I’ve always though that the Olympics was a Petri dish for corruption, violent nationalist tendencies, and egregiously bad “journalism”.
This year, it appears that NBC has outdone itself in its coverage.
It’s bad.
It’s really, really, really bad.
Seriously, it ain’t good.
I’m adding the Olympics, and discussions of Olympic coverage to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, absent something of Munich level catastrophe.
Have some climate change inaction figures:
H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Experts Quit Panama’s Transparency Committee Over Lack of Transparency
This is not a surprise. Transparency is the very antithesis of Panama’s financial system.
Their business is to offer the ability to conceal assets and income from legitimate law and tax enforcement entities.
Last month David Sirota’s reporting revealed conflicts of interest in the review of the merger between Anthem and Cigna, resulting in regulatory and political push-back against the deal.
This month, his reporting of Chris Christie’s sweet heart deals with political contributor hedge funds has led to the New Jersey pensions backing away from the deals:
Governor Chris Christie’s pension officials on Wednesday signed off on a major divestment of hedge funds — a move that is expected to save taxpayers and retirees tens of millions of dollars in fees that had been flowing to Wall Street. The decision caps an intensifying campaign against the hedge fund investments by groups representing retirees.
The campaign was prompted by an International Business Times investigative series that first spotlighted the skyrocketing fees.
At a meeting of the Christie-controlled State Investment Council, pension officials cut in half the amount of state pension money that will be allocated to hedge funds, according to a press release from the New Jersey state AFL-CIO. That $3 billion reduction was part of an overall reduction of pension investments in higher-risk “alternative investments” that generate big fees, but whose returns have in many cases failed to keep pace with low-fee stock index funds. In all, the reduction in hedge fund investments is expected to save more than $120 million in fees next year, according to the labor federation, whose retiree members rely on the pension system.
………
After a decade of public pensions pumping more retiree money into alternative investments, new questions have recently been raised about the fees and returns generated by the strategy. Major pension funds in California and New York have reduced their investments in hedge funds.
Back in 2014, before the national debate over pension fees had intensified, IBT first began reporting on how Christie’s administration had significantly increased the amount of pension money flowing to high-fee alternative investment firms. The two-pronged year-long series explored the politics of pension investments as well as the revenue implications of the investment shift.
Under Christie, pension investments flowed to politically connected firms whose employees had delivered campaign donations to Christie-linked political groups. IBT also documented how Christie’s political team was in contact with the governor’s top pension adviser. That adviser’s private firm concurrently invested in a fund he had directed public pension money into. The adviser subsequently resigned after the state’s largest labor federation filed an ethics complaint against him.
So, these Gaultian supermen on Wall Street have once again been proved to be, “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers.”
We need to shut down this sort of unproductive rent seeking.
The US Air Force has declared that its first squadron of F-35s is combat ready:
The U.S. Air Force on Tuesday declared an initial squadron of Lockheed Martin Corp F-35A fighter jets ready for combat, marking a major milestone for a program that has faced cost overruns and delays.
………
“The U.S. Air Force decision to make the 15 F-35As … combat ready sends a simple and powerful message to America’s friends and foes alike – the F-35 can do its mission,” the program’s chief, Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, said in a statement.
Not so much:
Dan Grazier, a fellow of the Project On Government Oversight, said, however, “This is nothing but a public relations stunt.” He added that it would not be possible to know if the F-35 jets were ready for combat until after initial operational testing.
That’s putting it mildly.
As the folks at The Register note. “It’s got dodgy radar, relies on an insecure database, boasts a buggy operating system, and a laser targeting system that can’t be used for training in the UK, but the United States Air Force is satisfied that the F-35A fighter is ready for combat.”
Also: its ejection seat can injure smaller (less than 165 lb) pilots, and its cannon cannot be fired.
This is a statement that is intended for the consumption of the Pentagon and Congress, and not reflective of the maturity of the program.
We now know that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is concerned about the primary later this month, because has just agreed to debate Tim Canova:
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Thursday she would debate her primary challenger Tim Canova.
“I have always said that when we got to August that I would focus on the question of whether or not I was going to debate my opponent,” she said in a brief telephone interview. “I am going to debate my opponent.”
Canova’s campaign treated the development like a victory. “It’s good news for the residents of South Florida,” Canova said. “Debbie Wasserman Schultz has never had to account for her record. She’s never engaged in a debate as long as she’s been a member of Congress. And it’s well past time to have that accounting.”
If you are comfortably in the lead, you pretend as if your opponent does not exist.
She is agreeing to debate because she expects the primary to be close.
I’ll post updates about when and where the debates will be, but in the meantime, throw some money at Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page which is currently set up to split contributions between Tim Canova and Alan Grayson, who is running for Florida Senate against former Republican, serial fabulist, and Wall Street BFF Patrick Murphy.
Have a Cat GIF:
Of course, if you were to make the cat do this, there would be your blood spattered on the walls.
I’m on my to the Open Space Arts community theater Summer Playwrights Festival to watch my wife and son act, and my daughter direct.
If you are near Reisterstown, there are shows tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday, and the following Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
Full disclosure: this is not my cat.
Following repeated cuts to the Missouri Public Defender’s office by the Missouri Governor, which has led the state to have the 49th most underfunded office in the nation, the head of the Public Defender’s office has invoked a section of state law to assign the Governor as a defense attorney for an indigent defendant.
It’s a “No Saving Throw” kind of thing under state law:
Fed up with what he says is the governor’s failure to properly fund his overwhelmed office, the state’s lead public defender ordered Gov. Jay Nixon this week to represent a poor person in Cole County this month.
Michael Barrett said he was using a provision of state law that allows him in extraordinary circumstances to delegate legal representation “to any member of the state bar of Missouri.” He’s starting with the state’s highest-profile lawyer: Nixon.
Barrett says the governor has repeatedly declined to give the public defender system the money it requests and is withholding promised funding increases this year.
“Providing counsel to poor people who face incarceration is the obligation of the state. It’s not fair to go after private attorneys who are trying to pay the rent when they had nothing to do with contributing to this,” Barrett said in an interview Wednesday.
Barrett never exercised this power before because he thought it was wrong to place the burden of public cases on private attorneys “who have in no way contributed to the current crisis,” he wrote in a letter to the governor dated Tuesday.
“However, given the extraordinary circumstances that compel me to entertain any and all avenues for relief, it strikes me that I should begin with the one attorney in the state who not only created this problem, but is in a unique position to address it,” Barrett wrote, referring to Nixon, a Democrat who was a four-term attorney general before becoming governor.
………
The Missouri constitution allows the director of the public defender system to assign cases to any lawyer in the state, regardless of whether the lawyer is a public defender, Barrett said.
Just this June, the legislature granted the public defender system a $4.5 million increase, which would’ve helped in hiring 10 more employees and some private attorneys on a contractual basis. The office currently employs more than 370 attorneys. Officials with the public defender’s office had asked for a $23.1 million boost, while Nixon recommended a $1 million increase.
Last month, Barrett and the Missouri State Public Defender Commission filed a lawsuit claiming that Nixon withheld $3.5 million of that $4.5 million increase. Barrett claims Nixon is targeting the public defender system for budget cuts while leaving more money for other programs he likes.
Rather unsurprisingly, the Governor is claiming that this assignment isn’t legal, but the law is pretty explicit here: the head of the Public Defender’s office can involuntarily appoint a bar member as counsel for an indigent defendant.
It’s gotten to the point where the US Department of Justice has expressed concerns that the state is violating defendants’ civil rights, and the governor keeps trying to gut the office.
Nixon deserves what’s happened to him.
The Department of Homeland Security is looking at ways to safeguard electronic voting machines from hackers.
It’s really pretty simple, you eliminate the purely electronic machines, and go with optically scanned machines, which will give you a count in roughly the same time, and then you do a manual recount of a small portion of the precincts.
If you want to retain purely electronic machines, I’d suggest that you require that the software be open source, so that it can be audited.
Instead, they will probably shovel money at Diebold and their ilk:
The Obama administration is weighing new steps to bolster the security of the United States’ voting process against cyberthreats, including whether to designate the electronic ballot-casting system for November’s elections as “critical infrastructure,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, said on Wednesday.
In the wake of hacks that infiltrated Democratic campaign computer systems, Mr. Johnson said he was conducting high-level discussions about “election cybersecurity,” a vastly complex effort given that there are 9,000 jurisdictions in the United States that have a hand in carrying out the balloting, many of them with different ways of collecting, tallying and reporting votes.
………
Mr. Johnson said he was considering communicating with state and local election officials across the country to inform them about “best practices” to guard against cyberintrusions, and that longer-term investments would probably have to be made to secure the voting process.“There are various different points in the process that we have to be concerned about, so this is something that we are very focused on right at the moment,” Mr. Johnson said.
His comments were the latest evidence that recent cyberintrusions have caused alarm in the administration about the potential for hacking to disrupt the election, and how to respond.
Seriously, this sh%$ ain’t rocket science.
Use paper ballots, and make selected public hand recounts of a small randomly selected group of sites.
It’s really that simple.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has permatemps employed by outside employee leasing firms can organize by workplace, which means that business will no longer be able to sabotage unionization efforts by splitting their worker among outside firms:
The National Labor Relations Board is reaffirming its view that labor law must now address the brave new world of the fissured workplace—where workers are often separated from their actual employer by layers of subcontractors and staffing agencies. On Monday, the board announced a decision on the case Miller & Anderson, ruling that unions that want to represent bargaining units including direct employees as well as “permatemps,” contract workers, and other indirect workers that share a “community of interest” are no longer required to get permission from the parent company.
The old standard, established by George W. Bush’s NLRB in 2004, which required unions to gain such parent-employer consent, allowed companies to use staffing agencies and subcontractors as a barrier to organizing drives. Under the new ruling, a nurses union, for example, can now more readily expand bargaining units at a hospital to include registered nurses who are directly employed by the hospital, as well as nurses who work for staffing agencies hired by the hospital.
In an increasingly fractured world of labor relations, it’s hard to understate how big of a deal this is for easing union organizing efforts. And coming less than a year after its Browning Ferris ruling that established a bold new standard for defining when parent companies are joint employers of subcontracted workers, the Miller & Anderson decision is yet another important step that increases employer accountability to their workers by expanding the responsibilities of joint employers.
I’m stoked.
Turns out Speaker Boehner is indeed enjoying Kansas primary night. Just received this from former staffer! pic.twitter.com/hIzmFt8hn0— carl hulse (@hillhulse) August 3, 2016
Well, Boehner is happy
Yesterday was primary night in Kansas, and Governor Sam Brownback’s motley crew of Teabagger scum got served:
A top Senate leader and at least 10 other conservative Kansas legislators lost their seats as moderate Republicans made Tuesday’s primary election a referendum on the state’s budget problems and education funding.
Senate Majority Leader Terry Bruce, of Nickerson, fell in his south-central Kansas district to Ed Berger, former president of Hutchinson Community College. Bruce’s defeat came amid a backlash against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback and his allies that appeared to spell trouble for conservatives.
“The way the state has been going, we have so many problems, and we need some changes to be made,” said Stanley Prichard, a 46-year-old manufacturing worker from Hutchinson, who voted for Berger in the Republican primary.
Five other conservative senators lost in races that spanned the state. So did five conservative House members, all of them from affluent Kansas City-area suburbs in Johnson County, the state’s most populous, where voters have cherished good public schools for decades.
The voting occurred against the backdrop not only of the state’s fiscal woes but ongoing legal and political disputes over funding for public schools. The state Supreme Court could rule by the end of the year on whether the Legislature is shorting schools on their state aid by hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Browback got a sh%$ load of money a few years from the Koch Brothers to get antediluvian reactionary candidates, and once they were elected, they proceeded to destroy the state.
Their theory was that if they lowered taxes on rich folk to next to nothing, and strip mined government, that prosperity would ensue.
As you can see, it did not work.
BTW, one of the most obnoxious of Teabaggers in Congress, Tim Huelskamp, just got crushed in the primary.
Boehner is having a glass of wine to celebrate because he drinks a lot, and because Huelskamp was the most Teabagger of the Teabagger Caucus in the House of Representatives, and undermined the then Speaker at every turn.
I think that the new members of the state lege are in for a rude awakening if they think that Brownback will see this as anything by an excuse to double down on his failed policies, because in his mind, wing nuttery can never, it can only be failed.
Kansas will be having interesting times, as in the Chinese curse, over the next few years.
I’ve not teased out all the reasons, but I have a profound and deep ambivalence about this Presidential campaign.
The last time I cared this little about a campaign, I was 6 years old, and living in a pre-oil boom Alaska (Humphrey-Nixon), and like most 6 year olds, I had only the vaguest understanding of the political process.
I’m still voting, but I’m probably writing in Vermin Supreme.
I am so glad that I live in a safe state where my vote does not count, because I cannot bring myself to care.
Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee are now former officials of the DNC:
Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee will leave their posts this week amid the controversy over the release of a cache of hacked emails from the committee.
Chief executive Amy Dacey, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall and Communications Director Luis Miranda will leave the DNC just days after a new leader took the helm.
A trove of nearly 20,000 emails were posted on WikiLeaks last month. They included some emails that raised questions about the faith of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), and others that seemed to disparage donors.
This is not a surprise.
Dacey and Marshall had the now infamous email exchange about targeting Sanders on his religion, and Miranda was hired by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and functioned primarily her personal publicist.
The organization needs to be fixed, and this will mean more than just getting rid of DWS toadies at the organization.
Think rich people get too many nice things from the government? Raise their damn taxes. Don’t use it as an excuse to make giving nice things to everyone else so complicated that it practically isn’t worth bothering.
This is a most excellent take-down of the over use of means testing of social programs.
It is both morally and fiscally bankrupt.
Yes, I am referring to Hillary Clinton’s objection to Bernie Sanders proposal for free college tuition was the remote possibility that Donald Trumps kids might get a free college education.
In a fit of political pandering, Governor Andrew Cuomo has issued an executive order banning sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go while declining a law intended to facilitate prosecution of child rape into law:
Governor Anthony Cuomo, never afraid to take quick and decisive action on the issues facing New York, announced today that all 3,000 of New York’s sex offenders will be prohibited from “downloading, accessing, or otherwise engaging in any internet-enabled gaming activities, including Pokémon Go.”
“Protecting New York’s children is priority number one and, as technology evolves, we must ensure these advances don’t become new avenues for dangerous predators to prey on new victims,” said Cuomo in a statement. “These actions will provide safeguards for the players of these augmented reality games and help take one more tool away from those seeking to do harm to our children.”
To that end, Cuomo will have the Division of Criminal Justice Services provide a current list of sexual offenders to Niantic Inc., the creator of Pokémon Go, as well providing the same list to Apple and Google. Parole officers will also be trained in how to check and see whether their parolees have been playing any internet-enabled games.
………
Meanwhile, left sitting on Cuomo’s desk at the end of this year’s legislative session was a bill that would have lengthened the statute of limitations on sexual-abuse cases by five years; given officials a six-month window to revisit old cases; and eliminated the difference in how public and private organizations (i.e., the Catholic Church) would be treated when it comes to child-sexual-abuse cases.
The cause of this? A grandstanding state senator who found that some Pokeman were located within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.
You can find anything within a few blocks of sex offenders’ houses ……… in New York City.
The stupid, it burns.
When the deputy sheriff’s patrol cruiser pulled up beside him as he walked down Broad Street at sunset last August, Martee Flournoy, a 32-year-old black man, was both confused and rattled. He had reason: In this corner of rural Georgia, African-Americans are arrested at a rate far higher than that of whites.
But the deputy had not come to arrest Mr. Flournoy. Rather, he had come to challenge Mr. Flournoy’s right to vote.
The majority-white Hancock County Board of Elections and Registration was systematically questioning the registrations of more than 180 black Sparta citizens — a fifth of the city’s registered voters — by dispatching deputies with summonses commanding them to appear in person to prove their residence or lose their voting rights. “When I read that letter, I was kind of nervous,” Mr. Flournoy said in an interview. “I didn’t know what to do.”
The board’s aim, a lawsuit later claimed, was to give an edge to white candidates in Sparta’s municipal elections — and that November, a white mayoral candidate won a narrow victory.
“A lot of those people that was challenged probably didn’t vote, even though they weren’t proven to be wrong,” said Marion Warren, a Sparta elections official who documented the purges and raised an alarm with voting-rights advocates. “People just do not understand why a sheriff is coming to their house to bring them a subpoena, especially if they haven’t committed any crime.”
The county attorney, Barry A. Fleming, a Republican state representative, said in an interview that the elections board was only trying to restore order to an electoral process tainted earlier by corruption and incompetence. The lawsuit is overblown, he suggested, because only a fraction of the targeted voters were ultimately scratched from the rolls.
………
But the purge of Sparta voters is precisely the sort of electoral maneuver that once would have needed Justice Department approval before it could be put in effect. In Georgia and all or part of 14 other states, the 1965 Voting Rights Act required jurisdictions with histories of voter discrimination to receive so-called preclearance before changing the way voter registration and elections were conducted.
Clearly the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act was premature, but it was a corrupt and blatantly political ruling, so this is no surprise.
Someone gave me a bad Bloomberg News link, and ended up with a 404 (not found) error message.
Someone in the Bloomberg IT department has a wicked sense of humor.
Lamas with hats, seriously bent:
Often said about academe, but also true of community theater, apparently.
An internal report reveals that IMF staff gave engaged in favoritism toward the EU and the Euro in the handling of the ongoing Greek financial crisis:
The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made a series of calamitous misjudgments in Greece, became euphoric cheerleaders for the euro project, ignored warning signs of impending crisis, and collectively failed to grasp an elemental concept of currency theory.
This is the lacerating verdict of the IMF’s top watchdog on the fund’s tangled political role in the eurozone debt crisis, the most damaging episode in the history of the Bretton Woods institutions.
It describes a “culture of complacency”, prone to “superficial and mechanistic” analysis, and traces a shocking breakdown in the governance of the IMF, leaving it unclear who is ultimately in charge of this extremely powerful organisation.
The report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) goes above the head of the managing director, Christine Lagarde. It answers solely to the board of executive directors, and those from Asia and Latin America are clearly incensed at the way European Union insiders used the fund to rescue their own rich currency union and banking system.
………
In an astonishing admission, the report said its own investigators were unable to obtain key records or penetrate the activities of secretive “ad-hoc task forces”. Mrs Lagarde herself is not accused of obstruction.
“Many documents were prepared outside the regular established channels; written documentation on some sensitive matters could not be located. The IEO in some instances has not been able to determine who made certain decisions or what information was available, nor has it been able to assess the relative roles of management and staff,” it said.
The report said the whole approach to the eurozone was characterised by “groupthink” and intellectual capture. They had no fall-back plans on how to tackle a systemic crisis in the eurozone – or how to deal with the politics of a multinational currency union – because they had ruled out any possibility that it could happen.
………
This pro-EMU bias continued to corrupt their thinking for years. “The IMF remained upbeat about the soundness of the European banking system and the quality of banking supervision in euro-area countries until after the start of the global financial crisis in mid-2007. This lapse was largely due to the IMF’s readiness to take the reassurances of national and euro area authorities at face value,” it said.
………
In Greece, the IMF violated its own cardinal rule by signing off on a bailout in 2010 even though it could offer no assurance that the package would bring the country’s debts under control or clear the way for recovery, and many suspected from the start that it was doomed.
The organisation got around this by slipping through a radical change in IMF rescue policy, allowing an exemption (since abolished) if there was a risk of systemic contagion. “The board was not consulted or informed,” it said. The directors discovered the bombshell “tucked into the text” of the Greek package, but by then it was a fait accompli.
………
The injustice is that the cost of the bailouts was switched to ordinary Greek citizens – the least able to support the burden – and it was never acknowledged that the true motive of EU-IMF Troika policy was to protect monetary union. Indeed, the Greeks were repeatedly blamed for failures that stemmed from the policy itself. This unfairness – the root of so much bitterness in Greece – is finally recognised in the report.
“If preventing international contagion was an essential concern, the cost of its prevention should have been borne – at least in part – by the international community as the prime beneficiary,” it said.
So, even with institutions in the tank for the Euro, the currency continues to fail.
I still say that the solution is to get the Germans out of the Euro, sooner, rather than later.