Month: January 2021

Thoughts and Prayers

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In a transparent attempt to leave the jurisdiction of the great state of New York, the National Rifle Association has declared bankruptcy, and announced its intention to move to Texas. 

That is a horrible thing to do to Texas: (And I want to give Texas back to Mexico)

Seeking an end-run around an investigation by the New York attorney general, the National Rifle Association said Friday that it was declaring bankruptcy and would reincorporate in Texas. The gun group was set up in New York after the Civil War.

The group’s effort to circumvent New York’s legal jurisdiction raised immediate questions from Letitia James, the New York attorney general and a Democrat, who is seeking to use her regulatory authority to dissolve the N.R.A. She has been conducting an investigation into corruption at the gun group since 2019.

“The N.R.A.’s claimed financial status has finally met its moral status: bankrupt,” Ms. James said in a statement Friday. “While we review this filing, we will not allow the N.R.A. to use this or any other tactic to evade accountability and my office’s oversight.”

………

Typically, nonprofit groups that are chartered in New York and under investigation are prohibited from relocating their assets during an inquiry; in recent years, the attorney general’s office prevented the Trump Foundation from closing before it had reached the conclusion of an investigation into that organization.

The bankruptcy filing is likely to halt legal proceedings in the attorney general’s case while the matter is litigated in bankruptcy court.

………

The N.R.A. and a subsidiary filed Chapter 11 petitions in the United States Bankruptcy Court in Dallas. It reported between $100 million and $500 million in assets and the same amount in liabilities, with aggregate non-contingent liquidated debts, excluding those owed to insiders or affiliates, of less than $2,725,625.

………

The N.R.A. has weathered years of revelations about its spending and oversight practices, including hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on Mr. LaPierre’s Zegna suits and far-flung travel to places like the Bahamas, Palm Beach, Reno and Italy’s Lake Como. The group even once explored buying a $6 million mansion in a Dallas-area gated community for his use. Last August, Ms. James, whose office has jurisdiction over New York charities, sued the N.R.A., seeking its closure along with tens of millions of dollars in restitution from Mr. LaPierre and three other executives.

………

The N.R.A. almost immediately filed suit in federal lawsuit against Ms. James’s office, claiming her action was politically motivated and violated the organization’s First Amendment rights. But the group conceded in recent tax filings that Mr. LaPierre and other executives had received hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of improper benefits from the group, which were reimbursed.

“The N.R.A. cannot be allowed to declare bankruptcy to try to escape potential criminal and civil accountability in New York,” said Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign, a gun control group. “The N.R.A. can run, but they can’t hide, and their days are numbered. No organization is above the law.”

So one would hope.

Remember when we made bankruptcy tougher for ordinary people in the early 2000s because getting cancer is no excuse?

Maybe we should make bankruptcies tougher for corporations, hedge funds, derivatives and charities as well. 

They seem to be the ones abusing the code.

The Good,

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Gary Gensler, who surprised everyone when he was appointed by Obama as the head of the  Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and then aggressively pushed for regulation and investigations of fraud, is Biden’s choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  

Word is that Wall Street is crapping their pants over this choice:

Gary Gensler will be named chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by President-elect Joe Biden, said two sources familiar with the matter, an appointment likely to prompt concern among Wall Street firms of tougher regulation.

Gensler was chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) from 2009 to 2014, and since November has led Biden’s transition planning for financial industry oversight.

His appointment as the country’s top securities regulator is expected to put an end to the four years of rule-easing that Wall Street banks, brokers, funds and public companies have enjoyed under President Donald Trump’s SEC chair Jay Clayton.

At the CFTC, Gensler implemented dramatic new swaps trading rules mandated by Congress following the 2007-2009 financial crisis, developing a reputation as a hard-nosed operator willing to stand up to powerful Wall Street interests.

A former Goldman Sachs banker and a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, Gensler also oversaw the prosecution of big investment banks for rigging Libor, the benchmark for trillions of dollars in lending worldwide.

When he came into the CFTC, it was assumed that he would be yet another corporate stooge.

Instead he was a pleasant surprise in an administration that was largely defined by corporate stooges.

The Bad,

Samantha Power has been picked by Biden to head USAID. 

Power is a bloody lunatic, who is almost as prone to demand the use of military force as the late and unlamented John McCain.

The is a warmonger of the highest order, and given that USAID is frequently used as a cutout to support regime change activities by the US State Security Apparatus, this is not good.

Former UN Ambassador Samantha Power, (in)famous for her screaming duels over Syria with late Russian envoy Vitaly Churkin, was picked by Joe Biden to head the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in his administration.

Though her appointment was rumored in Washington for weeks, Biden’s transition team officially confirmed it on Wednesday. Power is best known for her “humanitarian” interventionism advocacy. As an aide at the Obama White House, she championed US intervention in Syria and Libya – where US-backed Islamist militants sought to overthrow secular governments – in the name of stopping “genocide.”

Let us not forget that the intervention that she forcefully championed in Libya has led to the return of open air slave markets, and Syria………

And The Ugly

That would be Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland, whose pathological hatred of the Russians is largely responsible for the Ukraine the mess it is today.  (War, Fascism, Corruption, the deification of Nazi Sympathizers, etc.), who has been picked by Biden to be the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs

This is a remarkably bad idea, if just because she was the prime mover behind the Ukrainian coup, which closely mirrors what happened at the Capitol on January 7: 

Who is Victoria Nuland? Most Americans have never heard of her because the U.S. corporate media’s foreign policy coverage is a wasteland. Most Americans have no idea that President-elect Biden’s pick for Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs is stuck in the quicksand of 1950s U.S.-Russia Cold War politics and dreams of continued NATO expansion, an arms race on steroids and further encirclement of Russia.

Nor do they know that from 2003-2005, during the hostile U.S. military occupation of Iraq, Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the Darth Vader of the Bush administration.

You can bet, however, that the people of Ukraine have heard of neocon Nuland. Many have even heard the leaked four-minute audio of her saying “Fuck the EU” during a 2014 phone call with the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt.

During the infamous call on which Nuland and Pyatt plotted to replace the elected Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, Nuland expressed her not-so-diplomatic disgust with the European Union for grooming former heavyweight boxer and austerity champ Vitali Klitschko instead of U.S. puppet and NATO booklicker Artseniy Yatseniuk to replace Russia-friendly Yanukovych.

………

Despite outrage from German Chancellor Angela Markel, no one fired Nuland, but her potty mouth upstaged the more serious story: the U.S. plot to overthrow Ukraine’s elected government and America’s responsibility for a civil war that has killed at least 13,000 people and left Ukraine the poorest country in Europe.

In the process, Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan, the co-founder of The Project for a New American Century, and their neocon cronies succeeded in sending U.S.-Russian relations into a dangerous downward spiral from which they have yet to recover.

Nuland accomplished this from a relatively junior position as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. How much more trouble could she stir up as the # 3 official at Biden’s State Department? We’ll find out soon enough, if the Senate confirms her nomination.

………

The neocons’ coup de grace against Obama’s better angels was Nuland’s 2014 coup in debt-ridden Ukraine, a strategic candidate for NATO membership right on Russia’s border.

………

The muscle for Nuland’s $5 billion coup was Oleh Tyahnybok’s neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the shadowy new Right Sector militia. During her leaked phone call, Nuland referred to Tyahnybok as one of the “big three” opposition leaders on the outside who could help the U.S.-backed Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the inside. This is the same Tyanhnybok who once delivered a speech applauding Ukrainians for fighting Jews and “other scum” during World War II.

After protests in Kiev’s Euromaidan square turned into battles with police in February 2014, Yanukovych and the Western-backed opposition signed an agreement brokered by France, Germany and Poland to form a national unity government and hold new elections by the end of the year.

But that was not good enough for the neo-Nazis and extreme right-wing forces the U.S. had helped to unleash. A violent mob led by the Right Sector militia marched on and invaded the parliament building, a scene no longer difficult for Americans to imagine. Yanukovych and his members of parliament fled for their lives.

………
 
Nuland’s militaristic worldview represents exactly the folly the U.S. has been pursuing since the 1990s under the influence of the neocons and “liberal interventionists,” which has resulted in a systematic underinvestment in the American people while escalating tensions with Russia, China, Iran and other countries.

Nuland is a complete horror show, and she should be kept as far as possible from the reins of power as possible.

She is a disaster waiting to happen.

The Velocity of a Dead Cat at the Apex

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Initial jobless came out today, and it was pretty fucking awful, with jobless claims rising by 181,000 to 965,000 initial claims.

The stimulus has run its course, and the dead cat bounce has begun its downward path:

The number of workers filing for jobless benefits posted its biggest weekly gain since the pandemic hit last March and the head of the Federal Reserve warned the job market had a long way to go before it is strong again.

Applications for unemployment claims, a proxy for layoffs, rose by 181,000 to 965,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, reflecting rising layoffs amid a winter surge in coronavirus cases.

The total for the week ended Jan. 9 also was the highest in nearly five months and put claims well above the roughly 800,000 a week they had averaged in recent months.

………

The U.S. labor-market recovery stalled last month with the December jobs report showing the U.S. lost 140,000 payroll positions. The economic recovery’s slowdown has included weakness in household spending, though economists expect the economy to rebound later this year as a Covid-19 vaccine is distributed through the population.

But the increase in unemployment claims is another sign that the economic recovery is, at least for now, sputtering, as Covid-19 infections hit record levels nationwide.

On a political note, this is a pretty good indication as to what a bad idea it is to play nice with Republicans over a stimulus package.

They are philosophically opposed to fixing this, and they are politically inclined to focus exclusively on taking down a Democratic President.

When you are being chased by wolves, don’t stop to bake them a cake.

Yet Another Impeachable Offense

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In the sort of thing that you know woule not happen without Trump’s specific authorization, the White House liaison to the Department of Justice Requested compromising information against Trump rape accuser E Jean Carroll. 

This is illegal as hell:

The White House liaison to the Department of Justice (DoJ), Heidi Stirrup, sought out derogatory information late last year from a senior justice department official regarding a woman who alleges she was raped by Donald Trump, according to the person from whom Stirrup directly sought the information.

The revelation raises the prospect that allies of the US president were directly pressing the justice department to try to dig up potentially damaging information on a woman who had accused Trump of sexually attacking her.

E Jean Carroll, a journalist and advice columnist, sued Trump in November 2019, alleging he had defamed her when he denied her account of having been raped by him. Carroll alleges Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room in Bergdorf Goodman, a high-end Manhattan department store, in either late 1995 or early 1996.

………

Stirrup apparently believed the justice department had information that might aid the president’s legal defense in the suit. The attorney who Stirrup sought information from regarding Carroll said that Stirrup approached them not long after a judge had ruled the justice department could not take over Trump’s defense.

Stirrup asked if the department had uncovered any derogatory information about Carroll that they might share with her or the president’s private counsel. Stirrup also suggested that she could serve as a conduit between the department and individuals close to the president or his private legal team.

Stirrup also asked the official whether the justice department had any information that Carroll or anyone on her legal team had links with the Democratic party or partisan activists, who might have put her up to falsely accusing the president.

Just in case you are wondering, it is NOT Ok for the White house to demand that the Department of Justice do opposition research on someone who has filed a private lawsuit against the President.

The DoJ banned Stirrup from the building after this, which, considering the fact that William Barr was Trump “Fluffer in Chief” at the time, indicates just how far beyond the pale this request was.

This needs to be investigated and someone needs to face consequences for this act.

Tweet of the Day

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THE SEVEN SECRETS OF HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE

1. Private school
2. Legacy Ivy admission
3. Nepotism hire
4. Seed capital from family
5. Club memberships
6. Personal assistant, nanny, ghost writer
7. Journalists who ask, “What’s your secret?” and uncritically publish the answer

— Sandra Newman (@sannewman) November 26, 2019

This is what it means when I say that someone was born on 3rd base, and thought that they hit a triple.

The problem with aristocracy is that we grant money and power to drooling idiots who won the birth lottery.

Linkage

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An announcement from Honest Government:

It Really Sucks to be You

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It appears that in addition to being contemptible people, the purveyors of Parler, the now-shuttered right-wing Twitter, were technically incompetent.

Their tech was incompetently managed, and  a security researcher managed to download almost every post in Parler, including deleted posts and extensive metadata.

I’m sure that the FBI will be most interested in this information:

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.

………

In the wake of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by scores of President Trump’s supporters, a lone researcher began an effort to catalogue the posts of social media users across Parler, a platform founded to provide conservative users a safe haven for uninhibited “free speech” — but which ultimately devolved into a hotbed of far-right conspiracy theories, unchecked racism, and death threats aimed at prominent politicians.

The researcher, who asked to be referred to by her Twitter handle, @donk_enby, began with the goal of archiving every post from January 6, the day of the Capitol riot; what she called a bevy of “very incriminating” evidence. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, among other sources, Parler is one of a several apps used by the insurrections to coordinate their breach of the Capitol, in a plan to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Donald Trump in power.

………

Operating on little sleep, @donk_enby began the work of archiving all of Parler’s posts, ultimately capturing around 99.9 percent of its content. In a tweet early Sunday, @donk_enby said she was crawling some 1.1 million Parler video URLs. “These are the original, unprocessed, raw files as uploaded to Parler with all associated metadata,” she said. Included in this data tranche, now more than 56 terabytes in size, @donk_enby confirmed that the raw video files include GPS metadata pointing to exact locations of where the videos were taken.

………

Hoping to create a lasting public record for future researchers to sift through, @donk_enby began by archiving the posts from that day. The scope of the project quickly broadened, however, as it became increasingly clear that Parler was on borrowed time. Apple and Google announced that Parler would be removed from their app stores because it had failed to properly moderate posts that encouraged violence and crime. The final nail in the coffin came Saturday when Amazon announced it was pulling Parler’s plug.

………

The privacy implications are obvious, but the copious data may also serve as a fertile hunting ground for law enforcement. Federal and local authorities have arrested dozens of suspects in recent days accused of taking part in the Capitol riot, where a Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, was fatally wounded after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher. 

My suggestion to @donk_enby is that if someone comes sniffing around for the archive that she made, don’t without a subpoena.  Providing the information under compulsion indemnifies you, so if someone wants to sue you for someting like “Invasion of Privacy”, you are covered.  (NOte that I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit.*

My second piece of advice is that turning your personal information over to an online site is a stupid thing, and doing so to a business that caters to reactionaries is even dumber.

Businesses that cater to conservatives on the basis of politics tend to be scams.  All you have to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, and see how many of the ads are transparent bullshit like fat burning plant extracts, overpriced gold, phony ED cures, Corona Virus Cures, etc.

For them, it’s all about the Benjamins.

*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!

Talk About Burying the Lede, Insurrection Edition

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In an otherwise anodyne story about lawmakers impressions during the assault on the Capitol, this little gem is buryed about ⅔ of the way down:

As people rushed out of other buildings on the Capitol grounds, staffers in [Representative Ayanna] Pressley’s office barricaded the entrance with furniture and water jugs that had piled up during the pandemic. [Pressley’s Chief of Staff Sarah] Groh pulled out gas masks and looked for the special panic buttons in the office.

“Every panic button in my office had been torn out — the whole unit,” she said, though they could come up with no rationale as to why. She had used them before and hadn’t switched offices since then. As they were escorted to several different secure locations, Groh and Pressley and her husband tried to remain calm and vigilant — not only of rioters but of officers they did not know or trust, she said.

This was not an accident.

This operation prepared weeks in advance, and there were people on the inside. 

More evidence of this is the fact that Congressmen led what appears to be “Reconnaissance Tours” the day before the riots.

It was alarming enough that people complained to the House Sergeant at Arms that day:

More than 30 House Democrats are demanding information from Capitol security officials about “suspicious” visitors at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 5 — a day before violent insurrectionists swarmed the building — that would only have been permitted entry by a member of Congress or a staffer.

“Many of the Members who signed this letter … witnessed an extremely high number of outside groups in the complex on Tuesday, January 5,” wrote the lawmakers, led by Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), in a letter to the acting House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, as well as the acting head of the Capitol Police.

The lawmakers, some of who “have served in the military and are trained to recognize suspicious activity,” noted that Capitol tours have been prohibited since March as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and they said the tours were so unusual that they were reported to security on Jan. 5, ahead of the following day’s violence.

Finally, the orginizer of the “Stop the Steal” ralley, Ali Alexander, was caught ont ape admitting that he coordinated the demonstration with 3 Congressmen, Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Mo Brooks (R-AL) and Paul A. Gosar (R-AZ):

Weeks before a mob of President Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, right-wing activist Ali Alexander told his followers he was planning something big for Jan. 6.

Alexander, who organized the “Stop the Steal” movement, said he hatched the plan — coinciding with Congress’s vote to certify the electoral college votes — alongside three GOP lawmakers: Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.) and Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.), all hard-line Trump supporters.

“We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander said in a since-deleted video on Periscope highlighted by the Project on Government Oversight, an investigative nonprofit. The plan, he said, was to “change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”

This is beginning to sound like a vast right-wing conspiracy.

If it sounds outlandish, remember that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and William Casey arranged for the continued detention of the Iranian hostages in 1980 in order to improve Reagan’s election chances.

Fomenting an insurrection, and attempting to incapacitate Democratic legislators is really not much of a step beyond the October Surprise.

Michigan brings two charges against former governor for Flint case

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Well, I was wrong yesterday when I predicted that former Governor of Michigan Rick Snyder would be charged with obstruction of justice. 

I was wrong.

Snyder was hit with two counts of “Willful Neglect of Duty,” a misdemeanor.

Here is the statute, § 750.478:

When any duty is or shall be enjoined by law upon any public officer, or upon any person holding any public trust or employment, every willful neglect to perform such duty, where no special provision shall have been made for the punishment of such delinquency, constitutes a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than 1 year or a fine of not more than $1,000.00.

This case is just plain weird, with indictments for felonies, a dismissal of those charges, and now this. 

I do not know how this will end, but I expect to be disappointed.

Only 10 Republicans

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Better than the last time, but when Liz Cheney is on the side of the angels, everything is fucked up and shit. I am talking, of course, about the fact that Donald John Trump has been impeached again, only this time it’s egregious enough that some very bad people, like Cheney, have felt compelled to support the effort to remove him:

The House impeached President Trump for inciting an insurrection against the government, and 10 Republicans joined Democrats to do so. Senator Mitch McConnell said he would not agree to use emergency powers to bring the Senate back into session for a trial before Jan. 19.

The House on Wednesday impeached President Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the United States government, as 10 members of the president’s party joined Democrats to charge him with high crimes and misdemeanors for an unprecedented second time.

Reconvening under the threat of continued violence and the protection of thousands of National Guard troops, the House was determined to hold Mr. Trump to account just one week before he was to leave office. At issue was his role in encouraging a mob that attacked the Capitol one week ago while Congress met to affirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, forcing lawmakers to flee for their lives in a deadly rampage.

The House adopted a single article of impeachment, voting 232 to 197 to charge Mr. Trump with “inciting violence against the government of the United States” and requesting his immediate removal from office and disqualification from ever holding one again.

Ten Republicans joined Democrats in voting to impeach: Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the party’s No. 3 leader in the House; Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington; John Katko of New York; Adam Kinzinger of Illinois; Fred Upton of Michigan; Dan Newhouse of Washington; Peter Meijer of Michigan; Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio; David Valadao of California; and Tom Rice of South Carolina.

The defections were a remarkable break from the head of the party by Republicans, who voted unanimously against impeaching Mr. Trump just over a year ago.

………

This time, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, was said to support the effort as a means of purging his party of Mr. Trump, setting up a political and constitutional showdown that could shape the course of American politics when the nation remains dangerously divided.

We live in interesting, and not in a good way, but in a Chinese curse way.

This is Morally Bankrupt

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James Clyburn (D-SC) is calling for any impeachment trial of Donald Trump to be delayed by 100 days so that the Biden administration can get off to a quick start.

I get that the House Majority Whip wants to get down to business as quickly as possible once Biden is sworn in, but what he is saying is that incitement and conspiracy to conduct an insurrection against the US Government, and Congress in particular, is “Just Politics,” and so it can wait for Biden to assemble permanent staff at the White House and present some legislative initiatives.

This is wrong.

This was an attempt to overthrow an election, and by extension, an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States of America.

Judgement, and consequences, must be administered without delay.

Relegating this to a political ploy is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

About Fucking Time

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Rick Snyder, former governor of Michigan, as well as his senior staff, will be criminally charged over his role in the poisoning of the water in Flint. 

The specifics of the charges are not known at this time, so my guess is that we are looking at an obstruction of justice and the like:

Former Michigan governor Rick Snyder, his health director and other ex-officials have been told they’re being charged after a new investigation of the Flint water scandal, which devastated the majority Black city with lead-contaminated water and was blamed for a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in 2014-15, the Associated Press has learned.

Two people with knowledge of the planned prosecution told the AP on Tuesday that the attorney general’s office has informed defense lawyers about indictments in Flint and told them to expect initial court appearances soon. They spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The AP could not determine the nature of the charges against Snyder, former health department director Nick Lyon and others who were in the Snyder administration. The attorney general’s office declined to comment on details of the ongoing investigation. Spokeswoman Courtney Covington Watkins said investigators were “working diligently” and “will share more as soon as we’re in a position to do so”.

Snyder’s attorney didn’t return calls seeking comment.

I have no direct knowledge as to the course of the investigations, or the prosecutions, but if Snyder were charged with something like taking bribes over the water pipeline, or some other explicit corruption, I think that other people would have been prosecuted, and have cut deals, before Snyder was charged.

Mitch Has What He Wants

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Mitch McConnell has always supported Trump out of his own interest, and not out of any loyalty, so it comes as no surprise that the soon to be former Senate Majority Leader is pretty sanguine about impeaching Trump.

This is not a surprise.  McConnell has gotten the court stuffing that will support voter suppression and corruption, as well as the regulatory rollbacks that the Trump administration have implementation, and he is done.

As an aside, this may be an attempt to signal Trump to resign, or Pence to invoke the 25th amendment, which would reduce pressure on his caucus:

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has told associates that he believes President Trump committed impeachable offenses and that he is pleased that Democrats are moving to impeach him, believing that it will make it easier to purge him from the party, according to people familiar with his thinking. The House is voting on Wednesday to formally charge Mr. Trump with inciting violence against the country.

At the same time, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader and one of Mr. Trump’s most steadfast allies in Congress, has asked other Republicans whether he should call on Mr. Trump to resign in the aftermath of the riot at the Capitol last week, according to three Republican officials briefed on the conversations.

While Mr. McCarthy has said he is personally opposed to impeachment, he and other party leaders have decided not to formally lobby Republicans to vote “no,” and an aide to Mr. McCarthy said he was open to a measure censuring Mr. Trump for his conduct. In private, Mr. McCarthy reached out to a leading House Democrat to see if the chamber would be willing to pursue a censure vote, though Speaker Nancy Pelosi has ruled it out.

Taken together, the stances of Congress’s two top Republicans — neither of whom has said publicly that Mr. Trump should resign or be impeached — reflected the politically challenging and fast-moving nature of the crisis that the party faces after the assault by a pro-Trump mob during a session to formalize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.

As more violent images from the mayhem wrought by the rioters emerged on Tuesday, including of the brutal attack that ultimately killed a Capitol Police officer, and as lawmakers were briefed about threats of more attacks on the Capitol, rank-and-file Republican lawmakers grew angrier about the president’s role in the violence.

The rats are leaving a sinking ship.

Not a Good Look

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It turns out that Theranos has systematically destroyed incriminating evidence.

This appears to be deliberate obstruction of the investigation:

Failed blood-testing unicorn Theranos trashed vital incriminating evidence of its fraud, prosecutors said on Monday.

The imploded startup’s extensive testing data over three years, including its accuracy and failure rate, was “stored on a specially-developed SQL database called the Laboratory Information System (LIS),” according to a filing [PDF] in the fraud case against Theranos’s one-time CEO Elizabeth Holmes and COO Sunny Balwani.

………

The reality, however, was that for one set of tests, the failure rate was 51.3 per cent. What does that mean? Prosecutors explain: “In other words, Theranos’s TT3 blood test results were so inaccurate, it was essentially a coin toss whether the patient was getting the right result. The data was devastating.”

………

From the filing: “On or about August 31, 2018 – three months after a federal grand jury issued a subpoena requesting a working copy of this database – the LIS was destroyed. The government has never been provided with the complete records contained in the LIS, nor been given the tools, which were available within the database, to search for such critical evidence as all Theranos blood tests with validation errors. The data disappeared.”

………

When a grand jury issued a subpoena for the database, Theranos’s lawyer came up with a strategy to supply the info without exposing the company’s appalling test results: hand over a backup of the database to the government and fail to provide the necessary materials to reconstruct it.

How do we know this? Because prosecutors said they have the internal emails showing staff discussing exactly that: how the backup wouldn’t come with the “layers of applications and data.” Its VP of Operations emailed an internal lawyer: “If we are just handing over a database, I’m not sure it will meet the needs.”

If that wasn’t enough, all three versions of the backup provided to the US government came with a password that was necessary to open it up. And no one was able to remember it, at least according to the various internal emails flying around. After some discussion, it was agreed that Theranos’s former head of IT, Antti Korhonen, was the only one with the password. But then Korhonen wasn’t able to find it either.

Unable to get at the database, Uncle Sam put an expert on the case: “The government retained a computer forensic expert to assist in retrieving this data, who found that the ‘key’ file on the hard drive, required to reconfigure the SQL database, is itself encrypted by a distinct password (not the one provided with the transmittal letter to open the hard drive), and cannot be opened.”

While all this was going on, Theranos decided to shut down the facility that housed the database in Newark, New Jersey. Execs were warned that if the hardware and servers were taken apart “it would be almost impossible to recreate the database” by Theranos IT contractor Michael Chung. But they shut it down anyway, and any access to the database from that point was lost – both for Theranos and government investigators.
Oops?

Uncle Sam’s legal eagles are not convinced this was an innocent mistake. Referring to the IncRev’s CEO, they note: “Even though Chandrasekaran knew the LIS hardware would be coming apart on Friday, August 31, 2018, and even though he was on an email chain in which the ‘all clear’ was given to take apart the hardware, he waited until two days later, September 2, 2018, to email a senior Theranos official with a list of items he would need from the database in order to reconstruct the LIS.

………

Its conclusion? “It does not appear from the timing of Chandrasekaran’s requests that he, in fact, intended to successfully copy the database before it shutdown.”

There is plenty of other evidence that, despite Theranos’s repeat claims, its machines were so inaccurate that they were fundamentally worthless. But the database would have provided clear proof that the company had to be aware that its entire testing system was fundamentally flawed, which itself supports the argument that the startup knowingly misled investors. While lying in press releases and interviews is reprehensible, it’s not necessarily a crime. However, lying in presentations to people in order to pull in investment is.

The failure to retain a working copy of a database that the company had paid millions to build and maintain, and which contained critically important information for the functioning of the business, is, let’s say, suspicious. Sufficiently suspicious that prosecutors wrote an entire filing about it.

………

Other filings reveal that Holmes would often personally handle complaints about how inaccurate its tests appeared to be, something that prosecutors says is evidence that the CEO knew that its testing machines didn’t work while at the same time continuing to claim the opposite in public. Holmes and Balwani face a dozen criminal wire fraud charges apiece, and up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.

Throw the book at them.

There are way too many unicorns out there who are little more than fraud, and we need to start throwing their founders in jail.

Yeah, Lihop*

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So, now we know that there were specific rports from the FBI that right-wings intended to invade the Capitol on January 6.

Yet more evidence that the passivity of law enforcement in the face of a clear threat was more than just incompetence:

A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s demonstrations in support of President Trump planned to do harm.

A situational information report approved for release the day before the U.S. Capitol riot painted a dire portrait of dangerous plans, including individuals sharing a map of the complex’s tunnels, and possible rally points for would-be conspirators to meet in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and South Carolina and head in groups to Washington.

“As of 5 January 2021, FBI Norfolk received information indicating calls for violence in response to ‘unlawful lockdowns’ to begin on 6 January 2021 in Washington, D.C.,” the document says. “An online thread discussed specific calls for violence to include stating ‘Be ready to fight. Congress needs to hear glass breaking, doors being kicked in, and blood from their BLM and Pantifa slave soldiers being spilled. Get violent. Stop calling this a march, or rally, or a protest. Go there ready for war. We get our President or we die. NOTHING else will achieve this goal.”

………

Yet even with that information in hand, the report’s unidentified author expressed concern that the FBI might be encroaching on free-speech rights.

We can’t do this to Wypipo.


The warning is the starkest evidence yet of the sizable intelligence failure that preceded the mayhem, which claimed the lives of five people, although one law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid disciplinary action, said the failure was not one of intelligence but of acting on the intelligence.

………

The head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, Steven D’Antuono, told reporters on Friday that the agency did not have intelligence suggesting the pro-Trump rally would be anything more than a lawful demonstration. During a news conference Tuesday, held after The Post’s initial publication of this report, he said the alarming Jan. 5 intelligence document was shared “with all our law enforcement partners” through the joint terrorism task force, which includes the U.S. Capitol Police, the U.S. Park Police, D.C. police, and other federal and local agencies.

………

Steven Sund, who resigned as Capitol Police chief, said in an interview Tuesday that he never received nor was made aware of the FBI’s field bulletin, insisting he and others would have taken the warning seriously had it been shared.

“I did not have that information, nor was that information taken into consideration in our security planning,” Sund said.

………

The Jan. 5 FBI report notes that the information represents the view of the FBI’s Norfolk office, is not to be shared outside law enforcement circles, that it is not “finally evaluated intelligence,” and that agencies receiving it “are requested not to take action based on this raw reporting without prior coordination with the FBI.”

Again.  “We can’t do this to Wypipo!”

………

The document notes that one online comment advised, “if Antifa or BLM get violent, leave them dead in the street,” while another said they need “people on standby to provide supplies, including water and medical, to the front lines. The individual also discussed the need to evacuate noncombatants and wounded to medical care.”

On Jan. 6, a large, angry crowd of people who had attended a rally nearby marched to the Capitol, smashing windows and breaking doors to get inside. One woman in the mob was shot and killed by Capitol Police; officials said three others in the crowd had medical emergencies and died. A Capitol Police officer died after suffering injuries.

………

For weeks leading up to the event, FBI officials discounted any suggestion that the activities of Trump supporters upset about the scheduled certification of Biden’s election win could be a security threat on a scale with the racial-justice demonstrations that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.

………

Even so, there were warning signs, though none as stark as the one from the FBI’s Norfolk office.

FBI agents had in the weeks before the Trump rally visited suspected far-right extremists, hoping to glean whether they had violent intentions, said a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the law enforcement activity. It was not immediately clear who was visited or if the FBI was specifically tracking anyone who would later be charged criminally. These visits were first reported Sunday by NBC News.

In addition, in the days leading up to the demonstrations, some Capitol Hill staffers were told by supervisors to not come in to work that day, if possible, because it seemed the danger level would be higher than many previous protests, according to a person familiar with the warning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Capitol Police did not take the kind of extra precautions, such as frozen zones and hardened barriers, that are typically used for major events near the Capitol.

Again, this looks like deliberate malfeasance.

Law enforcement departed from standard protocols in order to empower the insurrectionists.

………

The FBI recently issued a different memo saying that “armed protests” were being planned “at all 50 state capitols” and in D.C. in the run-up to the inauguration, according to an official familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement matter.

They knew that there was a risk of violence, and either because of interference from the Trump administration, or because senior elements of the US State Security Apparatus chose to be on the side of insurrection.

I’m more inclined to believe the latter case today than I was yesterday.

*Let It Happen On Purpose.

Susan Collins is Peewee Herman

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I Think They’re Iranians

In an interview with the Bangor Daily News, Susan Collins said that when the terrorist attacked the Capitol on Wednesday, she thought that it was the Iranians, because ……… because ……… because ……… because ……… OK, I have no clue as to why she would say this for a non-nefarious reason.

My guess though, is that this is, much like it was for Peewee Herman in Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie, (I am not suggesting that she was caught masturbating in a porno theater) it was a ploy to manipulate the situation, because Susan Collins is a profoundly evil person who lies like the rest of us breath:

………

The proceedings began calmly enough. Around 1 p.m., we senators proceeded to the House for a joint session. Soon there was an objection, baseless in my view, to accepting the electoral count from Arizona. We returned to the Senate to begin our two-hour debate with senators, beginning a series of 5-minute speeches. Sen. James Lankford had just started speaking when, all of a sudden, the Capitol Police and staff from the Sergeant at Arms burst into the chamber and removed Vice President Mike Pence who was presiding. Shortly thereafter, the two Senate leaders were also rushed away.

My first thought was that the Iranians had followed through on their threat to strike the Capitol, but a police officer took over the podium and explained that violent demonstrators had breached the entire perimeter of the Capitol and were inside. Several of us pointed out that the doors to the press gallery were unlocked right above us. That tells you how overwhelmed and unprepared the Capitol Police were, although many, many of them were very courageous.

First, while the Iranians have said many intemperate things in response to our assassinating the head of the Republican Guard, the Iranians have never suggested that they would hit the Congress, and Collins would know this, being on the Intelligence Committee.

My more detailed guess is that Collins knows that here political future is tied to former Maine Governor  Paul “The Human Bowling Jacket” LePage’s antediluvian wing of the Republican party, and she so is desperate to avoid saying anything about a potential impeachment.

She is a toxic mix of entitlement, hypocrisy, and cowardice, and somehow or other, the best efforts of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) could not even manage to make the election close this year.

What Took You So Long?

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Months after being invaded by gun toting fascist and white supremacist terrorists, the Michigan legislature has finally decided that maybe allowing any Tom, Dick, and Harry to open carry in the state house is a bad idea:

Michigan banned the open carry of guns inside its Capitol building on Monday, following mob violence last week at the US Capitol and last year’s storming of the Michigan statehouse.

The Michigan ban came as reports detailed FBI warnings about possible violence at state capitols and in Washington in the run-up to the 20 January inauguration of Joe Biden.

………

Security officials are preparing for a large crowd in Washington for the inauguration, and state officials are preparing for protests.

On Monday, ABC News reported a similar FBI bulletin warning of armed protests “at all 50 state capitols” and in Washington, but neither the date of that bulletin nor the evidentiary basis for its advice was given.

………

Security around the Capitol has been stepped up.

Armed men stormed the Michigan capitol in April, protesting social restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19. It later emerged that a group had plotted to kidnap and perhaps kill the governor, the Democrat Gretchen Whitmer.

April ……… May ……… June ……… 9 Months?

It too them 9 Fucking Months to realize that it’s a bad thing for the legislature to be threatened by mooks carrying assault rifles?

Seriously? 

I get that Republicans controlled both state houses, but I would figure that they would have a have enough of a self preservation instinct to act sooner.

Today in the Internet of Shit

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It turns out that internet connect chastity penis locks with poor security is a very bad idea.

I know what you are thinking, “What, did hackers hold someone’s penis for ransom?”

Why yes, someone was hacking these devices to take command of their joy stick, and they were demanding Bitcoin to unlock the device, and hence the penis.

Thankfully no one was actually wearing the “Chastity Cages” at the time.

Full disclosure:  I did not even know that such a device existed, either with or without internet connectivity, until I read about this today.

My penis is in a long term exclusive engagement with Sharon*, thank you very much:

A hacker took control of people’s internet-connected chastity cages and demanded a ransom to be paid in Bitcoin to unlock it.

“Your cock is mine now,” the hacker told one of the victims, according to a screenshot of the conversation obtained by a security researcher that goes by the name Smelly and is the founder of vx-underground, a website that collects malware samples.

In October of last year, security researchers found that the manufacturer of an Internet of Things chastity cage—a sex toy that users put around their penis to prevent erections that is used in the BDSM community and can be unlocked remotely—had left an API exposed, giving malicious hackers a chance to take control of the devices. That’s exactly what happened, according to a security researcher who obtained screenshots of conversations between the hacker and several victims, and according to victims interviewed by Motherboard.

A victim who asked to be identified only as Robert said that he received a message from a hacker demanding a payment of 0.02 Bitcoin (around $750 today) to unlock the device. He realized his cage was definitely “locked,” and he “could not gain access to it.”

“Fortunately I didn’t have this locked on myself while this happened,” Robert said in an online chat. 

Yes Robert, you were a very fortunate person not to have been wearing when this got locked down.

We could make a movie out of this, Free the Willie.

 *Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Yeah, LIHOP

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As a bit of an FYI, there are two terms that frequently find their way into discussion, MIHOP (Make It Happen On Purpose), and LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose).

In the case of the recent riots and invasion of the US Capitol, at best the latter seems to be the case, particularly given the fact that there was a greater police presence at the March for Science headlining Bill Nye, The Science Guy. (Read the whole Twitter thread, it is chilling)

Now we have a report that  the FBI is investigating the possibility that there was inside support from law enforcement and the bureaucracy.

Well, duh:

The FBI has reasons to believe the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol not only premeditated the assault, but might have been aided by police and staffers in the building … TMZ has learned.

High ranking sources inside the Capitol Police Dept. tell TMZ the FBI is looking at several facts that stink of an inside job. For starters, the Bureau is puzzled by the ease with which the mob found its way to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s office.

It’s not off any main hallway or next to other Congressional offices … in fact, the path to get to the entrance is maze-like and not open to the public like other parts of the Capitol. The rioters who took it over — vandalizing it and stealing a laptop — got there within 10 minutes of entering the Capitol.

We’re told the FBI feels someone must have provided a roadmap for them to find it that quickly. Remember, the Capitol has been closed to the public since March due to the pandemic so it’s not like these guys could have been casing it to plot their path.

It is patently obvious that the law enforcement response by both by the Capitol Police and the DC Police was intentionally lackadaisical, and since neither of those organizations answer to the White House, this cannot be attributed to Trump administration rat-fuckery.

The lackadaisical response from the FBI and the National Guard, however, might very well have been told to stand down by Trump and his Evil Minions™.

It’s almost certain that a thorough investigation will see deliberate dereliction of duty, and I’d bet dollars to navy beans that that there were people inside of both the White House and the Congress who were actively aiding the rioters.

Need a Hobby?

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Did you know that there is a group of left-wing analysists dedicated to naming and shaming Nazis, Fascists, white supremacists, and other extremists:

Before a mob of Trump supporters staged a riot in the U.S. Capitol and thousands of Americans became amateur detectives working to identify the culprits, a loosely connected group of seasoned online sleuths were ringing alarm bells and picking off extremists online, one by one.

For a nationwide network of left-wing activists who seek out and publish the identities of those they believe to be violent “fascists,” some investigations can take months, years even.

Or it can take 10 minutes.

If you need to get in touch with these folks, you can go to the Left Coast Right Watch and volunteer.