Month: January 2018

Righteous Anger

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Burn it all down. That is the calm and reasoned conclusion to which I have come as one horror story after another unspooled in the courtroom. Nobody employed in the upper echelons at USA Gymnastics, or at the United States Olympic Committee, or at Michigan State University should still have a job. If accessorial or conspiracy charges plausibly can be lodged against those people, they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Those people should come out of civil courts wearing barrels. Their descendants should be answering motions in the 22nd Century. In fact, I can argue convincingly that none of those three institutions should continue to exist in its current form. USA Gymnastics and the USOC should lose their non-profit status forthwith. Michigan State should lose its status within the NCAA for at least five years. American gymnastics is no longer a sport. It’s a conspiracy of pedophiles and their enablers.

—Charlie Pierce, on the complicity of people with authority at all levels for the pedophile predator Larry Nassar

And that might not be the angriest thing in his Sports Illustrated article.

A Mulligan? Seriously?

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Tony Perkins, Christofascist President of the Family Research Council, an SPLC designated hate group, has announced that he is giving Donald Trump a “Mulligan’ on cheating on his pregnant wife with a porn star:

Donald Trump is still the answer to many conservative evangelical leaders’ prayers. Or at least to their continuing grievances.

They embrace Trump the policymaker, despite being uneasy about Trump as a man, says Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a prominent evangelical activist group.

Perkins knows about Stormy Daniels, the porn actress who claimed, in a 2011 interview, that in 2006 she had sex with Trump four months after his wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. He knows of the reports that Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford) was paid off to keep the affair quiet in the waning weeks of the 2016 election. He knows about the cursing, the lewdness and the litany of questionable behavior over the past year of Trump’s life or the 70 that came before it.

“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Perkins told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

Weigh a paid-off porn star against being the first president to address the March for Life live via video feed, and a lot of evangelical leaders insist they can still walk away happy

Hypocrisy much?

Today, I Wrote the Quote of the Day

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At the Stellar Parthenon BBS, we are having a discussion about 2020, and there was a difference of opinion.

Basically, it came down to a bunch of us saying that the Democratic Party is f%$#ed up, and before the Presidential campaign begins in earnest, we need to correct the fundamentally dysfunctional structure and culture of the party before going there.

On the other side was one guy, who was shouting for all the “Bernie Bros” to shut up.

It went around and around, and finally said that his position was about:

Who would be the best general for the Polish cavalry, when they are still charging Panzers on horse back, is like the bite of a dog into a stone; it is a stupidity.

That whole dog/bone thing was actually from Friedrich Nietzsche, but the analogy was mine.

I know, it ain’t deathless prose, but it’s as close as I’ll ever get.

Another Day ……… Another School Shooting

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Today, it’s Benton, Kentucky, for the 11th school shooting of the year, and it’s only January 23rd:

On Tuesday, it was a high school in small-town Kentucky. On Monday, a school cafeteria outside Dallas and a charter school parking lot in New Orleans. And before that, a school bus in Iowa, a college campus in Southern California, a high school in Seattle.

Gunfire ringing out in American schools used to be rare, and shocking. Now it seems to happen all the time.

The scene in Benton, Ky., on Tuesday was the worst so far in 2018: Two 15-year-old students were killed and 18 more people were injured. But it was one of at least 11 shootings on school property recorded since Jan. 1, and roughly the 50th of the academic year.

Researchers and gun control advocates say that since 2013, they have logged school shootings at a rate of about one a week.

F%$# the NRA.

F%$# Wayne LaPierre.

F%$# the ammosexuals.

Most particularly, f%$# the cowardly politicians who run screaming from even the most basic common sense gun laws.

A Sordid Chapter in a Tawdry Tale

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Dallas Dance is growing up so fast. Seems like it was just last year that he was finishing up with education, and now he’s already on his way to prison.

— Charles E Saroff (@W4t3rf1r3) January 24, 2018

My son was never a fan of his

Former Baltimore County superintendent Dallas Dance has been indicted for perjury.

He was appointed superintendent in 2012, and required a waiver for this, because he did not meet the statutory requirements, then he dumped lots of money into unsuccessful whiz bang and consultants, and finally, he paid lots of money to high dollar consultants through no bid contracts.

It turns out that these consultants also paid his company for consulting, something he neglected to mention on his disclosure forms, hence the perjury charges:

Former Baltimore County school superintendent Dallas Dance was indicted Tuesday on four counts of perjury for failing to disclose nearly $147,000 in pay he received for private consulting with several companies and school districts beginning in 2012, the Maryland State Prosecutor announced.

The four-count indictment handed down by a Baltimore County grand jury alleges the former superintendent falsely stated on financial disclosure forms filed with the county school district that he earned no additional income personally or through his consulting company, Deliberate Excellence, in 2012, 2013 and 2015.

………

The charges allege he negotiated a no-bid contract between the school system and Chicago-based SUPES Academy in 2012 while he was earning approximately $90,000 from the company without telling the school system.

“Parents of Baltimore County Public School students should be able to trust that their Superintendent of Schools is carrying out his duties, honestly, with transparency and in the best interest of the students and the schools,” state Prosecutor Emmet C. Davitt said Tuesday. “Any violation of that trust is intolerable.”

Tweet of the Day

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Oh look, FBI agents are still reading Dr. King’s mail. https://t.co/nN0WumWKkJ

— bertolt blecht (@benschwartzy) January 15, 2018

On MLK day, I like to read his Letter From Birmingham Jail, which still resonates: “Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away… and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation…”

— James Comey (@Comey) January 15, 2018

Brilliant!

Here Is Hoping the SCOTUS Will Leave This One to the States

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Of particular interest is the fact that they ruled solely on the state constitution, which means that, assuming that the US Supreme Court doesn’t pull some sort of bogus law out of its ass,* this ruling will stand.

In a decision that could tilt the congressional balance of power in a key swing state in favor of Democrats, Pennsylvania’s highest court decided Monday that the state’s GOP-drawn congressional districts violate its Constitution, and ordered all 18 districts redrawn in the next few weeks.

Less partisan congressional districts could give Democrats a chance this November to win back as many as half a dozen seats that had been lost to them over the past decade. It could also give the party a major boost in its quest to take back the House of Representatives, where Democrats need to net 24 seats to win control of the chamber.

………

In a 4-to-3 decision, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ordered the Republican-controlled state legislature to redraw the lines by Feb. 9, an extraordinarily quick timeline that will reset the districts in time for the state’s May congressional primaries. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf will have veto power over the maps.

………

How the court reached its decision is just as significant as what they decided. This is the second court case in recent weeks to throw out electoral lines because they were drawn to favor one party’s voters over another, decisions that have mostly benefited Democrats.

………

Monday’s case wasn’t the only one involving Pennsylvania’s maps. A three-judge panel on a federal court recently sided with Republicans, though Pildes and other legal experts think Monday’s state Supreme Court decision will be the final word.

Legal analysts also weren’t sure that appealing to the Supreme Court is a possibility, given that Pennsylvania’s state court ruled that the lines violated the state Constitution. The Supreme Court has never thrown out a state’s redistricting plan because of extreme partisan gerrymandering.

(emphasis mine)

The thing to watch for here is whether or not the US Supreme Court issues an injunction, which would indicate that a significant portion of the court is planning to do some seriously partisan bullsh%$.

*Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)

Racist Voter Suppression Much?

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The now (thankfully) shuttered “voter fraud” commission wanted a list of Texas voters with Hispanic names flagged:

President Trump’s voting commission asked every state and the District for detailed voter registration data, but in Texas’s case it took an additional step: It asked to see Texas records that identify all voters with Hispanic surnames, newly released documents show.

 In buying nearly 50 million records from the state with the nation’s second-largest Hispanic population, a researcher for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity checked a box on two Texas public voter data request forms explicitly asking for the “Hispanic surname flag notation,” to be included in information sent to the voting commission, according to copies of the signed and notarized state forms.

 White House and Texas officials said the state’s voter data was never delivered because a lawsuit brought by Texas voting rights advocates after the request last year temporarily stopped any data handoff.

 The voting commission was disbanded Jan. 3 after Trump cited a host of ongoing state and federal lawsuits and resistance from state officials over the sweeping pursuit, in the name of investigating alleged voter fraud, of information about more than 150 million voters across the country. The voting panel said it would destroy all voter data it had gathered, without detailing any data purchases.

 ………

 Texas since 1983 has identified voters with a Hispanic name to mail bilingual election notices in Spanish and English as required by state and federal laws, said Sam Taylor, spokesman for Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos (R). Names are selected from the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of most common surnames by race and Hispanic origin, Taylor said.

 ………

 On the forms sent to Texas by the voting panel, commission policy adviser Ronald Williams II checked a box to flag Hispanic names and signed a notarized form required as part of the overall process to get voter records released.

Kobach and his Evil Minions™ have denied any knowledge of this request.

If you believe them, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Terrorists Are Not Daleks

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A real estate developer in New York is, as part of his development deal, building an elevator to the allow the disabled to access the Subway from that stop, neighbors are objecting because they are afraid that terrorist will use the elevator to attack them.

Seriously? Terrorists are going to attack via the subway? And they cannot climb stairs?

To some, the prospect of adding new subway elevators not far from the World Trade Center is a godsend, a desperately needed portal for the disabled to a subway system that is among the least accessible in the nation.

To a group of neighbors who live beside the proposed site, the elevators seem like something else entirely: a hazard a terrorist could turn into shrapnel.

On one side of a growing skirmish on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan are disabled riders, advocates and a real estate developer building the elevators in exchange for being granted permission by the city to add more square footage to the mixed-use building the developer is erecting at 45 Broad Street.

On the other are tenants of nearby buildings like 15 Broad Street, a high-rise designed by the architect Philippe Starck. It is a pocket of the city that has long been under intense security because of its proximity to prime potential targets like the New York Stock Exchange, and critics say the elevators could pose a threat in an area where police and bomb-sniffing dogs routinely check vehicles driving through.

“The idea that people can then ride in on the subway with a bomb or whatever and come straight up in an elevator is awful to me,” said Claudia Ward, who lives in 15 Broad Street and was among a group of neighbors who denounced the plan at a recent meeting of the local community board. “It’s too easy for someone to slip through. And I just don’t want my family and my neighbors to be the collateral on that.”

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

Terrorists climb stairs, you bloody moron wankers.

From the Department of, “Well, Duh!”

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The reason that the Telcos are desperately trying to forestall any attempt at community run broadband is because they know the business, and they know that government running broadband is better and cheaper than the for profit alternative:

A new study out of Harvard once again makes it clear why incumbent ISPs like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T are so terrified by the idea of communities building their own broadband networks.

According to the new study (corrected link) by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, community-owned broadband networks provide consumers with significantly lower rates than their private-sector counterparts.

The study examined data collected from 40 municipal broadband providers and private throughout 2015 and 2016. Pricing data was collected predominately by visiting carrier websites, where pricing is (quite intentionally) often hidden behind prequalification walls, since pricing varies dramatically based on regional competition.

In many markets, analysts couldn’t make direct comparisons with a private ISP, either because the ISP failed to meet the FCC’s 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up standard definition of broadband (a problem for countless telcos who refuse to upgrade aging DSL lines), or because the ISP prequalification website terms of service “deterred or prohibited” data collection.

But out of the 27 markets where they could make direct comparisons, researchers found that in 23 cases, the community-owned ISPs’ pricing was lower when the service costs and fees were averaged over four years.

“When considering entry-level broadband service—the least-expensive plan that provides at least 25/3 Mbps service—23 out of 27 community-owned [fiber to the home] providers we studied charged the lowest prices in their community when considering the annual average cost of service over a four-year period, taking into account installation and equipment costs and averaging any initial teaser rates with later, higher, rates,” they noted.

In these 23 communities, prices for the lowest-cost service meeting the FCC’s definition of broadband were between 2.9 percent and 50 percent less than the lowest-cost such service offered by a private ISP in that market.

Of course, the study will be ignored, because neoliberal economics, and its attendant privatization of basic public services can never fail, it can only be failed.

The Amazonization of Whole Foods

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It looks like Whole Foods was attempting to out-Amazon Amazon while it was negotiating its sale to the internet retailer because it established a just in time inventory system that is leaving shelves empty of staple foods:

Whole Foods is facing a crush of food shortages in stores that’s leading to empty shelves, furious customers, and frustrated employees.

Many customers are blaming Amazon, which bought Whole Foods in August for $13.7 billion. Analysts have speculated that the shortages could be due to a spike in shopper traffic in the wake of the acquisition.

But Whole Foods employees say the problems began before the acquisition. They blame the shortages on a buying system called order-to-shelf that Whole Foods implemented across its stores early last year.

………

Order-to-shelf, or OTS, is a tightly controlled system designed to streamline and track product purchases, displays, storage, and sales. Under OTS, employees largely bypass stock rooms and carry products directly from delivery trucks to store shelves. It is meant to help Whole Foods cut costs, better manage inventory, reduce waste, and clear out storage.

But its strict procedures are leading to storewide stocking issues, according to several employees. Angry responses from customers are crushing morale, they say. (Many of the photographs in this story were provided to Business Insider by customers.)

“At my store, we are constantly running out of products in every department, including mine,” an assistant department manager of an Illinois Whole Foods told Business Insider. “Regional and upper store management know about this. We all know we are losing sales and pissing off customers. It’s not that we don’t care — we do. But our hands are tied.”

Whole Foods did not respond to several requests for comment on this story. The company’s executives have described the changes as cost-saving, and employees acknowledge that they have helped reduce food spoilage in stock rooms.

Let’s be clear: this predates the Amazon acquisition, but it seems to correspond with when negotiations likely began.

Either they were trying to make themselves more attractive to Amazon, or they were trying to be more like Amazon, but groceries ain’t books or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

H/t Atrios.

Truth is Antithetical Modern Corrections

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The New York Times has a story on how jails and prisons across the country are banning the book The New Jim Crow, the article is titles, “Why Are American Prisons So Afraid of This Book?“

The answer to this question is simple:  They don’t want inmates to understand the subtext of their detention, because for jailers, ignorance is bliss:

In the eight years since its publication, “The New Jim Crow,” a book by Michelle Alexander that explores the phenomenon of mass incarceration, has sold well over a million copies, been compared to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, been cited in the legal decisions to end stop-and-frisk and sentencing laws, and been quoted passionately on stage at the Academy Awards.

But for the more than 130,000 adults in prison in North Carolina and Florida, the book is strictly off-limits.

And prisoners around the country often have trouble obtaining copies of the book, which points to the vast racial disparities in sentencing policy, and the way that mass incarceration has ravaged the African-American population.

This month, after protests, New Jersey revoked a ban some of its prisons had placed on the book, while New York quickly scrapped a program that would have limited its inmates’ ability to receive books at all.

Ms. Alexander, a civil rights lawyer and former clerk on the Supreme Court, said the barriers to reading the book are no accident.

“Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth,” she said. “Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.”

A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections confirmed that the book had been banned but would not elaborate. A form from the prison system’s literature review committee obtained by The New York Times indicates that the book was rejected because it presented a security threat and was filled with what the document called “racial overtures.”

………

The central thesis of “The New Jim Crow” is that the mass incarceration of black people is an extension of the American tradition of racial discrimination.

It zeroes in on how the “law and order” rhetoric of the 1950s and 1960s led to the war on drugs and harsh law enforcement and sentencing policies, which disproportionately affect black people.

“It is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt,” she writes in the introduction. “So we don’t. Rather than rely on race we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

Jailers don’t like to be called racist stooges.

They certainly do not want the recipients of their tender mercies of this fact.

So they just ban the book.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

Not a Surprise

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We know that correlation does not imply causation, but lack of correlation does imply a lack of causation, and it appears that stop and frisk falls firmly into the latter category:

If you grew up in New York City in the 1970s, the number can be hard to get your head around: 291. If you were a reporter in New York City in the early 1990s, the number can almost make your head explode: 291 murders in 2017, the lowest total since the 1950s.

But the number is perhaps most striking when set not against the numbers of murders in other years, but against this figure: the roughly 10,000 police stops conducted in 2017.

The longstanding rationale for the New York Police Department’s widespread use of what came to be known as stop-and-frisk — encounters between officers and people they suspected of suspicious behavior — had been that it was an essential crime-fighting tool. Such stops got guns off the street, the theory went, and low-level enforcement helped sweep up criminals destined to commit more serious crimes.

………

Ultimately, a federal judge, Shira Scheindlin, found the NYPD’s enforcement of stop-and-frisk racially unfair and unconstitutional. A new mayor, Bill de Blasio, and the judge’s orders for reform, prompted a radical scaling back of stop-and-frisk. Critics predicted a disastrous return to, depending on one’s age and experience, the 1970s or the 1990s.

The disaster never happened. Instead, what many scholars and police officials thought nearly unthinkable — further reductions in crime after two decades of plummeting numbers — did.

Holding murders under 300 was just the headline of 2017 statistics that saw considerable reductions in almost every category of major crime.

Stop and frisk was never a tactic to reduce crime, though the naive might have believed that, it was a way to keep people of color down.  (With a bit of law-enforcement theater thrown in.)

This is Impressive

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The costs of renewable energy installations, including storage, has fallen precipitously:

Proposals for renewable electricity generation in Colorado are coming in cheap, like, $21/MWh-cheap for wind and battery storage. Though there are a few caveats to those numbers, federal incentives and quickly falling costs are combining to make once-quirky renewable projects into major contenders in an industry where fossil fuels have comfortably dominated since the 19th century. 

 Early last year, Colorado energy provider Xcel Energy requested proposals for new electricity generation. Specifically, the company needed 450 megawatts of additional generation to meet future demand. In a separate request called the Colorado Energy Plan, Xcel said (PDF) it would consider replacing two coal plants providing 660MW of capacity with “hundreds of megawatts of new wind and solar as well as some natural gas-fired resources” if new resources could be found cheaper than what those coal plants cost to operate (including costs to shut down the plants early).

By late November, energy companies had submitted their best offers. Although exact details of the offers aren’t available yet, Xcel Colorado was required to make public a summary of the proposals (PDF) in the month after the bids were submitted.

………

Still, the prices quoted were encouragingly competitive. Although Xcel’s report doesn’t have a lot of details, this is what we know:

  • Out of 152 standalone solar bids, the median bid price was $29.50/MWh.

  • Standalone wind received the second-most bids from potential developers (that is, 96), and the median bid price was an astonishingly low $18.10/MWh. That’s on the same level as a record-low $17.70/MWh bid put forward in Mexico in November.
  • 87 bids were placed to develop solar-plus-storage installations, with a median bid of $36/MWh. Still, we don’t know what kind of storage was proposed or how much of it was proposed. If you have a giant solar field sending electricity to the grid as it gets made, and a small battery installation to manage frequency regulation or serve a local community for an hour of downtime, that’s not terribly exciting. This median price is down from a previous competitive price of below $45/MWh signed by Tucson Electric.
  • 11 bids were placed to build wind-with-storage at a median bid of $21/MWh. The same problem with evaluating Xcel’s solar-and-storage bids is present in the reported wind-and-storage bids: without more detail, it’s hard to evaluate how much storage comes with that.
  • Seven bids suggested a combination wind, solar, and battery storage installation, with a median price of $30.60/MWh.
  • Five bids suggested combining solar and wind for around $19.90/MWh.


A few more traditional, dispatchable technologies were proposed as well, but Xcel asked bidders to price these out in terms of dollars per kilowatt-month ($/kW-mo). That unit of measurement is considered capacity pricing, or pricing for electricity that’s generated when demand exceeds a certain point, so it’s not quite comparable to the $/MWh seen above.

Among those resources, combustion turbines came in at $4.80/kW-mo, and combustion turbines with battery storage came in at $6.20/kW-mo. For context, in a 2010 paper (PDF), New England’s grid saw a $4.50/kW-mo bid for more traditional fossil fuel generators.

Renewables are still more expensive to install, but the differential is falling quickly.

A Good Surprise

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The staff of the Los Angeles Times has overwhelmingly voted to unionized:

The Los Angeles Times’ editorial staff voted to unionize in a rebuke to owner Tronc Inc. that marks a new era in the newspaper’s 136-year history.

The employees’ union, NewsGuild, won the vote by a margin of more than 5-to-1, organizer Nastaran Mohit said Friday. The guild is an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America union, which has been organizing at the Times since late 2016.

Perhaps the fact that overpaid senior executives in the organization are being investigated for misconduct, while the news room has been gutted, has something to do with the lopsided vote:

The company also said Friday that Ross Levinsohn, the L.A. Times’ publisher, is taking a voluntary unpaid leave while the company looks into allegations of misconduct.

The vote heralds the beginning of a bargaining process that’s sure to prove contentious. Like the rest of the industry, the L.A. Times has been in almost constant turmoil in recent years, amid dwindling readership, falling advertising revenue, editorial shakeups and, most recently, the allegations against its publisher. Meanwhile, the company that eventually became Tronc has lurched from bankruptcy to a spinoff to a change in ownership and, finally, a new name in under a decade.

………

“There was a time, way back when, when a guild couldn’t make headway in the newsroom, because the people were treated very well,” Paul Pringle, an investigative reporter who helped spearhead the drive, said in an interview before the vote. “Those days are over.”

Increasingly, newspapers are run by people who do not believe in newspapers, and because of this, their business model is to extract as much money as possible by making its employees lives a living hell.

Unionization is a logical response to this.

This was Intentional

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The NSA, despite being ordered by a judge to preserve records because of a lawsuit, deleted all of the records:

The National Security Agency destroyed surveillance data it pledged to preserve in connection with pending lawsuits and apparently never took some of the steps it told a federal court it had taken to make sure the information wasn’t destroyed, according to recent court filings.

Word of the NSA’s foul-up is emerging just as Congress has extended for six years the legal authority the agency uses for much of its surveillance work conducted through U.S. internet providers and tech firms. President Donald Trump signed that measure into law Friday.

Since 2007, the NSA has been under court orders to preserve data about certain of its surveillance efforts that came under legal attack following disclosures that President George W. Bush ordered warrantless wiretapping of international communications after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. In addition, the agency has made a series of representations in court over the years about how it is complying with its duties.

However, the NSA told U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in a filing on Thursday night and another little-noticed submission last year that the agency did not preserve the content of internet communications intercepted between 2001 and 2007 under the program Bush ordered. To make matters worse, backup tapes that might have mitigated the failure were erased in 2009, 2011 and 2016, the NSA said.

This is a repeated behavior, and it was repeated over and over again, from an organization that throws away nothing, ever.

This was a deliberate action that was conducted to cover up misconduct by the organization. 

The only question is how high in the chain of command that it went.