays during a disease outbreak, Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, publicly criticized Erasmus for putting patent laws ahead of protecting “your people.”
I have covered these issues here.
Labs cannot do research because the Erasmus Medical Center has this tied up in patents, even though it is an discovery, and invention which is what has traditionally been required for patents.
Right now, MERS, a coronavirus, is not that contagious because, unlike some of its near relatives in that viral family like the common cold, because, unlike the cold, it lurks deep in the lungs, as opposed to the nose and sinuses, so coughing and sneezing out virus is far less likely.
At least, it’s not that contagious right now.
I don’t know about you, but I’d like to see a vaccine, and perhaps some antiviral drugs, before it develops an affinity for sinus tissue, and starts behaving more like measles.
That cannot happen, because of our current insane patent regime.
Senator Warren Calls Out Wall Street Tool Heading SEC
As she is in the Senate, she wrote a letter critical of SEC chair Mary Jo White:
Senator Elizabeth Warren took aim at the country’s top Wall Street regulator Tuesday in an unusually personal and blunt letter that complained about delayed reforms and lax enforcement, prompting a full-throated defense from the White House.
In a 13-page letter to Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman Mary Jo White, Warren cited a “significant gap” between the promises White made during her Senate confirmation hearings and her subsequent performance leading the independent commission.
“I am disappointed that you have not been the strong leader that many hoped for — and that you promised to be,” the Massachusetts Democrat wrote. “I hope you will step up to the job for which you have been confirmed.”
Warren launched her salvo as the fifth anniversary approaches this summer of passage of the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. Backers hoped the 2010 legislation would spell a new era of tougher regulation on financial institutions, but it still has not been fully implemented by the SEC — the reason for some of Warren’s ire.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest brushed aside Warren’s concerns Tuesday afternoon, expressing confidence in White, who the administration nominated to the position two years ago.
………
Suspicion among liberals about White accelerated last week when she appointed a top Goldman Sachs lawyer to be her chief of staff. The left has long complained that key financial regulatory bodies are stacked with staff that have deep ties to Wall Street firms.
“Warren has expressed the frustration of many people who had high hopes for chairwoman White,” said Dennis M. Kelleher, the president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that supports market reforms. “It’s bad enough that the rule-making is so far behind. It’s inexcusable that the enforcement has been toothless.”
Kelleher’s group took heat from the left two years ago for supporting White during her Senate confirmation hearings. He and others believed that her background as a federal prosecutor in New York would outweigh her later position as a partner and cochair of the litigation department at a Manhattan law firm with finance industry clients. At the time, he called her a “tough, smart, no nonsense” prosecutor. Since then, he said, he’s witnessed two “largely unproductive years” at the SEC and he is particularly disappointed that key parts of the Dodd-Frank law have not been implemented.
BTW, it’s not just Elizabeth Warren, it is her fellow SEC members who are complaining rather loudly:
Elizabeth Warren just put SEC Chairman Mary Jo White firmly in her crosshairs. White is a deserving target. After being approved based on the promise that she’d reinvigorate a diminished agency via her chops as a former highly respected Federal prosecutor, White instead had specialized in empty promises, foot dragging and financial services cronyism. While these are sadly too common in senior regulatory circles most incumbents do far better than White in presenting a plausible veneer of serving the public interest. By contrast, White’s performance has been so remiss that a fellow Democratic party commissioner, Kara Stein, has gone into open opposition against her, and is regularly joined by the other Democrat commissioner, Luis Aguilar.
Warren’s letter (hat tip Adrien) comes a mere week after another missive calling out White’s dereliction at duty, when three former SEC commissioners blasted White for failing to to move forward on long-overdue rulemaking to require public companies to disclose their political spending.
I am not at al surprised that White has been avoiding any meaningful restrictions on Wall Street. She is doing exactly what Barack Obama wants.
That’s why he selected Tim “Eddie Haskell” Geithner as Treasury Secretary when he became President, and why he chose Eric “Place” Holder as Attorney General.
Obama wants no consequences for Wall Street lawbreaking, so Mary Jo White is not going anywhere.
Pass the Popcorn
In addition to what seems to be the whole New York State legislature being under federal investigation, they are looking Andrew Cuomo’s sweet heart real estate deals. I am enjoying this immensely:New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is blocking the release of details about transactions between the state and the governor’s top campaign donor. The state’s housing agency says it cannot release the documents because it is “cooperating” with a federal prosecutor’s probe of financial relationships between New York lawmakers and campaign donors in the real estate industry who have business before the state.
In rejecting an open-records request, New York officials disclosed the Cuomo administration’s connection to the probe: The letter denying the request specifically cited an exemption for documents involved in a law enforcement investigation. That is apparently the first time New York state officials have acknowledged Cuomo’s housing agency — as opposed to just state legislators — is involved in the investigation.
In recent months, the federal probe of influence peddling in Albany has resulted in the arrests of the New York legislature’s top Republican, Dean Skelos, and top Democrat, Sheldon Silver — the latter of which was charged with using his office to help his real estate industry donors. The new letter from Cuomo’s housing agency, which was obtained by International Business Times, moves to prevent the release of documents detailing state-supported loans to the real estate firm of Leonard Litwin. He gave more than $1 million to Cuomo’s Democratic gubernatorial campaign and is widely believed to be a central figure in the Silver case.
I am so hoping that this rat f%$# gets caught up in the US Attorney’s dragnet in Albany.
I Quote the Prophet, Bear Who Swims
Over a year ago, the Bear Who Swims predicted to me (via email, not his blog) that the Europe was on a path to another war.
If you follow the history of Europe, there seems to be one every hundred years or so.
Well, now the Shrill One, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, is making allusions to seeing the same thing:
U.S. officials are generally cautious about intervening in European policy debates. The European Union is, after all, an economic superpower in its own right — far too big and rich for America to have much direct influence — led by sophisticated people who should be able to manage their own affairs. So it’s startling to learn that Jacob Lew, the Treasury secretary, recently warned Europeans that they had better settle the Greek situation soon, lest there be a destructive “accident.”
But I understand why Mr. Lew said what he did. A forced Greek exit from the euro would create huge economic and political risks, yet Europe seems to be sleepwalking toward that outcome. So Mr. Lew was doing his best to deliver a wake-up call.
And yes, the allusion to Christopher Clark’s recent magisterial book on the origins of World War I, “The Sleepwalkers,” is deliberate. There’s a definite 1914 feeling to what’s happening, a sense that pride, annoyance, and sheer miscalculation are leading Europe off a cliff it could and should have avoided.
………
Yet there seems to be more to it than lack of trust. Some major players seem strangely fatalistic, willing and even anxious to get on with the catastrophe – a sort of modern version of the “spirit of 1914,” in which many people were enthusiastic about the prospect of war. These players have convinced themselves that the rest of Europe can shrug off a Greek exit from the euro, and that such an exit might even have a salutary effect by showing the price of bad behavior.
But they are making a terrible mistake. Even in the short run, the financial safeguards that would supposedly contain the effects of a Greek exit have never been tested, and could well fail. Beyond that, Greece is, like it or not, part of the European Union, and its troubles would surely spill over to the rest of the union even if the financial bulwarks hold.
I generally agree with my brother, aka “Bear who Swims”, that Europe is heading back into what seems to be a once a century path to conflict, though I differ in degree: He posits a shooting war, and I expect something analogous to a Cold War along with a dissolution of the EU.
And once again, I’ll blame the Germans.
H/T Stephen Saroff o o The Bear who Swims
(_)_____o
~~~~(______)~~~~~~~~~~
oo oo
Deep Thought
H/T Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal via Barry Ritholtz.
If you see two posts on my Facebook feed, this is because I am trying to tweak Facebook posts.
So, We Had 2 Days of NSA Free Phone Calls………
The Senate just passed “the USA Freedom Act”.
It provides some (remarkably tepid) reforms to our overweening security state, and Mitch McConnell fought like hell to prevent these and lost:
Congress just passed NSA reform. Here’s how Mitch McConnell tried—and failed—to thwart it.
The USA Freedom Act, the bill that reforms the Patriot Act and stops the US government’s bulk collection of phone records, finally passed the Senate on Tuesday after the chamber rejected three amendments from GOP Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) aimed at weakening the bill’s reforms.
McConnell originally supported leaving the Patriot Act with all of its surveillance powers intact, but he faced resistance from both Democrats and Republicans, including die-hards such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who were happy to let bulk collection simply disappear without creating a replacement. So McConnell agreed to proceed with the USA Freedom Act, but proposed four amendments to address what he called the bill’s “serious flaws .” (He withdrew one of them.)
Harley Geiger, chief counsel of the Center for Democracy and Technology, called McConnell’s amendments “unnecessary for national security” and said that they would “erode both privacy and transparency.”
The Senate agreed, rejecting the three amendments that came to a vote on Tuesday afternoon. McConnell’s proposed changes would have:
Delayed the shutdown of bulk collection: The USA Freedom Act calls for bulk collection to shut down within six months of the law’s passage. One of McConnell’s amendments would have stretched that out to a full year.
Kept arguments before the FISA court a one-sided affair: The FISA court reviews—and essentially always approves—requests for surveillance from government agencies. Its business is classified, and the only arguments presented are by government lawyers. The USA Freedom Act establishes a panel of experts to argue privacy concerns before the court, a move that one of McConnell’s amendments would have tried to limit.
Offered a potential backdoor for anti-reform efforts: Under the USA Freedom Act, bulk collection will be replaced by a “query-based” system, in which intelligence agencies would have to ask phone companies for records. That will take place six months after the bill is signed into law, but McConnell wanted to make the attorney general certify one month before the end of bulk collection that the new system would not harm national security. That may have given anti-reform lawmakers a final chance to scuttle the USA Freedom Act if the attorney general’s certification didn’t happen, or even raised any concerns at all.
McConnell got a lose, but I would have preferred that nothing at all got passed, which would have been the best possible outcome.
I guess that I will have to be satisfied by McConnel’s loss.
Good Governance from ……… Nigeria?!?!?!?!?!
I’m actually serious here.
Not only did the Nigerian parliament pass a ban on female genital mutilation, but it was done in a way in which the successor politicians get political cover to enforce the law:
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan signed a bill this week that criminalizes female genital mutilation or cutting, a practice that a staggering 19.9 million Nigerian women are thought to have undergone. The landmark legislation is being hailed as an important step for Africa’s most populous country but also one that experts hope will have a potential ripple effect on the 26 other African nations that have significant populations of women who undergo the practice.
Nigeria’s decision to outlaw female genital mutilation (FGM) sends “a powerful signal not only within Nigeria but across Africa,” according to J. Peter Pham, the director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council. “Nigeria, just because of the sheer size of its population, has one of the highest absolute number of cases of FGM in the world,” he said, adding that the bill now effectively criminalizes a significant percentage of FGM on the African continent. “One cannot overestimate the impact of any decision by Nigeria [on the continent].”
Here is the important bit:
In this regard, the timing of Nigeria’s decision to outlaw the procedure is no coincidence. While advocates have campaigned for this legislation for over a decade, it was only passed this week, in the final days of the Jonathan presidency. “There’s a price to be paid by bucking norms that are widely observed,” said Pham. “It took a lame duck president and lame duck legislators who don’t have to face voters to undertake something that goes that much against the cultural norms or practices.”
Indeed, Pham argued that Jonathan has even done a favor for his successor, President-elect Muhammadu Buhari, who will now not have to face future voter backlash by legislating the controversial issue. “It’s already signed and Buhari can say he’s simply enforcing the laws,” he said.
This last bit is remarkable, particularly for a country whose political system is a dysfunctional as Nigeria’s.
Normally, one would expect a defeated President to do whatever they could to plant policy land mines for his predecessor, much as GHW Bush did with Clinton on Somalia in 1992.
Props to the soon to be former President of Nigeria, Goodluck Jonathan, for doing the right thing in the right way in the most unlikely of places.
I Did Not See This Coming
FIFA President Sepp Blatter has resigned from his position:
Sepp Blatter rocked the world of soccer on Tuesday by unexpectedly saying he would step down as FIFA president in the wake of a corruption investigation that reportedly may include the embattled chief himself.
Citing sources familiar with the case, The New York Times and ABC News reported on Tuesday that Blatter was being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. prosecutors. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the report. Blatter has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
Blatter, 79, announced his decision to step down at a hastily arranged news conference in Zurich, six days after police raided a hotel in the city and arrested several FIFA officials, and four days after he was re-elected to a fifth term as FIFA president.
Blatter said an election to choose a new president would be held as soon as possible, though a FIFA official said it would probably not take place until at least December.
I have to figure that this is part of some sort of deal with either Swiss or US prosecutors.
My guess would be on the Swiss, because he must be desperate for a deal which prevents his extradition to the United States.
Are We the Baddies?
Mitchell and Webb, Are We the Baddies?
We now have some more details on our torture program, this time from a cooperating witness Majid Khan, and it is even worse than has previously been revealed:
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a wider array of sexual abuse and other forms of torture than was disclosed in a Senate report last year, according to a Guantanamo Bay detainee turned government cooperating witness.
Majid Khan said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his “private parts” – none of which was described in the Senate report. Interrogators, some of whom smelled of alcohol, also threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball bats, sticks and leather belts, Khan said.
Khan’s is the first publicly released account from a high-value al Qaeda detainee who experienced the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of President George W. Bush’s administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.
Khan’s account is contained in 27 pages of interview notes his lawyers compiled over the past seven years. The U.S. government cleared the notes for release last month through a formal review process.
………
The 35-year-old Khan, a Pakistani citizen who attended high school in Maryland, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in 2012 to conspiracy, material support, murder and spying charges. In exchange for serving as a government witness, Khan will be sentenced to up to 19 years in prison, with the term beginning on the date of his guilty plea.
Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 to al Qaeda operatives in Indonesia. That money was later used to carry out the 2003 truck bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta that killed 11 people and wounded at least 80 others. Khan also confessed to plotting with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to poison water supplies, blow up gas stations and serve as a “sleeper agent” for al Qaeda in the United States.
Khan was captured in Pakistan and held at an unidentified CIA “black site” from 2003 to 2006, according to the Senate report. Khan’s lawyers declined to comment on where he was captured or held, which they said remained classified.
………
n the interviews with his lawyers, Khan described a carnival-like atmosphere of abuse when he arrived at the CIA detention facility.
“I wished they had killed me,” Khan told his lawyers. He said that he experienced excruciating pain when hung naked from poles and that guards repeatedly held his head under ice water.
” ‘Son, we are going to take care of you,’ ” Khan said his interrogators told him. ” ‘We are going to send you to a place you cannot imagine.’ “
Current and former CIA officials declined to comment on Khan’s account.
Khan’s description of his experience matches some of the most disturbing findings of the U.S. Senate report, the product of a five-year review by Democratic staffers of 6.3 million internal CIA documents. CIA officials and many Republicans dismissed the report’s findings as exaggerated.
Years before the report was released, Khan complained to his lawyers that he had been subjected to forced rectal feedings. Senate investigators found internal CIA documents confirming that Khan had received involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration. In an incident widely reported in news media after the release of the Senate investigation, CIA cables showed that “Khan’s ‘lunch tray,’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was ‘pureed’ and rectally infused.”
The CIA maintains that rectal feedings were necessary after Khan went on a hunger strike and pulled out a feeding tube that had been inserted through his nose. Senate investigators said Khan was cooperative and did not remove the feeding tube.
Most medical experts say rectal feeding is of no therapeutic value. His lawyers call it rape.
………
Khan’s account also includes previously undisclosed forms of alleged CIA abuse, according to experts. Khan said his feet and lower legs were placed in tall boot-like metal cuffs that dug into his flesh and immobilized his legs. He said he felt that his legs would break if he fell forward while restrained by the cuffs.
Khan is not one of the three people whom current and former CIA officials say interrogators were authorized to “waterboard,” whereby water is poured over a cloth covering a detainee’s face to create the sensation of drowning. Nor is he the fourth detainee whose waterboarding was documented by Human Rights Watch in 2012.
His descriptions, however, match those of other detainees who have alleged that they were subjected to unauthorized interrogation techniques using water. Human-rights groups say the use of ice water in dousing and forced submersions is torture.
Because Barack Obama has decided to cover up look forward, none of the sadists who did this will face any consequences for their actions.
All this activities that elicited no meaningful intelligence, so the only benefit can be seen to be giving Dick Cheney a hard on.
What’s more you can be sure that some of these monsters will come home and go to work as cops, where they will apply what they have learned to the rest of us.
We are the baddies.
H/t Digby.
Draft Warren Throws in the Towel
The group “Run Warren Run” has shut its doors:
After a half year of circulating petitions, staging rallies, opening offices in states with early presidential contests and gathering 365,000 signatures, Run Warren Run is acknowledging what’s been clear to others for a while: Elizabeth Warren isn’t running for president.
And now, it’s closing up shop.
Run Warren Run, the effort jointly operated by the liberal groups Democracy for America and MoveOn, will shut down Monday after delivering its final petition to Warren’s Senate office. Warren, the bank antagonist and liberal hero who has said from the start that she has no plans to run for president in a field that now includes Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, hasn’t budged.
The organization’s recognition that the Massachusetts senator truly won’t run is a significant shift in the Democratic presidential contest, in which Warren has been a shadow candidate even as she has repeatedly insisted she would not pursue the White House. But the prime driver of pro-Warren enthusiasm is acknowledging that its time and resources would be better spent influencing the national discussion in another way entirely, while Sanders builds grass-roots momentum and O’Malley ratchets up his campaign by targeting liberals.
This has been clear to all but the dead enders since at least the new year, but it’s nice that they are joining the reality based community.
As an aside this does clear the decks for Bernie Sanders, which is also a good thing.
Another Reason not to Support DINOs
Because even if you get Democrats in Name Only into office, it turns out that it takes a lot more money to do so:
Writing for Stars and Stripes and the Washington Post Sunday, Anne Kim, an operative for Wall Street’s deceptively named Progressive Policy Institute (a pro-corporate/anti-worker New Dem outfit that was founded by the DLC to promote neoliberal ideas like NAFTA and the TPP), decries how much more it costs reactionary Democrats– New Dems and Blue Dogs– to run for election than it costs real Democrats. It costs the Democrats who support the Republican/Wall Street agenda double what it costs actual Democrats to run for office. Kim’s research finds that the fake Dems “spent roughly twice as much as their liberal counterparts to win or defend their seats.” That trend is getting more pronounced and she pointed out that for every dollar that the average Progressive Caucus member directly spent to defend his or her seat in 2014, the average right-wing Democrat spent $1.93. By comparison, right-wing Democrats shelled out $1.54 for every campaign dollar spent by liberals by 2012 and $1.65 in 2010.
She doesn’t get into it, but these figures include the way Wall Street-backed conservaDems gigantically outspend progressives in primaries, often with the help of the Democratic Beltway Establishment which has now entirely abandoned its pretense of being neutral in primaries. Let’s look at a few of the most recent examples from the last cycle. Here are 4 notable races that pitted New Dem types who back cutting Social Security benefits against progressives who favor expanding Social Security. In each case, the corporate-backed right-winger seriously outspent the progressive:
- CA-17- Ro Khanna- $4,427,701, Mike Honda- $3,447,979
- CA-31- Pete Aguilar- $2,246,265, Eloise Reyes- $1,029,617
- IL-13- Ann Callis- $1,936,927, George Gollin- $522,126
- VA-08- Don Beyer- $2,688,020, Patrick Hope- $307,599
The New Dem analysis for why they have to spend more than real Democrats never touches on the fact that the New Dems’ conservative policy agenda turns off Democratic primary voters. Instead they claim that “moderate districts are by definition competitive… In 2014, outside groups spent an average of $2.2 million per race in New Democrat and Blue Dog districts, compared with an average of $299,339 in Progressive Caucus districts. All told, outside groups spent $121 million on moderate districts, vs. $20.4 million in liberal ones.” [Keep in mind that New Dems and Blue Dogs and their propagandists like Kim, always refer to them as “moderate” rather than as the conservatives that they are.]
What a surprise. People require a lot more money to vote for a phony Democrat as they do to vote for a real Democrat.
Return of the Mad Sh%$ter
The funniest thing ever posted to the internet is an essay, “The Attack of the Mad Sh%$ter” a hilarious essay on an instance of fecal sabotage at what was then Texas Instruments.
Well, it appears that literal poo flinging in the workplace is far more common that I had anticipated, and now we have a lawsuit challenging an employer demanding DNA samples in order to identify a dung defiler:
Who was the “devious defecator” leaving their “offending fecal matter” across an Atlanta-area warehouse that stored and delivered products for grocery stores?
That’s how US District Judge Amy Totenberg described the issue as she ruled (PDF) in favor of two employees who were forced to give a buccal cheek swab to determine if their DNA was a match. But a match was not to be had. The two sued, claiming that the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) prohibited their 2012 tests by a forensics lab hired by their employer, Atlas Logistics Group Retail Services.
Employees Jack Lowe and Dennis Reynolds are expected to go to trial against their employer on June 17 in what could be the first damages trial resulting from the 2008 civil rights legislation, which generally bars employers from using individuals’ genetic information when making hiring, firing, job placement, or promotion decisions. The Office of Management and Budget has said the “potential misuse of this information raises moral and legal issues.”
Ahead of trial, Judge Totenberg set aside Atlas Logistics’ claims that the “genetic information” at issue wasn’t covered by the law. Atlas Logistics asserted that GINA excludes analyses of DNA, RNA, chromosomes, proteins, or metabolites if such analyses do not reveal an individual’s propensity for disease. The judge ruled that the “plain meaning of the statute’s text” is satisfactory for the case to go forward despite the tests at issue not revealing disease propensities.
But how much is a breach of this act worth to the warehouse workers Lowe and Reynolds? Phrased differently, what’s the monetary value of falsely being fingered as the “devious defecator”?
According to Atlas Logistics, the answer is a combined $200,000 for both plaintiffs. Days ago, the company offered that deal (PDF) without admitting wrongdoing. “This Offer includes any and all damages sought by Plaintiffs in this matter and is inclusive of attorneys’ fees and taxable costs,” Atlas Logistics attorney Dion Kohler wrote.
The plaintiffs, however, said the offer was a load of doo doo. “We are not taking the offer,” Amanda Farahany, the plaintiffs’ attorney, told Ars in an e-mail.
When asked how much damages they were seeking, Farahany replied, “We are asking that a jury determine the value of this important right.”
I have to agree with the plaintiffs: Employers are not entitled to the genetic information of their employees.
It’s also funny as hell.
I’m Shocked! Shocked! To Find That Gambling Is Going on This Establishment!
Scott Walker is under investigation for possible illegal coordination between his campaign, and so-called “independent” campaign groups.
Well, the prosecutor who is investigating the matter, it is called a “John Doe” proceeding under Wisconsin law, but this is being challenged in court.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is to here this challenge, but it now appears that some of the judges in question appear to be involved in the scheme:
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is facing an investigation into whether his 2012 recall campaign illegally coordinated with nonprofit groups that spent money to support him. Campaign finance laws prohibit “coordination” because they would allow candidates to run shadow campaigns outside of campaign finance law. The Center for Media & Democracy’s PRWatch said, “Prosecutors gathered evidence of Walker secretly raising millions of dollars for the supposedly ‘independent’ nonprofit Wisconsin Club for Growth (WiCFG), with the express purpose of bypassing campaign finance disclosure laws.” The secret donations were revealed to include money from a mining company that received permission to open a mine soon after Walker won reelection.
The investigation is at a preliminary stage, called a John Doe proceeding under Wisconsin law, which determines whether charges are filed. PRWatch said that “Walker and his allies have fought the probe not by denying coordination, but by claiming the rules don’t apply to so-called ‘issue ads’ that stop short of expressly telling viewers how to vote.” The Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering one of the many lawsuits filed to stop the investigation.
In a newly released court filing, the prosecutor in the case raised the question of whether one or two of the justices hearing the case are implicated in the same kind of scheme. Two groups suspected of coordinating with Walker’s campaign have also spent $10 million to elect the four-justice conservative majority. The prosecutor’s heavily redacted brief also suggests that two justices, or, at least, their campaigns, may have committed the same offense that is at the heart of the Walker investigation—coordinating with dark money groups to get reelected.
Special prosecutor Francis Schmitz—a Republican who voted for Walker in 2012—noted that the groups “had significant involvement in the election of particular justices,” though the document redacts the names of the justices and the groups. (The suspects in a grand jury or John Doe proceeding remain anonymous, unless and until charges are filed.) While the justices are not named, the brief refers to the justices benefiting from money spent by John Doe groups to support the reelection of the justices, and the groups have spent money to support the election of all four members of the court’s conservative majority.
Schmitz’s brief also referred to a “history of control, collaboration and coordination” between the groups and “political campaign committees that may potentially include judicial candidates.” The brief describes persons who worked for both a supreme court campaign and the John Doe groups. A redacted portion quotes an email that seems to provide evidence that a group was “actively involved” in a justice’s reelection campaign. Other redacted portions seem to describe contacts and “close connections” between the justice’s campaign and John Doe groups, before concluding:
Justice David Prosser was up for reelection in 2011, when Walker faced a recall election. At the time, the Wisconsin Supreme Court was hearing a legal challenge to Walker’s controversial law restricting collective bargaining rights. Both sides in the debate—unions and big business—spent big in the supreme court election. Two of the John Doe groups spent around $2.5 million to reelect Justice Prosser—much more than the justice’s own campaign.
Anyone wanna take money on whether David Prosser, who has been alleged to have physically assaulted a fellow justice in the court offices, is going to recuse himself?
I’ll take 5:1 odds that he won’t recuse himself.