Good Day for Journalistic Malpractice

Buzz Feed just published a story claiming that Russia wired to thousands dollars to its embassy in Washington, DC to influence the 2016 election.

Their evidence is a leak from someone in the FBI saying that they surveilled transfers to the embassy with "2016 election" in the memo field.

It turns out that if you ignore the headline, and the over the top tweets, and make it down 7 paragraphs, (Well, not any more, they rewrote the article) you discover that the money was to cover the expenses of setting up polling places for the 2016 Russian parliamentary elections: (Wapo link because I don't want to raise their Google rank, and because of the rewrite)

There is a persistent belief among many Americans that there exists a piece of evidence that will, once and for all, prove that President Trump was aware that the Russian government hoped that he would win the presidency and, further, that he or his campaign encouraged and aided that Russian effort. That belief is informed by two things: the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the election and the surfeit of revelations that, looked at through the proper lens, indicate an awful lot of smoke masking an as-yet-unseen fire.

The result is that a lot of people are eager for any new bread crumbs that seem as though they might lead to clear proof of Trump’s collusion. And that, in turn, means stories that might serve as those bread crumbs tend to see a lot of traffic for the news outlets that write them.

On Tuesday afternoon, a new story at BuzzFeed seemed like it might find a place in the picture of Russian meddling. “Secret Finding,” the headline proclaimed, “60 Russian Payments ‘To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016.’ ” The quoted section of the headline referred to the memo fields of a wire transfer sent by the Russian government to the embassy in Washington. It was Aug. 3, and the embassy was being sent $30,000 earmarked for the “election campaign of 2016.”

………

There was just one detail that didn’t warrant mentioning in the blurb or the alert . . . or even the story until the seventh paragraph: Russia, too, had an election last year, for its own legislative body. That election was held in mid-September, six weeks or so after the payment to the embassy in Washington.

BuzzFeed noted that it wasn’t only the U.S. Embassy that had received money. So, too, did embassies in countries as widespread as Afghanistan and Nigeria, with the last payments being sent two days after the election. After the Russian election, that is.

 Someone got their journalism degree out of a Cracker Jack box.

The Distinguished Gentleman from Virginia Can Go Cheney Himself

Virginia Senator Mark Warner is proposing legislation vitiating state regulation of the predatory practices of payday lenders, because, without the ability to f%$# poor people, we won't see "innovation":

A little over a year ago, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) addressed a small audience of political insiders at the Brookings Institution, one of the most prestigious think tanks in the nation’s capital. Times were changing, Warner told the crowd, and the old guard from Washington and Wall Street wasn’t keeping up with the needs of the modern workforce. The gig economy, outsourcing and automation had created an era of unprecedented “income volatility” for Americans. New financial technology firms had “an opportunity to bridge part of that new social contract,” to “lean forward and meet workers where they’re working.”

………


A year later, that tomorrow has arrived. And the grand financial technology breakthrough, it turns out, is to help payday lenders sidestep basic consumer protection laws.


In late July, Warner introduced the ingeniously titled “Protecting Consumers’ Access to Credit Act of 2017.” The legislation would allow payday lenders to ignore state interest rate caps on consumer loans as long as they partnered with a national bank.

………

Silicon Valley has been toying with the high-interest consumer loan market for a few years. LendingClub, Prosper, LendUp and other FinTech companies have been billing themselves as hip, savvy alternatives to payday loans or pricey credit cards. They typically partner with a bank to avoid regulatory costs, and they are just as eager to bypass state usury laws as are their more notorious competitors. LendingClub, in particular, insists it will not be able to help people lower their credit card bills if it has to abide by state usury caps (banks that issue credit cards are mostly exempt from those laws, after all).

Someone please primary this SOB.

This Is America, of Course He Can't Keep His Mass Shootings Straight

There are simply too many mass shootings to keep track of them all:

It’s not uncommon for presidents to express condolences after a mass shooting in America, but it’s certainly unusual for them to forget the city in which it occurred.

President Donald Trump took to Twitter Tuesday night after the shooting at the Rancho Tehema Elementary School in northern California. But instead of acknowledging the tragedy there, he name-checked the one in Sutherland Springs, Texas, which took place Nov. 5.

Mixed Emotions

After Morgan Tsvangirai won the first round of Presidential elections in Zimbabwe in 2008, I followed developments there hoping for a peaceful transition to democracy for a few years before throwing in the towel.

I figured that nothing would change, and I felt that I had nothing to add.

Well, it appears that the Zimbabwe Defence Forces have deposed Robert Mugabe in a coup.

I'm not sure if this actually constitutes a change, or if it will lead to change:

Zimbabwe — After ruling Zimbabwe for nearly four decades, leading the country from the triumph of its independence struggle to economic collapse, the world’s oldest head of state became a prisoner of the military he once commanded.

Robert Mugabe, 93, was detained along with his wife, according to a military announcement Wednesday. The move appears to end one of Africa’s most controversial political dynasties while raising questions about what might come next — military rule, a transitional government or a settlement that would allow Mugabe to return to power.

No matter what happens, this appears to be a watershed moment for Zimbabwe and southern Africa, which have suffered from the tumult of Mugabe’s reign, even as his hold on power sometimes seemed unshakable.

Zimbabweans awoke early Wednesday to a televised announcement from an army general promising that there was “not a military takeover,” although Mugabe had been detained and armored vehicles were rolling into Harare, the capital.

………

Mugabe recently purged some key officials from the ruling party, ZANU-PF, paving the way for his 52-year-old spouse, Grace, to succeed him. Many see that move as a major miscalculation, alienating Mugabe from the civilians and military leaders on whom he had long depended. 

Seeing as how the military is part and parcel of the corruption and human rights disaster that is today's Zimbabwe, I do not expect this to usher in an era freedom, prosperity, and democracy.

Hackitude

Of course, it's Ezra Klein who is the very modern model of cognitive dissonance.

He suggests that the Democratic establishment, of which the DNC is a part, tried to determine the outcome, and that somehow this is not an attempt to "rig" the primaries, because ……… Sparkle ponies.

It's kind of like how he suggests that the DNC debate schedule, which foreclosed meaningful exposure to candidates not named "Clinton", and the rules prohibiting other debates, weren't an attempt to fix things because, "Debates are arguably her best medium," despite the fact that Sanders more than held his own, and O'Malley excelled, while he lasted.

The concluding paragraph of the article summarizes this incoherent world salad:

The 2016 Democratic primary wasn’t rigged by the DNC, and it certainly wasn’t rigged against Sanders. But Democratic elites did try to make Clinton’s nomination as inevitable, as preordained, as possible. And the party is still managing the resentment that engendered in voters. “Once somebody doesn’t trust you,” sighs Buckley, the New Hampshire Democratic chair, “it’s very hard to get that trust back.”

Jeebus.  I wish that there were a cure for Michael Kinsley Disease. (Mindless contrarianism)

Crowdfunding Site Launched for Woman Who Gave Trump the Finger | Fortune

Remember how I wrote about Julie Briskman, who was bicycling and was passed by Donald Trump's motorcade, and gave him the bird?
I noted that she had been fired by Akima, a government contractor.just

Well, she crowded-funded over $50,000 $75,000 $96,355 and got a job offer:

Juli Briskman was fired when the picture of her flipping off the presidential motorcade went viral. But she’s doing just fine these days.

After word spread that her employer, government contractor Akima LLC, had terminated her, supporters quickly rallied and set up a fund-raising campaign in her name. To date, she has received pledges for nearly $75,000 in donations from people she has never met (and likely never will).

Over 3,000 donations, ranging from $5 to $250 have rolled in over the past week.

………

Briskman hasn’t yet announced a new job, but — rather predictably — she does have at least one offer. Porn company xHamster put an open offer on Twitter for her to join their marketing and social media team, following the long tradition of adult entertainment companies trying to catch a ride on pop culture events.

I am very amused.

Fabulous!

Australia just had an official postal poll on gay marriage. The bigots lost decisively:

Australia has taken a decisive step towards legislating marriage equality by Christmas after 61.6% of voters in an unprecedented national postal survey approved a change to the law to allow couples of the same sex to marry.

The result, announced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday, will lead to consideration of a same-sex marriage bill in parliament with the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, promising marriage equality should be law by Christmas.

With a turnout of 79.5% the result in the voluntary survey is considered a highly credible reflection of Australian opinion and gives marriage equality advocates enormous momentum to achieve the historic social reform. Australia’s chief statistician, David Kalisch, announced the results at a press conference in Canberra at 10am on Wednesday, revealing 7,817,247 people voted in favour and 4,873,987 voted against.

Two snaps up!

Another Day, Another Mass Shooting

This time, it's California.

Is this even news anymore?

I Actually Said Something Witty Today

On the Stellar Parthenon BBS, a bunch of people were ranting about how Bezos and his Evil Minions^™ will be producing a Lord of the Rings prequel.

They are convinced that it will be complete pants.

My response, "Forget it Jake, it's Amazon."

Heh.

Kidney Stone of a Commute Today

A car accident on the Beltway, a truck fire on I-95, and as a result an hour and a half commute to travel 26 miles.

That's an average speed of around 18 mph.

The only time I smiled on the way to work, was when I saw this bumper sticker:



I did smile at that.

Well, This Explains a Lot

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has over $25 million in campaign funds, and for 6 months last year, he literally raised no small dollars at all:

At $25 million and counting, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sits atop the largest tower of campaign contributions of any Democratic politician in America. But this monument to his prodigious fund-raising strength also reveals one of his greatest vulnerabilities, especially if he harbors presidential ambitions.

He has virtually no small donors.

Since the beginning of 2015, Mr. Cuomo has raised over 99 percent of his campaign money from donations larger than $1,000 and nearly 99.9 percent of his funds from donors who gave at least $200, according to an analysis by The New York Times. At one point last year, Mr. Cuomo went six months without reporting a single individual donor who gave less than $200.

“You almost have to try to have that few,” said Michael Whitney, who served as Senator Bernie Sanders’s digital fund-raising manager on his 2016 presidential campaign. He said that if Mr. Cuomo were to run for president and maintain his “comically absent number of small donors,” it could cripple him in an era where both parties, but particularly Democrats, have become reliant on an army of small givers to compete at the national level.

(emphasis mine)

This is f%$#ed up on so many levels, it buggers the mind.

I am so hoping that he loses the primary in 2018, though there are 25 million reasons why this is unlikely.

He the epitome of everything that is wrong with "centrist" Democratic hypocrites.

Matt Taibbi Shows What a Proper Apology Looks Like

Taibbi, back in his days at The eXile wrote some awful sh%$.  (Full disclosure:  I love his stuff from back then.)

He frankly admits that what he wrote was, "horrifying, embarrassing, hurtful, and stupid,"

It's a long read, but well worth the time.  Read it.  Seriously.

But What if it Gets Used for Evil ……… Oh ………Wait ……… It Already Has

Computer boffins in the land of Hobbits are using AI based chat bots to screw with scammers.

It's a nice to see someone turning chat bots against the scammers:

Thousands of online scammers around the globe are being fooled by artificial intelligence bots posing as New Zealanders and created by the country’s internet watchdog to protect it from “phishing” scams.

Chatbots that use distinct New Zealand slang such as “aye” have been deployed by Netsafe in a bid to engage scammers in protracted email exchanges that waste their time, gather intelligence and lure them away from actual victims.

yber crime costs New Zealanders around NZ$250m annually. Computer programmers at Netsafe spent more than a year designing the bots as part of their Re:scam initiative, which went live on Wednesday.

Within 24 hours 6,000 scam emails had been sent to the Re:scam email address and there were 1000 active conversations taking place between scammers and chatbots.

So far, the longest exchange between a scammer and a chatbot pretending to be a New Zealander was 20 emails long.

The bots use humour, grammatical errors and local slang to make their “personas” believable, said Netsafe CEO Martin Cocker. As the programme engages in more fake conversations with scammers overseas, its vocabulary, intelligence and personality traits will grow.

Here's hoping that the AIs will spend their time battling each other, and ,leave the rest of us alone.

Tweet of the Day

Much of the decline in the US unemployment rate has been due to falling labour participation. Otherwise, the rate would be 8%, not half that at 4%. So it isn't that much of a jobs miracle.@ProfSteveKeen @TheBubbleBubble @jtepper2 pic.twitter.com/p5Ldht35WY

— Philip Soos (@PhilipSoos) November 8, 2017

This is why people are not satisfied with the current economy even though the economists seem to think that it is wonderful.

Linkage

• The Myth of the Kindly General Lee (The Atlantic) Lee not only supported slavery, but he was a particularly heinous slave owner who argued against the black franchise post war, and turned a blind eye to white supremacist violence by students at Washington College (Now Washington and Lee University) when he was president there.
• Ukraine's Invented a 'Jewish-Ukrainian Nationalist' to Whitewash Its Nazi-era Past (Haaretz) Forget it Jake, it's the Ukraine.
• How to Build a Fallout Shelter Using Nothing but IKEA Furniture (Vice) Thank you, but death before IKEA.
• User asked help desk to debug a Post-it Note that survived a reboot (The Register) Today's, "White Out on the screen," moment.
• Roy Moore's alleged pursuit of a young girl is the symptom of a larger problem in evangelical circles (LA Times) It appears that child brides is a feature of the seamier side of Evangelical Christianity in the US.
• Green Beret Discovered SEALs’ Illicit Cash. Then He Was Killed. (Daily Beast) This is a predictable result of the juxtaposition of money, secrecy, and people trained to be highly proficient killers.
• Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker says social network exploits human 'vulnerability' (Business Insider) From the Department of Well Duh!
• SEC Chief Fires Warning Shot Against Coin Offerings (Wall Street Journal) They are looking at classifying them as securities.  If it walks like a duck………

How to Eat Sushi:

Aaron Burr's Gift to the Republic

While Alexander Hamilton was clearly a highly intelligent man, an examination of who and what he was reveals that he was the founding most hostile to the idea of a constitutional republic, and the one most likely to turn the US into a monarchy or dictatorship.

Among other things, he:

• Advocated for the creation of a standing permanent army run by and for the Federalist party.
• Called for the use of military force to prevent Thomas Jefferson becoming president after he was elected.
• Attempted to foment a coup against the US government.
• Was a slave trader, not an abolitionist.
• Attempted to put that day's big finance in charge of the government.

 Hamilton was a bad guy, and here is the money quote of this article:

But the agenda is hidden, because in America, no political leader, not even Donald Trump, can credibly come right out and pronounce democracy a bad thing and agitate for rule by big finance. And the reason for that is that Alexander Hamilton, despite his success in structuring Wall Street, lost the battle against American democracy. Thank God for that.

Read Harold Feld

He is a lawyer for the Public Knowledge, which advocates for, "Policies that serve the public interest."

He lives and breaths this stuff, and he has looked at the merger between AT&T and Time Warner, and the rumored remedies that the US Department of Justice is demanding, and concludes that the remedies demanded by the government, including requiring a divestiture of CNN, have extensive precedent and are reasonable in the context of the industry:

I want to start by applauding Randal Stephenson for coming out quickly and denying the rumors that DoJ asked them to sell CNN as the price of getting the merger done. At the same time, however, he acknowledged that negotiations were “complicated,” and that he and recently confirmed Asst A.G. for Antitrust Makan Delrahim were still “getting to know each other” and “figure out the ask on the other side of the table.” He also made it clear that, if DoJ does challenge, AT&T is prepared to go to court and are confident they will win.

AT&T is generally pretty good at persuading everyone that DoJ doesn’t really have a case against them. As folks may recall, despite the fact that the proposed AT&T/T-Mo transaction violated just about every basic tenant of existing antitrust law, AT&T managed to convince everyone for the longest time that DoJ was just playing hardball with them and didn’t really mean it because DoJ didn’t really have a case. While Stephenson refused to discuss what was negotiated, the rumors suggest it was a demand to divest either DIRECTV or the Turner Broadcasting cable channels (which include CNN, as well as TNT, HBO and a bunch of other real popular programming.) Once again, you have antitrust experts who do not have any particular experience with cable mergers shaking their heads and predicting that DoJ has no case.

In fact, demanding divestiture of either the must have content or the DIRECTV distribution platform is precisely the remedy you would expect if you believe the deal presents significant harm because of the vertical integration issues. That’s been the position of my employer, Public Knowledge, which has opposed the transaction since AT&T announced the deal. (That predates Trump’s election, for those of you wondering.) If you want a more detailed understanding of the theory of the harms, you can find it in my boss Gene Kimmelman’s testimony to Congress here. While generally true that vertical deals are hard to challenge, the cable industry has long been something of an exception, and the remedy here is similar to what the FTC imposed on the AT&T/Turner deal in 1996, where the FTC imposed stock divestitures and restructuring to eliminate the voting interest of John Malone and Liberty Media because of Malone/Liberty’s ownership TCI, which was then the largest cable operator in the United States (25% national market share). Given the massive criticism of “behavioral” remedies and a call to return to “structural” remedies from the right and the left, it’s unsurprising that DoJ would want actual divestiture rather than go the Comcast/NBCU consent decree route.

I would add that consent decrees tend to have limited effect over the long run, and that Public Knowledge has opposed this merger since before Trump's election.

While a lot of people have tried to cast opposition to the deal as political interference by Trump and his Evil Minions^™, it is clear that opposition could be easily justified.

This might be another case of a stopped clock being right twice a day, or it might be a vendetta by Donald Trump. 

Just don't jump to conclusions yet.

Read the rest.

But of Course

Remember the company Whitefish?

It had only two employees, and then it got a $300 million contract to repair Puerto Rico's electrical grid following the damage from hurricane Maria.

They had ties to the Trump campaign and Interior Secretary Zinke.

Well, one of their first jobs, a high power transmission line, just failed, cutting power coverage from 40% to 18%.

So not a surprise.

Just When I Thought That It Could Not Get Any Weirder………

We now have allegations that Michael Flynn, Trump's former NSC Advisor, tried to cut a deal with representatives of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to kidnap dissident cleric Fethullah Gülen and transport him to Turkey:

Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, is under investigation for involvement in an alleged plot to kidnap a Turkish dissident cleric living in the US and fly him to an island prison in Turkey in return for $15m, it was reported on Friday.

………

The new allegation, that Flynn and his son engaged in a conspiracy to arrange the rendition of Fethullah Gülen to the Erdoğan government – which accuses the cleric of plotting an abortive coup in July 2016 – could if confirmed result in even more serious charges.

In September, the Wall Street Journal reported a meeting about the plan, in which former CIA director James Woolsey is said to have participated. Friday’s report describes a second meeting involving both Flynns at the 21 Club restaurant, a prohibition-era New York speakeasy patronised by Trump, in mid-December. According to “people familiar with the investigation”, it was at this encounter that the $15m payment was discussed.

Even if this were legal, and it might be under a legal precedent from the late 1800s, this is SERIOUSLY f%$#ed up.

Even for Flynn, a man who typifies the flying monkey faction of modern conservatism, this is off the charts.

Once again, reality outstrips the most outlandish products of my imagination.

Speaking of Overrated Silicon Valley Brogrammers

On appeal, the decision of the UK Employment Tribunal to classify drivers to be employees of Uber has been upheld on appeal:

Uber suffered another setback in its biggest market outside the United States after a British employment tribunal rejected the ride-hailing company’s argument that its drivers are self-employed.

The decision on Friday, which affirmed a ruling issued last year, means that Uber will have to ensure that its drivers in Britain receive a minimum wage and paid time off. That creates problems for a common hiring model in the so-called gig economy that relies on workers who do not have formal contracts.

Companies argue that such labor practices increase flexibility on both sides of the hiring equation. But critics counter that the system is exploitative and deprives employees of important safeguards like unemployment insurance.

The ruling was the second blow to Uber’s business here in recent months. In September, London’s transport authority barred the company from operating in the British capital.

In the case before the employment tribunal, two men, James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, had challenged Uber on behalf of a group of 19 drivers, saying that the service had denied them basic protections by classifying them as self-employed. Uber countered with an argument it has used around the world: Its drivers were independent contractors.

“You can hide behind technology, but the laws are there, and they need to be obeyed and respected,” Mr. Aslam, 36, said in an interview after the tribunal issued its decision. “The impact of this ruling could affect thousands of drivers, and not just drivers but millions of workers across the U.K.”

The core of Uber's business model is that they can make other people cover the bulk of their costs, because ………Internet.

That they are finally getting push-back on this is heartening.

About F%$#ing Time

It appears that the hagiography of brogrammers and Silicon Valley "Unicorns" has hit its expiration date:

When Danny Greg first moved to San Francisco to work at Github in 2012, he used to get high-fives in the street from strangers when he wore his company hoodie.

These days, unless he’s at an investor event, he’s cautious about wearing branded clothing that might indicate he’s a techie. He’s worried about the message it sends.

Greg is one of many people working in tech who are increasingly self-conscious about how the industry – represented by consumer-facing tech titans like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Twitter and Uber – is perceived: as underregulated, overly powerful companies filled with wealthy tech bros and “brilliant assholes” with little regard for the local communities they occupy. Silicon Valley has taken over from Wall Street as the political bogeyman of choice, turning tech workers – like it or not – into public ambassadors for the 1%.

“I would never say I worked at Facebook,” said one 30-year-old software engineer who left the company last year to pursue an alternative career. Instead, at dinner parties he would give purposefully vague responses and change the subject. “There’s this song and dance you learn to play because people are quick to judge.”

Like Wall Street before, the tech industry is a justifiable punchbag. “MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm.”

Gee, my heart bleeds for these guys.

Quote of the Day

Bill Clinton Was A Horrible President

He really was. 20 years later I am tired of people defending him. Impeachment was bullsh%$ but he was a bad man and a bad Democrat and a bad president.

—Atrios

(%$# mine)

Mass incarceration, destroying welfare, repealing Glass-Steagall, privatizing core government functions, DADT, DOMA, etc.

He's right.

Linkage

• Princeton Digs Deep Into Its Fraught Racial History (New York Times) Princeton was always the Ivy of choice for segreationists, see Wilson, Woodrow. It first graduated blacks in 1947, and had only 7 black undergrads in 1962.
• Unpaid labourers are 'slipping pleas for help into Zara clothes' (The Independent) Clearly the globalism tide raises all boats.
• MINIX: ​Intel's hidden in-chip operating system (ZDNet) Minix is also not secure.
• Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects (LabSix) Convincing AI systems that a cat is a bowl of guacamole, or that a turtle is a rifle.
• Scientists on new supernova: WTF have we been looking at? (Ars Technica) Supernova iPTF14hls has been going boom for much longer than our models would indicate.
• German officials celebrate doubled Twitter character limit (AP) Well, I can see how this might be an issue when describing the impact of Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz on a Niederflurfoerderfahrzeugfuehrer working on beef products. (Real German words.)

Cat meets Crayfish. Sorry, no sound.

Taibbi Nails it Again

In reviewing the revelations of Donna Brazile's new book, Matt Taibbi identifies the root problem here:

………

The point of the Brazile story isn't that the people who "rigged" the primary were afraid of losing an election. It's that they weren't afraid of betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn't believe in them anymore.

If you're not frightened by the growing appeal of that line of thinking, you should be. There is a history of this sort of thing. And it never ends well.

That Republicans have believed this is not a surprise. Disdain for the hoi polloi is at the core of conservative ideology, and has been since before Plato's Republic.

The neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has embraced this as well.

We see it in opaque and confusing programs (Obamacare), "nudge" theory, unaccountable "experts" running our lives (ISDS, Fed, etc.).

It's why we are seeing an upsurge in populism.

And Roy Moore Takes His Clown Show to a New Level

Cannot post this without invoking Lily Allen

I was surprised when I read of allegations that Alabama candidate for the US Senate Roy Moore has been alleged to have had sexual encounters with teen girls, but only because I was expecting that the skeletons in his closet to be pre-teen boys, because that is how homophobe hypocrites tend to roll.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.

“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.”

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

Two of Corfman’s childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.

Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the three women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.

………

Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women say they don’t know one another.

………

The legal age of consent in Alabama, then and now, is 16. Under Alabama law in 1979, and today, a person who is at least 19 years old who has sexual contact with someone older than 12 and younger than 15 has committed sexual abuse in the second degree. Sexual contact is defined as touching of sexual or intimate parts. The crime is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

Moore, of course, is claiming that it's all a political hit job.

Me, I have a simpler explanation:  You are a skeevy perv.

If you are wondering why this is happening now, you could put it down to happenstance, or increased awareness following l'affaire Weinstein, but I have a simpler explanation:  God hates you, Roy Moore.

Stopped Clock, H1B Edition

The Trump administration is starting to apply due diligence to the widely abused H1B guest worker program, and companies used to doing whatever the f%$# they want are having a tantrum:

Donald Trump came into office promising a restrictive new approach to immigration and there has been little question about his intention to follow through — with one seeming exception. Despite its enthusiastic rhetoric about the H-1B program, which provides temporary visas to high-skilled workers, the administration failed to make significant changes in time to impact the program’s annual lottery this April, leaving some who had anticipated action fuming. It has also declined to take up any of the legislative proposals for H-1B overhaul.

But a crackdown has been in the works, albeit more quietly. Starting this summer, employers began noticing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications. Cases that would have sailed through the approval process in earlier years ground to a halt under requests for new paperwork. The number of challenges — officially known as “requests for evidence” or RFEs — are up 44 percent compared to last year, according to statistics from USCIS. The percentage of H-1B applications that have resulted in RFEs this year are at the highest level they’ve been since 2009, and by absolute number are considerably higher than any year for which the agency provided statistics.

The H-1B program is controversial largely because IT firms based in India have used it to hire for rote computer programming jobs. These firms, like Infosys Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., have been working to reduce their reliance on the program, in anticipation of a less receptive political landscape. The overall number of H-1B applications dropped this year for the first time in five years. The skeptical eye the government is taking to applications has extended to all types of employers, according to immigration lawyers. Many are rethinking their own use of H-1B as a result.

The H1B program was intended to allow for someone to be hired if they have a skill set that could not be found in the US.

The H1B program does not work that way in reality.  It's actually a source of cheap labor, and a way to lower wages generally in the industry.

Donald Trump is right on this, and the delicate snowflakes who are experiencing butt hurt over this are wrong.

Mark Zuckerberg Wants Me to Send Him What?!?!?!?!?

Facebook is testing a new feature in Australia.

Here is how it workssend Facebook your nude picture, and they promise to try to prevent revenge porn posts on their platform.

Seriously? Send a nude picture of myself to Mark Zuckerberg and his Evil Minions^™?

Facebook is asking users to send the company their nude photos in an effort to tackle revenge porn, in an attempt to give some control back to victims of this type of abuse.

Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner (or ex-partner) might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be “hashed”. This means that the company converts the image into a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to identify and block any attempts to re-upload that same image.

Facebook is piloting the technology in Australia in partnership with a government agency headed up by the e-safety commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, who told ABC it would allow victims of “image-based abuse” to take action before pictures were posted to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.

“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” she told the Australian broadcaster.

It makes me want to go all. "Jules in Pulp Fiction."

I gotta figure that if you send Facebook your nude pix, you will shortly be seeing a lot of ads for penis enlargement, boob jobs, body hair removal, or anal bleaching.

Tweet of the Day

A socialist beat the House whip with no support from the party and is singing Solidarity Forever at his victory party, we can do this everywhere https://t.co/BVW9wOmW5b

— Will Bloom 🍞🌹 (@WillWBloom) November 8, 2017

Here is a low quality video of him singing:

🌹When a marine veteran socialist beats the GOP majority whip in Virginia 🌹 pic.twitter.com/QxUCCY9TRG

— Metro DC DSA (@dc_dsa) November 8, 2017

Election Night

In New Jersey, Democrats have retaken the Governor's mansion, but this is not a surprise.

Jersey is firmly blue, and outgoing Republican Governor Chris Christie is well past his sell by date, and the polls predicted a romp, so this is not a surprise.

Virginia has been a much closer affair, but the Democrats won, taking the Governor's race, and the Lt. Governor and Attorney General races.

In the Governor's race, Ralph Northam beat Ed Gillespie by 9% beating the polls by 6%.

Further down ticket, the Democrats have picked up at least 14 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, with 4 as-yet-uncalled close races possibly flipping the chamber.

Particularly heartening is the fact that Virginia's first transgender person to win an election, defeated a Republican who is arguably the most virulent anti-LGBT bigot in the state house:

Danica Roem, who will be Virginia’s first openly transgender elected official, defeated Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), a culture warrior who opposes LGBT rights. Elizabeth Guzman, who raised more money than any Democratic candidate except for Hurst, unseated Del. L. Scott Lingamfelter (R-Woodbridge).

A good night.

Tweet of the Day

So many members of the Cabinet ought to resign that none of them can. It's like the Three Stooges trying to get through a door.

— Hugo Rifkind (@hugorifkind) November 7, 2017

Yeah, pretty much.

F%$# the Mouse

The LA Times published an article describing how much corporate welfare Disney Land is extracting from the city of Anaheim.

The mouse didn't like this, so they banned LA Times movie reviewers from advance showings of their movies, including things like Marvel and Star Wars movies.

In response many critics from other papers have announced that they will not be participating in advance showings, and a number of critics groups have barred all Disney movies from consideration at their year end awards.

If this were about an Times critic violating an embargo date, I could see some justification, but this is just thuggery.

BTW, Disney just caved.

Good, but someone at the movie studio needs to be fired.

Stopped Clock: Republican Tax Plan Edition

In an otherwise anodyne New York Times article about various sources of opposition to Republican tax plan, and they reveal a good idea buried in their black hearted evil plans. Needless to say, large multinationals hate the proposed excise tax on payment made to a company's foreign affiliates:

That may be an uphill battle, as key groups begin coming out in opposition to parts of the bill, including a proposed excise tax of 20 percent on payments made by American companies to foreign affiliates. The provision is aimed at preventing American companies from shifting profits abroad through payments, such as royalties, made to subsidiaries or other foreign affiliates.

American multinational corporations are especially concerned about the proposal, which would raise just more than $150 billion over a decade. They say the tax will wind up harming American companies and their consumers.

The American Forest and Paper Association said it was “very troubled” by the provision, which it said “would lead to massive overcollection of tax in the United States.” The provision is also coming under fire from pharmaceutical companies and the small-government advocacy groups spearheaded by the billionaire Republican megadonor brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch, who are trying to generate opposition to the excise tax from other conservative groups.

………

Mr. [Kevin] Brady [House Ways and Means Committee chairman] said lawmakers are working with multinational companies to address their concerns. “But make no mistake,” he said, “we have to have safeguards in place so that companies aren’t encouraged to shift their earnings and their profits offshore and to low-tax havens, and we need strong guardrails to make sure they’re not importing deductions, exclusions and other tax rate issues.”

My heart bleeds borscht for these folks.

They assign their IP to a foreign subsidiary in the Caymans, or the Isle of Mann, or Ireland, and pay "royalties", and voila, no taxes paid.

Of course, this will be dropped in conference committee, because, of course, tax evading job cutting multinationals are the Republican political base, but this is actually good idea.

Pay attention.  It's likely to be a long time before the Republicans get an element tax policy right.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

Juli Briskman, who shot to fame flipping off Donald Trump's motorcade, has been fired:

A woman whose picture went viral after she raised her middle finger at Donald Trump as his motorcade passed her on her bicycle has been fired from her job.

A woman whose picture went viral after she raised her middle finger at Donald Trump as his motorcade passed her on her bicycle has been fired from her job.Juli Briskman was cycling in Virginia last month when she offered the gesture in a gut reaction to Trump’s policies, she said.

“He was passing by and my blood just started to boil,” she told the Huffington Post. “I’m thinking, Daca recipients are getting kicked out. He pulled ads for open enrollment in Obamacare. Only one third of Puerto Rico has power. I’m thinking, he’s at the damn golf course again.

“I flipped off the motorcade a number of times.”

A photographer traveling with the presidential motorcade snapped Briskman’s picture and the image quickly spread across news outlets and social media. Many hailed Briskman as a hero, with some saying she should run in the 2020 election. Late-night comedy hosts also picked up the story.

Briskman had been working as a marketing and communications specialist for a Virginia-based federal contractor, Akima, for six months. She thought it best to alert the HR department to the online fuss. Bosses then called her into a meeting, she said.

“They said, ‘We’re separating from you,’” Briskman told the Huffington Post. “‘Basically, you cannot have lewd or obscene things in your social media.’ So they were calling flipping him off obscene.”

You dissed the Dear Leader, of course you were fired

Just be glad that he didn't send you to Guantánamo.

Not really. 

I just wish that we lived in a first world nation with meaningful job protections.

Thoughts and Prayers

Gunman Kills at Least 26 in Attack on Rural Texas Church

The new normal.

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Linkage

• U.S. states allege broad generic drug price-fixing collusion (Reuters) Best health care system in the world, my ass.
• Brexit: why are these lying bastards lying to us? (EUreferendum.) I love British snark.
• The world's biggest grave robbery: Asia’s disappearing WWII shipwrecks (The Guardian) Scrap hunters.  Most importantly, "low background steel," low radiation pre-nuclear age refined steel which is needed for some scientific applications.
• New Code Offers a 100-Fold Speed Increase (Futurism) It's called Taco, for tensor algebra compiler. Basically sparse matrix database handling. I'd wait for real world applications.
• Angry About the DNC Scandal? Thank Obama. (The Intercept) Obama let the party establishment wither on the vine, and he did his level best to emasculate any political organization independent of the Obama apparatus. (aka Veal Pen)
• America – The Grim Truth (Escape from America) "Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin."
  

Thor Ragnarok 4D: (May contain some spoilers for the actual movie)

I Do Not Know What to Make of This, but It Seems Significant

There is some sort of seriously f%$#ed up dynastic sh%$ going on inside of the house of Saud:

Saudi Arabia announced the arrest on Saturday night of the prominent billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, plus at least 10 other princes, four ministers and tens of former ministers.

The announcement of the arrests was made over Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned satellite network whose broadcasts are officially approved. Prince Alwaleed’s arrest is sure to send shock waves both through the kingdom and the world’s major financial centers.

He controls the investment firm Kingdom Holding and is one of the world’s richest men, owning or having owned major stakes in 21st Century Fox, Citigroup, Apple, Twitter and many other well-known companies. The prince also controls satellite television networks watched across the Arab world.

The sweeping campaign of arrests appears to be the latest move to consolidate the power of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the favorite son and top adviser of King Salman.

At 32, the crown prince is already the dominant voice in Saudi military, foreign, economic and social policies, stirring murmurs of discontent in the royal family that he has amassed too much personal power, and at a remarkably young age.

The king had decreed the creation of a powerful new anti-corruption committee, headed by the crown prince, only hours before the committee ordered the arrests.

The machinations of the House of Saud are a bag full of cats, but I find this behavior unusual, even by the standards of Riyadh.

Normally, when power dynamics shift, you find people quietly removed from their positions, and any arrests or detentions are on the down-low.  Public notice mass detentions of the royals are unprecedented.

Because of this, I do not think that this is coming from a position of strength.

Mohammed bin Salman's (MBS) policy initiatives have not gone well, the Yemen operation is a hole sucking resources and diplomatic credibility, and the conflict with Qatar is not turning out as expected, and I think there has been increasing push-back from elements of the royal family against the meteoric rise of MBS.

What this means in the longer term for Saudi Arabia is unclear to me, but I think that there are likely to be some major shifts in the monarchy.

This could be a new path forward, or it could be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

My money is on the the latter, but I'm an optimist.

Read Matt Taibbi: College Loan Edition

I really cannot do justice to Taibbi's treatment, but it is classic Taibbi.

His basic thesis is encapsulated in this paragraph:

But the separateness of these stories clouds the unifying issue underneath: The education industry as a whole is a con. In fact, since the mortgage business blew up in 2008, education and student debt is probably our reigning unexposed nation-wide scam.

The solution is relatively straightforward:  Change the law that forbids debtors from using bankruptcy to discharge their debts, and change the loan program so that it no longer encourages tuition inflation.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!! (on Sunday)

We had another credit union failure, New York State Employees Federal Credit Union of New York City, which was taken over on the 27^th of October.

Depending on how you count, this might be equal to the 15 credit union failures last year, because 6 of those failures were from tightly linked organizations.

Here is the Full NCUA list.

Some Perspective………

Alleged Russian government Facebook ads were marginally more than one-two thousandth of Clinton and Trump ads during the election.

Obviously, we can talk about how a butterfly flapping its wings in Malawi can create a hurricane, but the effects of this "massive" Russian interference

Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who could have spent even more than that on the campaigns’ behalf.

Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch revealed these figures today during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing with Facebook, Twitter and Google about Russian election interference.

Without counting PACs, the top campaigns spent 1,760X more on election ads than one group of Russian meddlers puts the situation into context. The IRA ad buy was small by comparison. This aligns with Stretch’s main talking point that Russian propaganda content was a tiny fraction of the content and ads seen on Facebook. This revelation could put more focus on organically posted propaganda.

The Democratic Party is focusing on this stuff, and avoiding a meaningful examination of how it failed and why.

I can understand why they are doing this:  Any search for incompetence will lead to a lot of folks working for the Democratic establishment getting VERY well deserved pink slips.

Absent a meaningful autopsy of the 2016 debacle though, the party will continue to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

PLONK!!!!!!!!!!*

The day before the California primary, Rachael Maddow, and the rest of the NBC news org, breathlessly and gleefully announcing that they had surveyed the "Super Delegates", and declared that Hillary Clinton had won the nomination.

I have not watched Maddow since, I saw that it was a descent into hackdom. (though I have referenced online video clips)

Her later non-reveal Trump tax return reveal, parodied by Stephen Colbert, confirmed my opinion.

Well, I just dropped Talking Points Memo from my blogroll, because its founder and editor-in-chief Josh Marshall, just confirmed his descent into hackdom with a truly laughable OP/ED condemning Donna Brazile's Politico article revealing of the Clinton Campaign's takeover of the DNC more than a year before the convention.

In order to do this, he had to ignore contemporaneous reports of some of the issues raised in the essay, including reports from Talking Points Memo at the time, as well as insisting that the DNC is moving left while TPM is reporting a purge of progressive members.

There are a number of news orgs whose OP/ED pages contradict what their news section reports, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are legion for this, but they have a wall between opinion and reporting, and Talking Points Memo does not.

Notwithstanding the work done by TPM employees, and the fact that Josh Marshall has assembled a top flight team, this site is, and will probably will always be, Josh Marshall at its core.

He's jumped the shark, so:  Plonk!!!

^*This is a term from the very early (Usenet) days of the internet. the term PLONK is a statement that you have added a user to your killfile, meaning that you will not see their posts.

Epic Troll

On his trip to Asia, Trump had a stop over in Hawaii, where he was greeted with signs from protesters welcoming him to Kenya. 

Truly inspired trolling:

Donald Trump is heading off from the States to do a two-week tour of Asia, including South Korea, which many believe is a little too close to someone who isn't exactly a fan of Trump.

However, on the way over, Trump stopped off in Hawaii, making a stop off at Pearl Harbour, and checking in at Trump-branded hotel.

When he landed though, there were hundreds of anti-Trump protestors lined on the streets, with many of those present for their President holding signs that said "Welcome To Kenya".

Brilliant!

Google News Fail

What Is Wrong with This Picture?


Here is a hint.

I was looking at Google News, and the front page had a story about Corey Feldman and sexual abuse of child actors.

It's not normally not something that I would read, or even expand the item, but the picture next to the story seemed to be an odd juxtaposition.

Someone or something, likely a computer algorithm, screwed up.

I'm pretty sure that Paul Ryan did not touch Corey Feldman in his "uncomfortable place".

Paul Ryan is far to busy pimping for the top 1% and f%$#ing the rest of America to do anything to the former child actor.

Linkage

• Puerto Rico Cancels Whitefish Energy Contract to Rebuild Power Lines (New York Times) I'm hoping that there will be a criminal investigation.
• This Guy Documents Nearly A Year Of Quality Problems With His Tesla Model S (Jalopnik) It's like that old the GM — Bill Gates joke.
• Source tells WSJ that the FBI is investigating Whitefish Energy and its $300M Puerto Rico contract (Boing Boing) My wish is granted.
• Researchers warn state system to catch voter fraud has 99% false positive rate (Ars Technica) This is a feature, not a bug. It's about preventing people named Gonzalez from voting.
• Appeals court keeps alive the never-ending Linux case, SCO v. IBM (Ars Technica) This is still a thing? WTF?
• In our defence we didn’t think you were thick enough for this to work, says Russia (Daily Mash) It's satire, folks.
• Meet the Democratic Party’s Corrupt, Crooked Pro-Clinton Rules Committee: “Hey everybody, let’s further openly f%$# democracy in 2020! (Washington Babylon) Pretty much.
• Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture (Current Affairs) Intellectual bankruptcy akin to that of the of economists.

Disturbed cover of Sound of Silence. It might be better than the original:

Tweet of the Day

Another week, another round of #Brexit negotiations. Here's a handy guide for EU officials struggling to understand their UK counterparts. 😉 pic.twitter.com/1WVD2Ccxjc

— 🇪🇺Martin Mycielski (@mycielski) October 30, 2017

I've been told about similar cultural issues with various cultures.

H/T Links 10/31/17 | naked capitalism

When I Said that the Clinton Campaign had Strip Mined the Democratic Party, I Had No Idea

Donna Brazile, the consummate Democratic Party insider has detailed Hillary Clinton's takeover of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was complete before the Presidential primaries began.

What's more they then proceeded to steal everything that was not nailed down:

Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

………

The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s [Wasserman-Schultz] way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news.

………

“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.

Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the states first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.

“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”

Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.

“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”

………

Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.

When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.

The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.

I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.

………

I told Bernie I had found Hillary’s Joint Fundraising Agreement. I explained that the cancer was that she had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee. Had I known this, I never would have accepted the interim chair position, but here we were with only weeks before the election.

When Donna Brazile describes the Clinton campaign as a, "Cancer," it means something.

What's more, she makes it clear that her campaign contributed to Democratic losses down ticket by starving those races, and the state and local party organizations, of resources.

Not a pretty picture.

Guantánamo is F%$#ed Up and Sh%$

It's always been clear that the military tribunals have as their primary goal the creation of the illusion of due process.

Most recently, defense attorneys involved in a capital case from withdrew from the case because their attorney-client communications were monitored.

The judge in the case has now sentenced the remaining lawyer for contempt after they refused to order the existing attorneys back to work.

Kangaroo court much?

The military judge presiding over the Guantánamo military commissions prosecution for the 2000 USS Cole attack confined the chief military defense attorney to his quarters for three weeks for disobeying orders, according to The Miami Herald.

The military judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, held Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker in contempt for refusing to rescind his decision permitting the three non-military defense attorneys in the death penalty case against Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri to quit for ethical reasons related to secret government eavesdropping on their communications. Baker was also held in contempt for refusing to testify about his decision.

The military judge said that Baker did not have the authority to make the decision and rejected Baker’s effort to explain that the military court has no jurisdiction over him.

“The contempt finding and confinement of General Baker is unlawful and an outrage,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “General Baker was continuing the honorable military defense counsel tradition of trying to act ethically, despite being part of a system rigged against the rule of law. The military judge’s unprecedented contempt ruling against General Baker shows just how difficult that is. The military judge’s decision needs to be reversed and General Baker released immediately.”

The military judge has ordered the three civilian attorneys — Rick Kammen, Rosa Eliades, and Mary Spears — to participate in a hearing on Friday, setting the stage for another legal showdown.

Also today, in Washington, other attorneys for al-Nashiri asked a federal district court to stop the prosecution from going forward without an attorney specially qualified for capital cases, which is required by the rules of the Guantánamo military commissions themselves. The attorneys made two filings in court today, and a hearing is scheduled for tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“The whole prosecution of Mr. al-Nashiri has again gone off the rails, this time because of ethical violations caused by the government itself,” Shamsi added.

We really need to end this charade.

It servers neither the interests of justice, due or of due process, and it harms US security.

To quote George Clemenceau (Not Groucho Marx as is often erroneously attributed), "It suffices to add "military" to a word for it to lose its meaning. Military justice is to justice what military music is to music."

Preach It Sister!

Writing in Politico, Elizabeth Warren opens up a well deserved can of whup ass on the Supreme Court's lack of ethics standards:

A few days before the Supreme Court returned from its summer break, Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court’s newest member, attended a luncheon at the Trump International Hotel, where he was to give the keynote address. The location of the speech attracted the attention of dozens of protesters and a number of ethics watchdogs, who noted the apparent conflict of interest posed by Justice Gorsuch—a Trump nominee—keynoting an event at a hotel whose revenue goes in part to President Trump. That arrangement was bad enough on its own. But there was another potential conflict of interest created by Justice Gorsuch’s speaking engagement—and it highlights the ongoing ethical issues that threaten the credibility of our nation’s highest court.

The same morning that Justice Gorsuch gave his speech, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear Janus v. AFSCME. This is a case that will determine whether public sector unions—which represent teachers, nurses, firefighters and police in states and cities across the country—can collect fees from all employees in the workplaces they represent. Justice Gorsuch is widely expected to deliver the court’s deciding vote to strip unions of this ability. A decision along these lines would seriously undercut workers’ freedom to have a real voice to speak out and fight for higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions.

Here’s the rub. Justice Gorsuch’s speech at the Trump hotel was hosted by the Fund for American Studies. And who funds the Fund of American Studies? The Charles Koch Foundation and the Bradley Foundation. The Charles Koch Foundation is dedicated to promoting limited government, free markets and weaker unions; and the Bradley Foundation has worked for decades to, in their own words, “reduce the size and power of public sector unions.” In fact, the Bradley Foundation helped pay the litigation expenses for Janus—the case in which Justice Gorsuch is likely to be the deciding vote. Think about that: Just as the ink was drying on the court’s announcement that it would hear Janus, Justice Gorsuch was off to hobnob with some of the biggest supporters for one side of this important case—the side that wants to deny workers the freedom to build a future that doesn’t hang by a thread at the whim of a few billionaires.

This isn’t the first time the Supreme Court has strayed over the ethical line. Take a look, for example, at ABC v. Aereo. The court concluded that Aereo, a small television streaming service, had violated the copyright of broadcasters by capturing signals from television stations and retransmitting programming from those stations to the company’s subscribers. Time Warner—one of the broadcasters who stood to lose if the court allowed the practice—filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that the court should side with the broadcaster. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts owned as much as $500,000 in Time Warner stock. Despite this blatant conflict of interest, Roberts would not recuse himself from the case. Instead, he joined the majority in effectively killing the small streaming service.

There are plenty of other examples of ethical conflicts. According to Fix the Court, a nonpartisan group focused on increasing accountability and transparency on the Supreme Court, Justices Roberts, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito owned shares in 53 publicly traded companies as of 2016.

The Code of Conduct for United States Judges requires judges to recuse themselves when certain potential conflicts arise, such as in cases in which the judge, the judge’s spouse or the judge’s minor children have a financial interest or in cases in which the judge has a “personal bias or prejudice” against or for any party in the case. But those rules don’t apply to Supreme Court justices.

(Emphasis Mine)

I think that this is a matter that is under the purview of Congress, and changing the law to explicitly apply federal court standards to SCOTUS would be a good thing.

OK, So Bob Mueller has Just Busted Paul Manafort………

This is not particularly surprising.

Manafort was clearly on the hit list (I was hoping that he would take down Roger Stone).

What's more, Manafort is a longtime professional lobbyist, and therefore dirty.

It just comes with the business.

I think that Mueller is hoping to flip him, or his side kick Rick Gates, to flip.

What I should note here is that the charges have to do with his lobbying practices, and not any alleged coordination with Russia.

Still, it appears that there is some real good over this, because it has put a bipartisan fear of God in lobbyists across the political spectrum, as evidenced by Tony Podesta, John's uber-lobbyist brother, stepping down from his lobbying firm amid because he was acting as a foreign representative without properer registration.

It appears that DC lobbyists are freaking out, because ignoring foreign registration rules has been the rule for many years, and they are now worried that the worm has turned.

Good.  Turning over the rocks in DC influence peddling is a good thing.

Ironically, Trump's nemesis might be draining that swamp he kept talking about on the campaign trail.

Tweet of the Day

While they raped my Grandmother,lynched my Uncle,broke up my family to lost history, you find honor & compromise in that, you racist, prick? https://t.co/bOihrwd67N

— Wendell Pierce (@WendellPierce) October 31, 2017

It's in response to these comments by Trump CoS Kelly:

Kelly says Civil War was caused by 'lack of compromise' https://t.co/0FddNmwxCU pic.twitter.com/zR1PRAqvLO

— POLITICO (@politico) October 31, 2017

Yeah, Confederate lost causers are racist pricks.