Small Business Owners Are Complaining Because E-Verify Works, not Because it Doesn't

The Wall Street Journal writes about the problems that employers are having with E-Verify, the online worker verification system run by the INS.

The problem is not that the system is too buggy, its early problems have been ironed out, and it's not too expensive, it's free, no, for the small businesses interviewed, the problem is that works the way that it is supposed to:

Since January, Daniel VanLoh has turned away nine new dishwashers and one line cook from his four Atlanta, Ga., restaurants within days of hiring them.

The reason: Not one was authorized to work in the U.S., according to background checks he ran on the job applicants using a federal verification system, known as E-Verify.

He says he's now struggling to fill six openings, with some job seekers simply walking away after hearing that the company uses the free, Internet-based system to check their immigration status.

This is the way that this is supposed to work.  Proper enforcement of worker verification is supposed to keep people who want to work illegally out of the job rolls.

Here is the money quote:

This month, Georgia required small employers to screen applicants with the system, a move that extended existing requirements for larger firms. At least 15 other states, including Arizona, Mississippi and South Carolina, have enacted laws in recent years requiring at least some, if not all, employers to run E-Verify checks on job applicants before hiring them. The laws don't require employers to check existing employees.

Scott Whitehead, who operates an Atlanta landscaping service, began using E-Verify July 1. Over the past three weeks, he says he hasn't found a single authorized worker among more than 50 applicants at his metro area firm, Unlimited Landscaping & Turf Management Inc. "Every immigrant who walks through this door is illegal" according to the online check, says Mr. Whitehead, whose firm has more than 100 employees.

He says the checks are shrinking the pool of applicants he's able to hire. As he struggles to fill openings, existing maintenance workers, most of whom he pays about $14 an hour, are demanding higher wages.

(emphasis mine)

Gee without the possibility of easily recruiting workers who are willing to live in immigration status enforced peonage, his workers are asking for more money.

Hoocoodanode?

BTW, Whitehead's solution is to engage in illegal discrimination:

The system is also bringing anxieties about productivity, he says. To avoid running afoul of the new Georgia law, Mr. Whitehead plans to hire only U.S. citizens who clear the system, even though, in landscaping, he has found that immigrant workers are generally more productive.

This is a violation of the civil rights law.

You cannot discriminate against legal workers on the basis of immigration status.

Unemployment is over seven percent, and if your crappy job cannot attract legal workers at a given wage, then raise the f%$#ing wage.

Even in Bankruptcy, Detroit Must Pay for a Millionaire's Toys

Bankruptcy, Schmankruptcy, billionaire Mike Ilitch's new stadium must get its $450 million:

When Detroit filed for what is the largest municipal bankruptcy in United States history, one of the items immediately placed on the potential chopping block was pensions for current retirees who had worked for the city. A pension shortfall accounts for $3.5 billion of the city's $18 billion in debt, and the city's emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, has called for "significant" pension cuts.

But even with pensions possibly getting the axe – along with who knows what else in terms of services for the already downtrodden city, or even masterpieces at the Detroit Institute of Art – Detroit still seems ready to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to help pay for a new arena for the National Hockey League's Detroit Red Wings………

This is not The Onion.

Detroit is in bankruptcy (sort of, long story), but this billionaire has to get a shiny new stadium for his team.

It buggers the mind.

Linkage

• Fried chicken recipe. (New York Times)
• Oldest European cookbook found. (IO9)
• How Damon Runyon Would Have Explained Jon Corzine. (Brad Hicks)
• Scientific proof that cats are better than dogs. (Buzzfeed)

Below is a recent video of the proto-Punk group Death.

This group (some of the guys on stage in the vid are the sons of the original members) were from Detroit in the 1970s.

They predated the Sex Pistols, and the Ramones, and the Dead Kennedys, and the Clash by a few years.

As I've noted earlier, it does make you wonder how much the emergence of Punk was more of a societal trend than it was a

We Lose

The House has narrowly rejected an amendment to the Defense Authorization Bill to restrict NSA spying on Americans:

U.S. lawmakers angry about domestic telephone record-collection lost an effort to curtail funding for the intelligence-gathering tools revealed by fugitive U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden.

On a vote of 205-217, the House rejected an amendment that would have limited the National Security Agency’s ability to collect communications records.

Implementation of the amendment could have created a new burden on telephone and Internet companies to retain bulk data, in addition to ending the NSA’s blanket collection of phone records. Those possibilities led the White House, Republicans leaders and many congressional Democrats to oppose the proposals, pitting them against lawmakers from both parties who champion civil liberties and privacy.

The by-party tally is Democrats  (111-83), and Republicans (94-134), a 5 vote margin, and it is almost certainly only because Obama started seriously twisting arms on the Dem side of the aisle in the past 48 hours or so.  (My rep, John Sarbanes, voted yes).

Hopefully, this is only the start of the fight, and the next time, the good guys will pick up a few more votes, and win.

Quote of the Day

If the NYT really cared about keeping the newspaper business profitable they wouldn’t be calling for Anthony Weiner to get out of the Mayor’s race.

—Josh Marshall

Just When You Thought that Obama's Secrecy Fetish Could Not Get Any More Reprehensible………

I present to you the case of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was imprisoned at the demand of the US government because he revealed that it was a US drone strike, and not a Yemeni army attack, that killed 41 civilians in al-Majalla in 2009.

His "trial" was condemned as a kangaroo court by numerous human rights group, and when the President of Yemen wanted to pardon him because of internal protests, Barack Obama personally called him to brow beat him into extending his detention.

Well, Shaye has now been released, but the official wheels in the Obama administration continue to try to grind him to dust:

News broke yesterday afternoon that, after a nearly three-year-long imprisonment, Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye had been released by the Yemeni government. Shaye's work drew international attention in 2009 when he reported on a U.S. airstrike in the Yemeni village of al-Majalla that killed 41 civilians. He also conducted multiple interviews with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

U.S. officials, including the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, have told journalists that Shaye facilitated AQAP attacks, but his accounts of his arrest detail press intimidation by the Yemeni government, then still headed by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned amid mass protests in November 2011. Shaye's five-year prison sentence has drawn criticism from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation of Journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Yemen-based Freedom Foundation.

The U.S. government is still concerned about Shaye. Bernadette Meehan, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told FP this morning by email, "We are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula." Meehan did not comment on whether the United States advocated against his release.

This is so repulsive on so many levels.

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banksta

Because as a bankster you can break into someone's house, and take all their stuff, and not only are not arrested, you don't have to pay them anything for this:

An Ohio bank is refusing to reimburse a Vinton County woman whose house they unjustly repossessed while she was out of town.

Katie Barnett recently returned home after being away for two weeks to find that the lock on her door had been changed. She crawled in through the window to find all of her stuff missing.

Barnett suspected she had been robbed — and she wasn't too far off.

It seems that, while Barnett was gone, the First National Bank of Wellston arrived at her place of residence, broke in, and took possession of all her belongings, including the house.

Except, as it later turned out, they had the wrong address.

"They told me that the GPS led them to my house," Barnett told 10TV. "My grass hadn’t been mowed and they just assumed."

Phoning the local police to report the incident did Barnett little good, as the McArthur Police Chief refused to investigate and considered the case closed.

But for Barnett, the ordeal is very much ongoing.

With all of her stuff either sold off by the bank or thrashed, the homeowner presented the bank's president with an $18,000 estimate for restitution.

He refused to pay up.

"He got very firm with me and said, ‘We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,’" Barnett recalled. "I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff and I want it back."

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, will no one prosecute these rat bastards?

They break into your house, they steal and trash all of your stuff, and when caught, they refuse to make you whole.

I would suggest that Katie Barnett lawyer up, put a lien on the f%$#ing bank's HQ, and then start foreclosure proceedings.

Linkage

• This is Joseph. He is a well known commodity forecaster. (Biblical commodities hedging from FT)
• The next financial weapon of mass destruction. (Reuters)
• PA Republican GOP Chair admits that voter ID is for partisan advantage. (TPM)
• No, the Komodo Dragon does not have a particularly dirty mouth. (NatGeo)
  

---

Another thought on the Trayvon Martin murder:

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

It Means that She Frightens Them………

Politico, the epitome of the mindless and soulless Washington, DC stupidity, has published a hit piece on Elizabeth Warren.

They now see her as a threat.

A Patent Troll Bites the Dust

One of the worst of the parasite, Eolas, has had its patents invalidated:

The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, had never testified in court before last year. In February 2012, he left Cambridge to fly down to Tyler, an East Texas city of about 100,000, to testify at a patent trial. It was the culmination of a bold campaign by a man named Michael Doyle to levy a vast patent tax on the modern web.

Berners-Lee was one of several web pioneers who came through the court during the course of a four-day trial, which ultimately convinced a jury to invalidate two patents owned by Eolas, the tiny patent-holding company that Doyle and his lawyers transformed into one of the most fearsome "patent trolls" of all time.

Now Eolas appears to be gone for good. The company mounted a lengthy appeal, but it was all for naught; this morning, a three-judge appeals panel affirmed the jury's verdict without comment.

………

Pei-Yuan Wei created the pioneering Viola browser, a key piece of prior art, while he was a student at UC-Berkeley in the early 1990s. Scott Silvey, another UC-Berkeley student at that time, testified about a program he made called VPlot, which allowed users to rotate an image of an airplane using Wei's browser. VPlot and Viola were demonstrated to Sun Microsystems in May 1993, months before Doyle claimed to have conceived of his invention.

Eolas claimed an tremendously broad patent on all forms of interactive web products.

Why the f%$# has Eolas been able to blackmail people for so long?

Seriously.

Why Janet Yellen will not Become the Federal Reserve Chairman

Because she has ovaries:

The favored parlor game of the political-economic complex right now is guessing who will replace Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. The clear front-runner is Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen. But she’s by no means a sure thing.

One important reason she’s not — and I don’t know another way to say this — is sexism, as evidenced by the whispering campaign that’s emerged against her.

The message isn’t always delivered in a whisper, of course. In May, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher suggested on CNBC that if Yellen is chosen, the pick will have been “driven by gender.” That’s more of a shouting campaign.

Fisher hastened to add that Yellen is “extremely capable.” But, he said, “there are other capable people.” Capable people, I guess, who are male, and thus whose picks wouldn’t be driven by gender.

But Fisher’s comments aren’t the sort that matter in this process. They’re too crude. The significant doubts about Yellen are transmitted with more subtlety, and for months they’ve been coursing through the cloistered, close fraternity that will drive the selection of Bernanke’s successor.

If you look at the dynamics of the Obama administration and finance, at least under the auspices of (the now thankfully in private life) Timothy Geithner was contempt against those who lacked a Y chromosome.

Notwithstanding the presence of Valerie Jarrett, the Obama administration has many of the aspects of an old boy's club, and even if you ignore the "boys" part, it is a club, and Larry Summers is most assuredly a part of that club, and Janet Yellen isn't.

Barack Obama Reveals that he is Black

Barack Obama has spent pretty much all of his time on the national stage trying to avoid the accusation that he is the stereotypical "Angry Black Man", and so, with the brief exception (which he walked away from as quickly as he could) of a comment on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

This is why Obama saying that 35 years ago that he would be Trayvon Martin was such a big deal:

Barack Obama used an unexpected speech at the White House to personally address the debates over race relations that have convulsed America since George Zimmerman was acquitted over the shooting of the unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin.

In remarks immediately interpreted as the most expansive comments on race since he became president, Obama said the US was still not "a post-racial society".

"You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son. Another way of saying that is: Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago," he said.

But once again, it appears that Obama immediately followed this up by pandering to bigots racial profilers by floating the name of New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who has aggressively profiled blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims:

Earlier this week, President Barack Obama endorsed New York City police commissioner, and stop-and-frisk cheerleader, Ray Kelly as an adequate replacement for Janet Napolitano as head of the Department of Homeland Security. Under Kelly, the New York Police Department’s policy on randomly stopping people in the streets and then questioning and patting them down for weapons and drugs, imposed a stiff burden on black and Latino residents. According to the ACLU in New York, between 2002 and 2011, black and Latino New Yorkers made up close to 90 percent of those stopped by police — 88 percent of whom had no weapons or drugs on them when it happened. Kelly has staunchly defended the policy regardless of the racial profiling it codifies and its fruitless conclusions.

But Obama told Univision on Wednesday that “Kelly has obviously done an extraordinary job in New York,” and that the police commissioner is “one of the best there is” — an “outstanding leader in New York.”

“Mr. Kelly might be very happy where he is,” said Obama. “But if he’s not I’d want to know about it. ‘Cause, you know, obviously he’d be very well qualified for the job.”

This endorsement seems tone deaf given the current conversations nationwide around national security. Kelly’s “extraordinary” work in New York City has led to the city council passing the Community Safety Act, which scales back the police’s ability to racially profile considerably. Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policy is being challenged in federal court by the Center for Constitutional Rights right now. Obama’s own Justice Department may be sending in a federal monitor to ensure that NYPD stops racial profiling. The following, questioning and apprehension of targeted black males is at the crux of the current debate around George Zimmerman’s killing Trayvon Martin.

Also, you have to read the New York Times OP/Ed by Ta-Nehisi Coates:

It was candidate Obama who in 2008 pledged to “ban racial profiling” on a federal level and work to have it prohibited on the state level. It was candidate Obama who told black people that if they voted they would get a new kind of politics. And it was State Senator Obama who understood that profiling was the antithesis of such politics. Those of us raising our boys in the wake of Trayvon, or beneath the eye of the Demographics Unit, cannot fathom how the president could forget this.

Of course, the best argument against allowing Ray Kelly anywhere near law enforcement are the words of Ray Kelly, who, writing in (where else) The Wall Street Journal, where he engages in transparent lying to defend his career:

Since 2002, the New York Police Department has taken tens of thousands of weapons off the street through proactive policing strategies. The effect this has had on the murder rate is staggering. In the 11 years before Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, there were 13,212 murders in New York City. During the 11 years of his administration, there have been 5,849. That's 7,383 lives saved—and if history is a guide, they are largely the lives of young men of color.

So far this year, murders are down 29% from the 50-year low achieved in 2012, and we've seen the fewest shootings in two decades.

He knows that these numbers are reflected nationwide in any number of cities with all sorts of different sorts of police tactics.

He knows these numbers, and the reason that he lies about this is because the only way that he can defend his contemptible policies is to misrepresent his numbers, and what they mean.

Linkage

It's a new feature for my blog.

Basically stuff that I don't have anything about but, "KEWL!!!!"

I'll be doing this whenever the f%$# I feel like it.

• When mushrooms ruled the earth.
• Durgin Park recipes for Baked Beans and Indian Pudding.  (.doc file)  (BTW, if anyone has a suggestion for a kosher replacement for pork fatback [for the baked beans] and for corn meal [for the Indian pudding] it would be appreciated.
• Why the rich are above the law. (Short version: our justice system is geared toward extracting plea bargains, and the rich have the resources to take it to trial.)
• We are currently fighting 74 different wars.  (Old, but worth it)

For your amusement:

Obama Continues to Spy on Ordinary Americans

They just got a 3 month extension of its data drift net of Verizon, and one would assume everyone else too:

The National Security Agency has been allowed to extend its dragnet of the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon through a court order issued by the secret court that oversees surveillance.

In an unprecedented move prompted by the Guardian's disclosure in June of the NSA's indiscriminate collection of Verizon metadata, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has publicly revealed that the scheme has been extended yet again.

The statement does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa).

The announcement flowed, the statement said, from the decision to declassify aspects of the metadata grab "in order to provide the public with a more thorough and balanced understanding of the program".

According to Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, the Verizon phone surveillance has been in place – updated every three months – for at least six years, and it is understood to have been applied to other telecoms giants as well.

Not feeling hopey changey here.

What Yves Smith Said

She makes a compelling case against Larry Summers being the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that he is a polarizing personality who refuses to listen to others:

The big problem with Summers is not his record on deregulation (although that’s bad enough) or his foot-in-mouth remarks about women in math, or for suggesting that African countries would make for good toxic waste dumps. No, it’s his appalling record the one time he was in a leadership position, as president of Harvard. Summers was unquestionably the worst leader in Harvard’s history.

Summers, unduly impressed with his own economic credentials, overruled two successive presidents of Harvard Management Corporation (the in-house fund management operation chock full of well qualified and paid money managers that invest the Harvard endowment). Not content to let the pros have all the fun, Summers insisted on gambling with the university’s operating funds, which are the monies that come in every year (tuition and board payments, government grants, the payments out of the endowment allotted to the annual budget). His risk-taking left the University with over $2 billion in losses and unwind costs and forced wide-spread budget cuts, even down to getting rid of hot breakfasts.

………

So Summers couldn’t keep his ego out of the way, bullied the people around him, ignored the advice of not one but two presidents of Harvard Management, and left a smoldering pile of losses in his wake. And serious adults are prepared to allow someone with so little maturity and such misplaced self confidence to have major sway over much bigger economic decisions?

Summers’ second big problem is the scandal that led to his ouster at Harvard, which was NOT the “women suck at elite math and sciences” remarks. The university has conveniently let that be assumed to be the proximate cause.

In fact, it was Summers’ long-standing relationship with and protection of Andrei Schleifer, a Harvard economics professor, who was at the heart of a corruption scandal where he used his influential role on a Harvard contract advising on Russian privatization to enrich himself and his wife, his chief lieutenant Jonathan Hay, and other cronies. The US government sued Harvard for breach of contract and Shleifer and Hay for fraud and won.

And yes, he was also hip deep in the ouster of Brooksley Born for her demands that derivatives be regulated.

So, he doesn't listen, he alienates those around him, he is deeply involved in a massive corruption scandal, and he has been wrong on basically everything outside of academe.

Given this record, I expect him to fail up into the Federal Reserve.

Why I Want Rush Holt and not Corey Booker to be the Next Senator from New Jersey

Go Rush Holt!

Rush Holt has proposed eliminating the tax cap on social security, which would keep the fund solvent until the sun burns down to a cinder.

You won't hear this from Corey Booker, because he is owned by Wall Street, who is determined to get their hands on this money, so that they can generate fees.

Helen Thomas Dead at 92

Link.

While it was clear from her statements later in life, she was aggressively anti-Zionist, it should be noted that this was not her journalistic beat.

On her beat, the White House, she was a pain in the ass to 10 successive administrations, which is what a reporter assigned to the White House is supposed to do.

Johnny Cashing It Today

Remember when I complained about ruining my shirt by leaving an uncapped pen in my pocket?

My dad, who follows my blog, sent me a bunch of dark colored shirts, including a black dress shirt.

Without thinking, I put on the black shirt today, and also grabbed a pair of black slacks.

I got comments on my style sense from about 5 people at work, the best being, "Johnny Cashing it today?"

I think that this is the closest that I have ever been to being fashionable in my life.

I Don't Give a Crap

It has been reported that Britain's biggest welfare family is expecting their first child.

Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is reportedly in labo(u)r.

To quote George Washington, "Let there be no Kings."

Americans should not be following this news with baited breath.

I can't wait to hear what Vonners, my (small R) republican British friend has to day about this.

Posted via mobile.

Gee, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

After all, the market solves everything, so the sale of the UK's primary blood plasma supplier to Bain Capital should work out just fine:

The Government was tonight accused of gambling with the UK’s blood supply by selling the state-owned NHS plasma supplier to a US private equity firm.

The Department of Health overlooked several healthcare or pharmaceutical firms and at least one blood plasma specialist before choosing to sell an 80 per cent stake in Plasma Resources UK to Bain Capital, the company co-founded by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a £230m deal. The Government will retain a 20 per stake and a share of potential future profits.

PRUK has annual sales of around £110m and consists of two companies: it employs 200 people at Bio Products Laboratory (BPL) in Elstree, Hertfordshire, and more than 1,000 at DCI Biologicals Inc in the US. DCI collects plasma from American donors and sends it to BPL where it is separated into blood proteins, clotting factors and albumin for supply to NHS hospitals in the treatment of immune deficiencies, neurological diseases, and haemophilia.

Considering the damage caused in the US because the American Red Cross (under the direction of Liddy Dole) and big pharma, both of whom resisted 100% testing for years,and  killed tens of thousands of hemophiliacs in the United States, and many times that world wide, this does not fill em with confidence about the UK blood supply.

Silly Rabbit, Extradition is for Other Countries

Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Rome, was arrested in Panama on an Italian warrant after he was convicted in absentia for kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr and sending him to Egypt to be tortured.

Less than 24 hours later, he was on his way back to the United States, free from any legal jeopardy:

Former CIA Milan station chief Robert Seldon Lady, who was convicted in Italy of kidnapping an Egyptian Muslim cleric and recently arrested in Panama, is headed back to the United States, a State Department spokeswoman said on Friday.

"It is my understanding that he is in fact either en route or back in the United States," said Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman.

So he'll probably never face trial for this.

In an interview, he invoked the good German defense:

He was quoted as telling Il Giornale newspaper in 2009 that he was not guilty and was carrying out orders from his superiors.

Just following orders. I thought that Nuremberg settled this matter. This is not supposed to be a valid defense.

But don't worry, he has already suffered great punishment:

Also in that interview, he said he had wanted to stay in Italy but his retirement villa with vineyards had been seized to cover court costs.

Compare this to what is looking at Edward Snowden.

Note also the case of Posada Carriles, who blow up a civilian airliner, but lives in safety in the United States.

Bank Failure Friday on Sunday!

We had the 10^th credit union failure last Monday, Taupa Lithuanian Credit Union, the rate of bank and credit union failures certainly have been slowing down.

Deep Thought

Went to Another Concert Tonight

A band called Junior Doctor.

They are doing an (I kid you not) living room tour, which is why out looks like they are playing in a living room.

We drive across the Bay Bridge to Stevenville.

Good music, and the bass player/keyboardist (Davey Hoogerwerf) was particularly impressive. His bass playing was insane.

Because of the limitations of playing in a living room, the drummer, Jarrod Kearney, played a Cajón, the box like instrument that he is sitting on.

Mark Hartman does lead vocals and rhythm guitar.

It was (obviously) a very intimate setting.

Natalie got a compliment on her song writing (she had shared some songs with then a few weeks back via Facebook). This had her going "SQUEEE!" All the easy home.

Charlie got himself filmed by the band members once they saw his mad (Rubik's) cube skills.

It was a good time for all, though there was a 45 minute hangup on the Bay Bridge going home because of an accident.

Posted via mobile.

At a Vort

(Yiddish for engagement party)

This is my nephew and his betrothed.

Posted via mobile.

What Stefan Svallfors Said

He has nominated Edward Snowden for the Nobel Peace Prize as a way for the Nobel committee to atone for giving the aware do Obama:

In his letter addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Stefan Svallfors praised Snowden for his“heroic effort at great personal cost.” He stated that by revealing the existence and the scale of the US surveillance programs, Snowden showed “individuals can stand up for fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“This example is important because since the Nuremberg trials in 1945 has been clear that the slogan ‘I was just following orders’ is never claimed as an excuse for acts contrary to human rights and freedoms,” Professor Svallfors wrote.

He emphasized that the decision to award the 2013 prize to Edward Snowden would also “help to save the Nobel Peace Prize from the disrepute incurred by the hasty and ill-conceived decision to award US President Barack Obama 2009 award.”

Not being George W. Bush is an insufficient reason to give someone a f%$#ing Nobel f%$#ing Peace prize.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever

So, a judge rules that guards grabbing the genitals of Guantánamo prisoners who want to talk to their lawyers is interfering with their right to counsel, so they are appealing:

A federal appeals court is allowing Guantánamo guards to resume searching detainees’ genitals on their way to and from legal meetings while the Obama administration challenges a federal judge’s ruling that the searches unfairly impede attorney-client interaction.

The order Wednesday by a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit capped 24 hours of legal wrangling: The Justice Department asked a New York lawyer to let guards search her client’s genital area, the lawyer refused and the Southern Command’s top general joined the fray with a sworn declaration that a federal judge got it wrong.

Groin searches aren’t intended to prevent legal meetings, said Southcom’s Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, noting that his Guantánamo soldiers similarly search captives meeting with Red Cross delegates.

Past practice of shaking a captive’s trousers to see if “nails, shanks, ragged scraps of metal” fall out “posed an unacceptable risk to the safety and security of detainees and guards,” Kelly said.

Last week, detainee lawyers persuaded U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth that the invasive searches, adopted amid a widespread hunger strike, were discouraging some of Guantánamo’s 166 captives from voluntarily leaving their cells for meetings with their lawyers. Lamberth ordered the guards to stop it, and resume the practice of physically shaking the waistband of the pants of a prisoner to see if any contraband comes out.

………

In his ruling last week, Lamberth concluded that the motivation for the searches was not to enhance security but to deter the detainees’ access to attorneys by implementing search procedures that are “religiously and culturally abhorrent” to devout Muslims.

Lamberth’s ruling had sought to reset the search procedures to an era before Latif’s death. The judge noted that there was no proof that Latif hid the drugs in his genital area.

………

In London, detainee attorney Crider, who works for a non-profit law firm Reprieve, called the refusal to follow Lamberth’s order “contempt of court, pure and simple. Why is it suddenly essential for the government to grope my clients in a way that been off-limits for years?”

I'm beginning to think that the Bush/Cheney regime of overt lawlessness is preferable to the protestations by Obama and His Evil Minions^™ that they "respect" the rule of law and due process.

Where is the outrage?

The Final word on George Zimmerman, Care of Alex Fraser

Dear George Zimmerman,

For the rest of your life you are now going to feel what its like to be a black man in America.

You will feel people stare at you. Judging you for what you think are unfair reasons. You will lose out on getting jobs for something you feel is outside of your control. You will believe yourself to be an upstanding citizen and wonder why people choose to not see that.

People will cross the street when they see you coming. They will call you hurtful names. It will drive you so insane some days that you'll want to scream at the top of your lungs. But you will have to wake up the next day, put on firm look and push through life.

I bet you never thought that by shooting a black male you'd end up inheriting all of his struggles.

Enjoy your "freedom."

Sincerely,

A black male who could've been Trayvon Martin

From his Facebook page.

Those Whom the Gods Destroy, They First Make Weird(er)

So, Michelle Bachmann is under investigation for campaign finance violations, one of her staff has been charged in petty thefts in other Congressional offices, and now its been revealed that aa Conservative Christian group mailed vibrator to Michele Bachmann:

.Hundreds of pages of email and text message correspondence made public last week shed new light on the infighting and organizational disarray that have plagued America’s leading conservative Christian political consulting firm in recent months.

As BuzzFeed reported in June, the Columbus-based Strategy Group for Media — which has represented dozens of tea party and religious right Republicans, including Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, and Newt Gingrich — has been mired in lawsuits and internal tumult since last spring, when seven of the firm’s managers staged a religious intervention with their CEO, Rex Elsass. After the managers made their demands in a dramatic meeting that culminated with them laying hands on their boss and praying for his soul, Elsass fired three of his top lieutenants, including his longtime protégé and Strategy Group President Nick Everhart.

The series of emails and text messages, made public on the Franklin County Court website in the ongoing lawsuit between Everhart and Strategy Group, adds further detail to that meeting, and shows the extent to which the company’s managers were worried about Elsass’ psychological and spiritual health. They also reveal potentially embarrassing anecdotes for the company, including one incident in which an executive said Elsass accidentally mailed a “female pleasure machine” to Rep. Michele Bachmann.

………

And an email thread from May 29 — after the three managers were fired — featured Strategy Group’s former voter-contact consultant P.J. Wenzel making reference to Elsass sending “female pleasure machines” to Bachmann. The emails don’t elaborate on the incident, but one person familiar with the story told BuzzFeed that Elsass had intended to give Bachmann a vibrating head massager to help alleviate her migraines, and that the employee he sent to buy the gift accidentally purchased something that more closely resembled a sex toy — and sent it to her office.

Tyler said the item in question was purchased at Brookstone and was not a sex toy, but he declined to provide further information about the product. (Brookstone announced in 2011 that it had begun selling “pleasure objects.”)

The person familiar with the story said the firm successfully retrieved the gift before Bachmann could open it.

Seriously, have you noticed that when a political figure's career is in a death spiral, that there suddenly emerge a plethora of stories that are even weirder than before?

By this benchmark, I think that Michelle Bachmann will be sent to Gitmo.

If the Washington Post Were to Replace Richard Cohen with Pat Buchanan………

No one could tell the difference, except that Pat is a more interesting writer.

So, it's OK to stalk a black boy in a hoodie because he's a black boy in a hoodie, just like when he said that it was OK for jewelers to refuse to allow black people into their stores.

He also decided that the Polanski child rape was no big deal, basically because he likes Chinatown.  (I would note that there are legitimate issues of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, which are serious issues, but Cohen, and the almost as awful Anne Applebaum, are just horrible human beings.)

I do not understand why Cohen is not sweeping floors for a living.

Unloading on Florida After the Zimmerman Verdict

The hosts of Comedy Central both unload with both barrels

Colbert


Oliver:


A well deserved smackdown of a state that seem determined to elevate Carl Hiassen from novelist to documentarian.

Damn, This is Weird

There have been rumors of a corruption investigation f Representative Michelle Bachmann for some time. Well, now a senior staffer of hers has been arrested for petty thefts from other Congressional offices.

Have you ever noticed that just before a political figure is frog marched out of the building in handcuffs, their staff starts getting busted for the weirdest crap?

Well, it looks like Bachmann is on the hit parade:

That's Javier Sanchez back in June of this year with his then-boss, Michele Bachmann. [Not bothering with the picture here] They're headed for a closed briefing on the NSA disclosures. Javier Sanchez was a high-level legislative director for Michele Bachmann, assisting her with issues such as immigration reform, the farm bill, and her oxymoronic assignment to the House Intelligence Committee.

On July 11, Mr. Sanchez was arrested on charges that he burglarized several offices belonging to other House members. From news reports, it appears that some thefts took place back in 2012 and others in 2013.

It has been noted that, "Sanchez has been charged with Theft II," which is for amounts less than $1000.00.

If this is the indicator that I think that it is, then Michelle Bachmann is toast.

I Think that Carl Levin Just Suggested that Obama Fire James Clapper

Seeing as how Levin is one of the most intelligence agency friendly Senators, so the fact that he is subtly suggesting that DNI Clapper be fired is a significant thing:

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said Tuesday that he was “troubled” by the testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and was unsure how Clapper could be held accountable.

………

The testimony prompted criticism from lawmakers and led to some calls for his resignation over the false testimony.

Levin said he wouldn’t go that far but suggested that the only way Clapper could be held accountable was if President Obama fired him.

“I’m troubled by that testimony, obviously,” Levin said at a breakfast roundtable hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

“How do you hold him accountable? I guess the only way to do that would be for the president to, somehow or other, fire him,” Levin added. “I think he’s made it clear that he regrets saying what he said. I don’t want to call on the president to fire him, although I’m troubled by this.”

Actually, the distinguished gentleman from Michigan does want Clapper fired, he would not have brought it up, and then dismissed the suggestion, if he did not want Clapper gone.

Tweet of the Day

White supremacy: the idea that some black men must be killed with impunity to keep society at large safe. http://t.co/t6eK1WzL3D

— The Nation (@thenation) July 14, 2013

Not a Great Day for Jews

It is Tisha B'Av, the 9^th day of the Hebrew month Av, and a small subset of the nasty bits of Jewish history follows:

1. The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
2. The destruction of the 1^st Temple.
3. The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
4. The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
5. The Romans plowed the temple mount.
6. The start of the 1^st Crusade.  (You see it as a coming together of Christendom.  I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
7. The expulsion of Jews from England.
8. The expulsion of Jews from France.
9. The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
10. Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
11. Formal approval of the "Final Solution" by the Nazis in 1941.
12. Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

Excuse me while I find something sturdy to cover my head with.

Crap

The Commodities Futures Trading Commission could have instituted real and effective rules on swaps trades by doing nothing, but they caved to the banks, because the banks refused to prepare for the deadline:

I’m going to be brief, in part because the CFTC’s probable demonstration of lack of gumption is still in play, while the SEC’s was expected but nevertheless appalling. But the bottom line is that even though we seem some intermittent signs of the officialdom recognizing that big banks remain a menace to the health and well-being to the general public*, the measures to constrain them continue to be inadequate.

As readers may recall, CFTC chairman Gary Gensler was in a position to stare down bank efforts to water down critical provisions of Dodd Frank on derivatives (see here for details of the issues at stake). The short version is that Gensler did not have the votes among his commissioners to support his position since the Administration had managed to appoint a bank stooge as one of the Democrats. However, Gensler controlled the agenda. That meant he had the option of not putting the matter to a vote of his fellow commissioners at all, which meant Dodd Frank would become effective as written (mind you, normally legislation does legitimately require some tweaking since the legislative language may be imprecise or not mesh well with existing rules).

What appears to have forced Gensler to relent was not the CFTC politics, but bank refusal to prepare, which meant they could stamp their feet and say if Gensler did not back down, the markets would blow up and it would all be his fault.

Read the rest, and you will not just be disgusted by the CFTC, you will want to replace the SEC with a trained monkey as well.

Barack Obama Gets a Warning from Dianne Feinstein*

If there is one constant in the US Senate, it is that Dianne Feinstein is friendly to an expansive and intrusive state security apparatus.

Thus her signing onto letter to Obama suggesting that his allowing the force feeding of prisoners at Guantanamo is illegal is a big deal:

Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin sent Obama a letter yesterday, using Kessler’s [The Federal Judge who condemned the force feeding, but said that she had no standing to rule] ruling to connect the two explicitly.

U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Gladys Kessler also expressed concern about the force-feeding of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The Court denied detainee Jihad Dhiab’s motion for a preliminary injunction to stop force-feeding due to lack of jurisdiction, but in her order, Judge Kessler noted that Dhiab has set out in great detail in his court filings “what appears to be a consensus that force-feeding of prisoners violates Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which prohibits torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment.” The United States has ratified the ICCPR and is obligated to comply with its provisions. Judge Kessler also wrote, “it is perfectly clear from the statements of detainees, as well as the statements from the [medical] organizations just cited, that force-feeding is a painful, humiliating, and degrading process.” (emphasis added).

The judge concluded by correctly pointing out that you, as Commander in Chief, have the authority to intercede on behalf of Dhiab, and other similarly-situated detainees at Guantanamo. The court wrote: “Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution provides that ‘[t]he President shall be the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. …’ It would seem to follow, therefore, that the President of the United States, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority—and power—to directly address the issue of force-feeding of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.”

Feinstein only by association makes the next part of her argument. We comply with these treaties by complying with our Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment. And the government has long said that if we can do something elsewhere in a our gulag system, we can do it in Gitmo.

………

Say what you will about DiFi (lord knows I’ve often said the same, where I thought it appropriate), but she has just told a President from her own party that he’s breaking the law.

This is what you call a, "statement against interests."

When DiFi is implying that your intelligence activities are over the top, you have jumped the shark.

I would also note that the Snowden matter might very have something to do with this, she also sent a letter expressing concerns to SecDef Hagel about a month ago (about a week and a half after the Snowden revelations).

The US state security apparatus still thinks that this will blow over, but even DiFi realizes that something has changed.

^*Full disclosure, her grandfather, Sam Goldman, and my great-grandfather, Harry Goldman, were brothers.

Back Loaded Bribery

If you play ball with the monied people who want law and regulation structured to ensure that their wealth increases even more, then they reward you with lucrative jobs, like a high paid lobbyist, or, as in the case of Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner, an absurdly lucrative speaking gig:

During his tenure as Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner was constantly dogged by the belief that he was spawned from Wall Street. This thinking was false: If you need a refresher, Geithner had actually spent most of his career in government, and none of it at a bank. When he left office this year, Geithner said that it would be "extremely unlikely" for that to change.

But as it turns out, Geithner is now being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by massive financial organizations. It's just that he isn't being paid to work on Wall Street; he's just being paid to talk every now and then.

The Financial Times reports that Geithner, like countless former public servants before him, has hit the highly lucrative speaking circuit. He's already made about $400,000 in just three engagements. And that tab is being footed by financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank and Blackstone, which paid him about $200,000 and up to $100,000, respectively.

No one ever explicitly told Geithner that if he protected the banksters, he woud get a payoff, but this is explicit in Washington, DC's revolving door.

He knew that he would get rewarded, and he has not been disabused of this belief.

H/t Gaius Publius.

Bummer of a Birthmark, Boeing

A Boeing 787 caught fire at Heathrow, though there are no indications that batteries are involved:

Investigators classified the fire that broke out on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner parked at London's Heathrow airport as a "serious incident" but have found no evidence it was caused by the plane's batteries, Britain's Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said on Saturday.

The question of whether the fire was connected to the batteries is crucial because the entire global fleet of Dreamliners, Boeing's groundbreaking new flagship jet, was grounded for three months this year due to battery-related problems.

The AAIB designation fell just short of a full-blown "accident" on the scale it uses to describe investigations. The agency's preliminary probe is expected to take several days, opening up Boeing to more questions about its top-selling plane.

When Boeing decided that it would be a good idea to outsource most of its expertise to "risk sharing partners", it was pretty much inevitable.

As I noted 2 years ago in the case of Dell Computer, this is penny wise and pound foolish:

So the decline of manufacturing in a region sets off a chain reaction. Once manufacturing is outsourced, process-engineering expertise can’t be maintained, since it depends on daily interactions with manufacturing. Without process-engineering capabilities, companies find it increasingly difficult to conduct advanced research on next-generation process technologies. Without the ability to develop such new processes, they find they can no longer develop new products. In the long term, then, an economy that lacks an infrastructure for advanced process engineering and manufacturing will lose its ability to innovate.

Boeing's problems are further complicated by the fact that its partners did not have the time to develop the expertise to do the job right, so now we have a troubled airliner where the sum of the parts is less than the whole.

F%$# Florida

George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin.

The problem here is that the law, and quite honestly the whole governmental apparatus, of Florida is broken.

Between stand your ground, and half-assed Sanford cops, my guess is that this was inevitable.

Expect more people to be shot for being black in "stand your ground" states now.

51 Years Ago Today

The rolling stones played their first gig in public.

Feel old? I do.

Well Duh!

The Washington Post notes that, "Lawmakers say administration’s lack of candor on surveillance weakens oversight."

Gee, you think?

Lawmakers tasked with overseeing national security policy say a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congress’s ability to rein in government surveillance.

Members of Congress say officials have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more commonly, made statements that left some lawmakers with the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations.

The most recent example came on March 12, when James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the government was not collecting information about millions of Americans. He later acknowledged that the statement was “erroneous” and apologized, citing a misunderstanding.

"Misunderstanding," my ass.

Clapper was given a day's notice that the question was going to be asked, and he was given an opportunity to further clarify immediately after the fact.

He simply lied, because he knew that he could.

You Cannot Tell Me That This Was Not Intentional

Oh to be a fly on the wall of this week's editor's meeting at Businessweek.



H/t TPM.

DuckDuckGo

I've used the search engine DuckDuckGo now and again, and now the search engine, which does not record data on its users, has experienced a surge in use following the NSA revelations:

Gabriel Weinberg noticed web traffic building on the night of Thursday 6 June – immediately after the revelations about the "Prism" programme. Through the programme, the US's National Security Agency claimed to have "direct access" to the servers of companies including, crucially, the web's biggest search engines – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Within days of the story, while the big companies were still spitting tacks and tight-lipped disclaimers, the search engine Weinberg founded – which pledges not to track or store data about its users – was getting 50% more traffic than ever before. That has gone up and up as more revelations about NSA and GCHQ internet tapping have come in.

"It happened with the release by the Guardian about Prism," says Weinberg, right, a 33-year-old living in Paoli, a suburb of Philadelphia on the US east coast. "We started seeing an increase right when the story broke, before we were covered in the press." From serving 1.7m searches a day at the start of June, it hit 3m within a fortnight.

Yet you've probably never heard of DuckDuckGo. "If you asked 100 people, 96 would probably think it was a Chinese restaurant," as the SFGate site observed. (The name comes from the children's game DuckDuckGoose, a sort of tag involving seated players.) You won't find it offered as an alternative default search engine on any browser, on desktop or mobile. Using it is very definitely an active choice, whereas using Google is the default option on most browsers. And 95% of people never change the default settings on anything.

But this 20-person business offers what none of the big search engines do: zero tracking. It doesn't use cookies or store data about its users' IP addresses, doesn't offer user logins, and uses an encrypted connection by default. (Google provides an encrypted connection for logged-in users, but not automatically for non-logged in users.) If the NSA demanded data from DuckDuckGo, there would be none to hand over.

Seeing as how Google (full disclosure, they do cut me a check occasionally for the ads they serve on this site) is determined to drop the word "Don't" from their motto, "Don't be evil," I do wish them all the success in the world.

Why Ellsberg Could Turn Himself In, and Edward Snowden Cannot

Basically, it comes down to the fact that while Ellsberg might have been at risk by illegal activities of the Nixon administration, he was not at risk by the law itself, while Edward Snowden would be tortured as a matter of law and Department of Justice policy:

Many people compare Edward Snowden to me unfavorably for leaving the country and seeking asylum, rather than facing trial as I did. I don’t agree. The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago.

After the New York Times had been enjoined from publishing the Pentagon Papers — on June 15, 1971, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in U.S. history — and I had given another copy to The Post (which would also be enjoined), I went underground with my wife, Patricia, for 13 days. My purpose (quite like Snowden’s in flying to Hong Kong) was to elude surveillance while I was arranging — with the crucial help of a number of others, still unknown to the FBI — to distribute the Pentagon Papers sequentially to 17 other newspapers, in the face of two more injunctions. The last three days of that period was in defiance of an arrest order: I was, like Snowden now, a “fugitive from justice.”

Yet when I surrendered to arrest in Boston, having given out my last copies of the papers the night before, I was released on personal recognizance bond the same day. Later, when my charges were increased from the original three counts to 12, carrying a possible 115-year sentence, my bond was increased to $50,000. But for the whole two years I was under indictment, I was free to speak to the media and at rallies and public lectures. I was, after all, part of a movement against an ongoing war. Helping to end that war was my preeminent concern. I couldn’t have done that abroad, and leaving the country never entered my mind.

There is no chance that experience could be reproduced today, let alone that a trial could be terminated by the revelation of White House actions against a defendant that were clearly criminal in Richard Nixon’s era — and figured in his resignation in the face of impeachment — but are today all regarded as legal (including an attempt to “incapacitate me totally”).

(FYI, “incapacitate me totally” means assassination by Nixon's people)

I hope Snowden’s revelations will spark a movement to rescue our democracy, but he could not be part of that movement had he stayed here. There is zero chance that he would be allowed out on bail if he returned now and close to no chance that, had he not left the country, he would have been granted bail. Instead, he would be in a prison cell like Bradley Manning, incommunicado.

He would almost certainly be confined in total isolation, even longer than the more than eight months Manning suffered during his three years of imprisonment before his trial began recently. The United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture described Manning’s conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.” (That realistic prospect, by itself, is grounds for most countries granting Snowden asylum, if they could withstand bullying and bribery from the United States.)

What he is saying here is that Snowden will be tortured if he ever enters US custody.

Hell, they did that almost 20 years ago in the case of Wen Ho Lee, where he spent months in pretrial solitary, largely because the prosecutors, and the counter-espionage apparatus, wanted to break him.

BTW, when we look at the NSA surveillance regime, it is what a former East German Stasi officer would call a totalitarian state's wet dream:

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

You know, if your surveillance regime is something that gives a former Stasi agent a stiffie, you are doing something profoundly evil.

Former FISA Judge Criticizes the Court

Well, now we have a retired FISA Court Judge saying this court has been reduced to a joke and a fraud:

A retired judge who once served on a secretive U.S. intelligence court said on Tuesday it should not be able to approve broad government data-gathering requests without hearing from outside parties who could warn of potential civil liberties concerns.

Currently, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court makes its decisions on government surveillance requests without hearing from anyone but U.S. Justice Department lawyers in its behind-closed-doors proceedings.

James Robertson, a retired federal judge in Washington who served on the court for three years ending in 2005, said that if the court is required to approve broad data-collection programs, the judges should be able to hear from other parties.

Speaking at a public meeting in Washington on privacy and civil liberties, he said the process would work better if some approximation of an adversarial system existed.

"I submit this process needs an adversary," he said.

Robertson suggested the possible reforms during the public meeting held by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, a bipartisan government entity set up in 2004 to advise the White House on civil liberties concerns raised by intelligence gathering. He said the privacy board itself could possibly be a party in the intelligence court's proceedings.

The actions of the court have come under new scrutiny following the disclosure of previously secret telephone and internet surveillance programs conducted by the U.S. government.

The British Guardian and the Washington Post newspapers disclosed the details of the data collection in June based on documents provided by Edward Snowden, the fugitive U.S. National Security Agency contractor believed to be holed up in Russia.

Since the U.S. Congress amended the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 2008, the court "now approves programmatic surveillance," Robertson said, meaning it was acting more like a government agency than a court.

"That's not the bailiwick of judges," he said. "Judges don't make policy."

Robertson said that when he served on the court, the judges' role was to decide whether to grant government requests for individual warrants, he said. Granting approval to entire programs is not a "judicial function," he said.

(emphasis mine)

While he does say that he is not suggesting the law is being broken, this sort of talk from a judge about his court (with the possible exception of Antonin "Fat Tony" Scalia) is very rare.

Note also that he is not criticizing the judges, he is criticizing the role of the court under new laws.

Understanding just how vehement this seemingly mild speech is a bit like reading Nathanial Hawthorne,^* he cannot express his outrage explicitly.  It is a circuitously oblique way to to express his views, but this is as befits a judge.

^*The phrase, "Then, all was spoken!" refers to physical passion (probably sex) in The Scarlet Letter.

I Liked Him Better as Ford Prefect

Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) volunteers to be force fed to show what it's like for the Guantanamo detainees. (Not for the faint of heart, I felt ill after watching)



Note that they stopped when he asked. In our Gulag in the Caribbean, they don't stop, and it goes on for 2 hours ……… Twice a day.

Because torturing people who have been cleared of any crime, because Barack Obama lacks the balls to let them out, is what we have become as a society.

And still, the Republicans are working on a phony IRS and Benghazi scandal, instead of this, or his coddling the banksters.

There are very real crimes here, and the Republicans cannot bring themselves to complain about the torture of non-white people.

And this will be the response from the Obamabots:



Food for thoughtlessness

My Vacation Pix & Sh%$

I'm still organizing the pix, so it will be a few days.

I'm probably going to paste a couple of pix for each category, and link to the rest in some sort of album (Probably Imgur or Tumblr).

One of the joys of digital media is that you can take pictures at essentially no cost, and I took advantage of it.

I Need a Vacation From My Vacation

Too tired to blog.

Posted via mobile.

More Geeking Our on Our Vacation

The Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

More pix to follow.

Posted via mobile.

The Joys of a 16 Year Old Daughter

While packing to head home, she got cross, and let fly, "I am not a bitch, shut the F$&% up!"

I think that this is a classic in the annals of angst and the teenage girl.

Posted via mobile.

On the Way to the WTC Memorial

And I am hanging out in a little square watching portions and waiting for the time our passes say we can go in, and I am using Google maps to look at things to do while we cool our heels.  (Which is pretty amazing on it's own, that I can look for stuff on my phone.)

I then notice that Zucotti Park is near by, and then I realize that I am in Zucotti Park, and that there are OWS protesters at the other end.

Kewl!

More pix to follow.

Posted via mobile.

A New York State of Mind

Ran out of juice, so I did not post it from my phone, but we went to the Empire State Building, and walked around the lobby taking pictures of the (now restored to original) Art Deco interior.

The line for the observation deck was too long, and the price for the elevator trip to the top deck was $42 (!) so we did not go up.

After we finished with our impromptu tour, we grabbed pretzels from a street vendor and walked down the East 33^rd street, where we hit the Fashion Museum.

From there, we took the subway to the construction site for the new World trade center, and then the PATH back to where we had parked our car.

Fun time.

Deep Thought

It appears that for women under 30 in New York, at least in July, the brassiere is optional.

I approve.

Posted via mobile.

Catch Phrases VIII

As I've noted before, this may not as big a deal as one would think, as achieving air superiority comes down to training and tactics, so even with an inferior platform, particularly when backed up by superior numbers and logistics.

^*As I have asked many times, "Is there anything that big finance can't make destructive and evil?"^†
†If the goal is to involve Wall Street in a public service, the effect will harm that service. QED.

Left align right align
on same line

Requiring police officers to self insure




......
testing

^*how do do indented multiline footnotes
testing
testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing testing

testing

Betteridge's law of headlines, "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

1. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
2. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
3. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
4. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
5. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
6. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>
7. Add spacing to list <ul> and ordered list </ol>

Corrupt Former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin^™

(יש"ו) (Y.S.) yimakh shemo יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ "May his name be obliterated"

Kung Fu monkey has the final word on Rand and her Randroid followers:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

Out Standing!

^*At Naked Capitalism, in the aptly named post, "Neo-liberalism Expressed as Simple Rules," gives two basic rules:

1. Because markets.
2. Go die!

No Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Die

Having a Serious Geekgasm

Taking a leisurely drive to NYC, and we stopped at the Roebling Museum.

Roebling, as in the company that built the Brooklyn and San Francisco bridges.

History and engineering bliss.

Pix to follow.

Posted via mobile.

Btw

I just got carded.

Heading to the bar at the club.

Seriously serious carding.

First time on my life.

At age 50.

I have a dull life.

Posted via mobile.

Road Trip!

In Philly.   Will be heading to the City (NYC) tomorrow.

Currently at a concert with my wife & kids, The Maine and A Rocket to the Moon.

On the way down, we passed the Philadelphia Naval shipyard, and saw a bunch of mothballed ships, including some Aegis class cruisers, including the Ticonderoga (CG-47).

Pix to follow.

Posted via mobile.

It's Like a Slow Motion Car Wreck

So, the little people will be required to buy health insurance under the PPACA (Obamacare), but the requirement for big employers has been pushed back a year:

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

The move addresses complaints from employer groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements. The decision pushes the issue past the 2014 midterm congressional elections, as Republicans have sought to make the health law a symbol of government overreach.

“In our ongoing discussions with businesses we have heard that you need the time to get this right,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, said in a White House blog post announcing the decision. “We are listening.”

The move may lead some employers to delay providing coverage to workers. The law’s individual mandate remains in effect, a provision that requires most Americans to carry health insurance.

You knew that this was coming.

When big business talks, they, "Are listening."

When it's civil libertarians, , the poor and elderly, advocates for financial reform, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, etc., it's, "talk to the hand".



H/t to my Dad, who sent me a link to a (subscription only) WSJ article.

What the F%$#?

This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it.

Authorities, forced down Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane because he was suspected to be carrying Edward Snowden to Bolivia:

The plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales home from Russia was rerouted to Austria on Tuesday after France and Portugal refused to let it cross their airspace because of suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden was on board, the country’s foreign minister said.

Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca denied that Snowden was on the plane, which landed in Vienna, and said France and Portugal would have to explain why they canceled authorization for the plane.

“We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales,” Choquehuanca said from Vienna, where the plane landed.

………

“This is a hostile act by the United States State Department which has used various European governments,” said Bolivian Defense Minister Ruben Saavedra, who was on the flight.

Choquehuanca said in a statement that after France and Portugal canceled authorization for the flight, Spain’s government allowed the plane to be refueled in its territory. From there the Falcon plane flew on to Vienna.

He said the decision by France and Portugal “put at risk the life of the president.”

They f%$#ing interfered with the f%$#ing flight of a f%$#ing diplomatic f%$#ing flight carrying a f%$#ing President of a f%$#ing sovereign f%$#ing nation, almost certainly as the result of a fairly explicit request from the United States.

This is insane.  I'm beginning to think that Snowden knows a lot more than just the fact that the NSA spies on Americans and ignores the law and/or uses a completely obedient FISA court as a fig leaf, because this level of pressure is a clear disaster for both the reputation and the foreign policy of the United States.

Seriously.  What ……… the ……… f%$#?

When you are making Vladimir Putin, who is saying that Snowden has to stop leaking if he wants asylum in Russia, seem like the only sensible person with an ounce of compassion in this entire affair.

Seriously.  Vladimir Putin?  What ……… the ……… Oh, never mind.

Light Posting this Week

We have a week long plant shutdown where I work, so we are going on a road trip.

We will hit Philly on Wednesday and catch part of A Rocket to the Moon's Farewell Tour, and then we head to New York City to catch some museums.

Oh, Crap

Have you heard about MERS?

I don't mean the fraudulent legal figleaf known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System that is a plague upon home-owners, I am instead referring an actual plague to Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a SARS like infectious disease with a 55% fatality rate centered in Saudi Arabia.

Discussions of this disease have been bouncing around the epidemiology world for a while, there have only been about 80 confirmed cases, but in a couple of months millions of pilgrims will be going to Saudi Arabia as a part of the Hajj:

When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

Although the numbers -- so far -- are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia's holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means "to visit a populated place," and it's the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent -- a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

All this is going on while a Dutch lab is claiming rights to the species genome, which is crippling research on the disease.

This has all the hallmarks of a public health catastrophe.