Big Whoop

OK, I mean, it’s nice that this highly intrusive program has paid dividends. That’s great that we can get some bang for our bucks.

No pun intended.

There is a point where we have to wonder if there wouldn’t have been any other way of getting around to stopping terror attacks that this program netted. Couple that with the fact that it also failed to net the Boston Marathon bombers, as well as any number of terror-like attacks (the recent Ricin mailings come to mind, as well as the assault on the Sikh temple massacre last year) puts a bit of a damper on General Alexander’s boasts:

In a robust defense of the phone program, General Alexander said that it had been critical in helping to prevent “dozens of terrorist attacks” both in the United States and abroad and that the intelligence community was considering declassifying examples to better explain the program. He did not clarify whether the records used in such investigations would have been available through individual subpoenas without the database. He also later walked back the assertion slightly, saying the phone log database was used in conjunction with other programs.

In his testimony, General Alexander said he had “grave concerns” about how Mr. Snowden had access to such a wide range of top-secret information, from the details of a secret program called Prism to speed the government’s search of Internet materials to a presidential document on cyberstrategy. He said the entire intelligence community was looking at the security of its networks — something other government officials vowed to do after the WikiLeaks disclosures three years ago.

Under the Prism program, the N.S.A. collects information from American Internet companies like Google without individual court orders if the request is targeted at noncitizens abroad. That program derives from a 2008 surveillance law that was openly debated in Congress.

Oh. Well. I see now. The program doesn’t track terrorists per se. Only brown-skinned ones. Well, that’s much better. We white people are free to bomb marathons,  abortion clinics, and murder Arabic and Arabic-looking folks to our hearts content.

Terrorism is terrorism, whether it’s 19 Saudis flying planes into buildings, a couple of lunatics with rifles picking off passersby, or the NRA threatening your daughter with rape if you don’t buy her a gun. Period. It’s only security theater to think that only Muslims mean us harm.

World Leaders Should Probably Tape This To Their Walls

A Haaretz Op-Ed opines that Israel should follow Nelson Mandela’s lead in trying to come to grips with the Palestinian question:

The first and clearest lesson one can learn from Mandela is that peace is only achievable if the putative peacemakers believe in it. “One cannot be prepared for something while secretly believing it will not happen,” Mandela once said. Does Israel’s current leadership truly believe in peace? Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett are on record as saying that they don’t. Netanyahu maintains that he does, though I can’t help looking for the fingers crossed behind his back whenever he says it.

Peace is both an abstract concept – “a winner is a dreamer who never gives up,” according to Mandela – and a very finite calculation of profit and loss. Peace means making compromises – and Mandela came perilously close to losing his base of support among South Africa’s blacks in compromising to the extent that he did. He was prepared to take significant risks in the interest of peace. Are Israel’s leaders prepared to do likewise?

Mandela was able to take risks and make compromises because he believed in what he was doing and he had a clear vision of the South Africa that could emerge. Addressing the court at the conclusion of his trial for treason in 1964, he said: “I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

And there it is: one has to wonder what the Israeli leadership really wants. Hegemony? Over a billion Muslims, most of whom could care less whether Israel lives or dies, and a minority of whom want to destroy that nation?

Mandela did take risks, but then he was willing to lose it all, even after his release from prison, even after his ascendancy to president. He had courage, which Mandela defines as not the absence of fear but the strength to overcome it. It seems odd to me that a nation whose people have courage in boatloads can’t bring themselves to use that courage to create a niche for themselves that doesn’t involve the constant vigilance of armed forces.

It is a courage that I wish America would show, too, in its own struggle against many of the same adversaries that Israel faces (possibly because we support Israel so strongly.) We lost three thousand citizens in one day from an Islamist terror attack and we’ve lost a few dozen since in this country, most notably the Boston Marathon bombing.

Yet, this year more toddlers have killed using guns than were killed by a couple of backpack bombs. More Americans died “taking the fight to the terrorists” – as if Iraq had anything to do with 9-11 – than died on September 11, even if you include the first responders and residents who subsequently got sick and died. And never mind the 500,000 Iraqis who died at our hands.

That’s not courage. Courage is the ability to take a punch and still stand. Courage is saying “You bloodied me, and while I will not forget, my get-even will be to become even stronger, even better, and a brighter beacon to the world of what freedom really means.”

I mean, if the terrorists hated us for our freedom, we must be on pretty friendly terms now, with all the recent revelations. We gave away our precious Bill of Rights in exchange for…nothing.

Courage seems to be in short supply in the world: from the NSA scandal here to Israel’s fear of a black burqa, to Turkey’s Prime Minister warring with his own people over a public park, echoing our own response to Occupy Wall Street, but much much bloodier.

And I’m not even counting Syria or Egypt or Iraq or Afghanistan. We are sitting on a powder keg and all this grandstanding is merely inciting someone to light a match. Someone needs to defuse at least their corner of the world.

Take the message of Mandela, leaders. We can’t stop being afraid until you are.

 

Reality

It’s all donuts

A Few Thoughts on Freedom

The non-scandal scandal – OMG! You mean the government is doing what it’s been doing for the last decade since we as a people told it that it could do it? – has raised some interesting dynamics in American society and culture.

For instance, for all the foofaraw you hear in Blogtopia (© Skippy, the Bush Kanagaroo) and the rightwing blogosphere, the American people seem reasonably OK with the revelations that the government can pretty much know who we’re talking to at any time.
We don’t just get the government we deserve. We seem to get the freedom we deserve. Here, I have to give the bloodthirsty monotonous savages at the NRA and the Gun Owners of America some credit: they’re putting up a real fight for a freedom, even if it’s an antiquated and misguided freedom at best in a modern society.

For another thing, it’s been interesting to see some of the same folks come out now, arguing against the NSA program as well as the government intrusion into the Associated Press phone records and giving full throated support to Edward Snowden, who also stood behind the Bush administration when Valarie Plame was being skewered and castigated for being involved in essentially the same whistleblower activity (via her husband, no less).

I’m of two minds about this: as someone who was vocal in his opposition to the war in Iraq, I suspect my name came up in at least one database under the Bush administration and while I was probably given a surveillance miss – altho for reasons unrelated to my politics, I know I was vetted at least once last decade – that part of me is tempted to say “Welcome to the party, pal!”

On the flip side, the Libertarian in me – the kind that actually cares about the rights of everyone and not the greedy selfish pigdog kind like Rand and Ron Paul – believes this is an incredibly dangerous program and I was against it before I was even more against it.

The sad thing about rights is, we don’t get to pick and choose from a menu: if you abandon a right, and she abandons her right, and he abandons his right, I don’t get a choice to keep mine in a democratic society. I’m under the same dictatorial knife edge that you are. I don’t get a card that gives me a privilege.

It’s not even like we received a benefit in return. Security? We have had one major terrorist attack in the past century that killed thousands, and one that we could have easily prevented at the time (President Clinton did it for eight years). In essence, we abandoned a whole slew of rights in exchange for a retroactive promise to never let what shouldn’t have happened in the first place happen again.

It’s as if your son or daughter break curfew and your response is, “Well, what time would you like to come home next time? Here, take my car keys!” (pace Jon Stewart)

I think it’s too late now for any recovery of these rights, barring a major uprising in a country of people easily distracted by the next sports championship or The Voice or Kim Kardashian’s breasts. Or even distracted by the petty bickering of partisans over a very narrow range of opinions.

Noam Chomsky says it best: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Sound familiar?

I Don't Buy It

Today, published reports reveal the identity of the purported whistleblower, Edward Snowden:

An ex-CIA employee has said he acted to "protect basic liberties for people around the world" in leaking details of US phone and internet surveillance.

Edward Snowden, 29, was revealed as the source of the leaks at his own request by the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Mr Snowden, now believed to be in Hong Kong, said he had an "obligation to help free people from oppression".

The recent revelations are that US agencies gathered millions of phone records and monitored internet data.

Admittedly, this story is unfolding and all the details have not been revealed about Snowden or his responsibilities, but here’s what he’ll admit to:

He told The Guardian he never received a high school diploma and didn't complete his computer studies at a community college. Instead, he joined the Army in 2003 but was discharged after breaking both legs in an accident.

Snowden said he later worked as a security guard for the NSA and then took a computer security job with the CIA. He left that job in 2009 and moved on to Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked as a contractor for the government in Hawaii.

He told The Guardian that he left for Hong Kong on May 20 without telling his family or his girlfriend what he planned.

So he’s a high school drop out (CNN’s wording), never got even an associate’s degree in computer science, was discharged from the Army at age 20, and was hired by the CIA to do computer security work...after spending most of his adult life shouldering a gun only.

Does any of that even begin to make any sense to anyone? The CIA requires experts in their field, either from experience or from education, neither of which appears to be the case for Snowden, unless he did some bang-up job for the Army fresh out of high school.

And somehow, we’re also expected to buy his story that he had pangs of conscience over the “oppression” of American citizens, after years of data mining, even after he left the CIA and went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton (which is going to suffer an awful lot of consequences over this, I should add.)

A less cynical man than me would think that Glenn Greenwald has been set up.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) So the bag of salted rat dicks that is my boss has been quieted with a ball gag and hood by my superior software and editing skills, so I am free to do a little light blogging. It’s Friday, so…

2) The NSA surveillance of telephones and e-mails scandal is a ten-year old bugbear of mine and while I appreciate the fact that the rest of the fucking nation woke up to it, it would have been more helpful if you asshole had before we actually stopped terror attacks using this tool. Now, we’re stuck with it. Welcome to the party, pals! We liberals were surveilled and tracked to kingdom come under Bush but did you fauxbertarians give a crap? Noooooooooooooooooooooo!

3) Odd that the unemployment rate goes up even tho more jobs were added last month than in April. But it’s a good sign that people who stopped looking for jobs are looking once again. They can have mine. It comes with a free bag of salted rat dicks.

4) Now that he’s divorced, look for him to run as a “family values Republican” in the 2016 primaries.

5) It’s National Donut Day. Scales nationwide shudder.

6) And if you’re too elitist to have a donut, try one of these.

7) I can foresee only good coming out of this meeting, much like our own Bohemian Grove.

8) Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, we can be sure it wasn’t the rooster.

9) Bad News: There’s an Archie comics movie in the works. Good news: it features zombies.

10) OK, the Obama drone program has gone TOO FAR!

Administrative Note

Because I work for a bag of salted rat dicks, blogging will be light for the balance of this week, possibly into next. Please accept my apologies.

The Old Ball Game

This is pretty sad, if you’re a baseball fan:

Major League Baseball will seek to suspend about 20 players connected to the Miami-area clinic at the heart of an ongoing performance-enhancing drug scandal, including Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun, possibly within the next few weeks, "Outside the Lines" has learned. If the suspensions are upheld, the performance-enhancing drug scandal would be the largest in American sports history.

Tony Bosch, founder of the now-shuttered Biogenesis of America, reached an agreement this week to cooperate with MLB's investigation, two sources told "Outside the Lines," giving MLB the ammunition officials believe they need to suspend the players.

One source familiar with the case said the commissioner's office might seek 100-game suspensions for Rodriguez, Braun and other players, the penalty for a second doping offense. The argument, the source said, is the players' connection to Bosch constitutes one offense, and previous statements to MLB officials denying any such connection or the use of PEDs constitute another.

Twenty players, including at least two league MVPs, one a probable Hall of Famer (sans performance enhancements).

I understand the need to cheat, particularly when the stakes are really high, and big money is a stake you can’t get much higher than. I can even understand that many of the cheaters involved started doping long before the issue was taken seriously at the major league level.

However, once it became clear that there was a new attitude in town, you have to ask yourself what kind of idiot would expose himself that way.

I suppose it was a matter of believing you could never be caught. Too, the clinic billed itself as an anti-aging clinic, a new code I suppose for less steroids, more biologic enhancements. You can rationalize cheating a million different ways.

But then there’s some ancillary issues that need to be addressed, and primarily, those involve the teams of these players: they get most of the benefit from these now-used up husks of humanity, but bear none of the responsibility or the consequences. It seems unfair for, say, Alex Rodriguez to be condemned and suspended – and likely stripped of any personal accomplishments in the time frame covered – but the New York Yankees get to keep their pennants and championships.

You want steroids out of sports? Hurt the teams. Hurt the sponsors of those teams. Athletes are interchangeable. They are cogs in a machine, albeit really well-paid and shiny cogs. They are, however, no different than the front office secretaries or the groundskeepers, and if any of them had been found to be breaking the law, they’d be summarily dismissed in order to minimize damage to the team.

Yes, players are under contract and the union will work hard to protect them, but a team that stands around and does nothing while it has to have some knowledge of what was going on ought to pay a price now.

Managers, both general and field, and owners may claim ignorance but as officers of an organization, that argument holds little water. After all, even the head of the IRS had to throw himself under the bus when that scandal broke, even if he had no personal knowledge of events beforehand. Punish the team, end the problem.

A New Hope

There’s a really interesting study that’s been released by the College Republican (Inc.) National Committee that bears a little discussion:

The College Republican National Committee released a report on Monday outlining the major challenges facing the GOP as it seeks to rebrand and redefine itself in the aftermath of the 2012 election. The survey criticizes the party’s singular focus on “big government” and “tax cuts” and calls on Republicans to become more tolerant and open on issues like same-sex marriage and women’s reproductive health.

Keep in mind, this report was released as a memo to the Republican, Inc. partyleadership to outline recommendations as to how the GOP, Corp. can fix not only its image but its ideology.

You can view the full report here (pdf). Skip ahead to page 84 and beyond for some eye-popping stuff. Let me highlight a few of the bulletpoints for you:

1) Focus on the economic issues that affect young people today: education, the cost of health care, unemployment.

3) Don’t concede “caring” and “open-minded” to the left.

4) Fix the debt and cut spending, but recognize that messages about “big government” are the least effective way to win this battle of ideas with young voters.

Those are practically progressive ideas. Those are warning shots to the future. But there’s more: young Republicans want the party to stop concerning itself with the issues of the far right religious right, particularly on unwinnable issues like marriage equality and the nuts (literally) and bolts of the anti-abortion crusaders. These issues, the College Republicans feel, are nearly irrelevant and only serve to reinforce the existing image of the party as scary and terrorizing. Likewise, the party positions on Latino voters and on rape and other women’s issues is driving people into the arms of the Democrats.

Which, as a lifelong Democrat, should make me feel good, but it really doesn’t. Let me explain why.

Should the Republican, Inc. party die, and it will, at this rate, voters will be left with two choices: Democrats and Teabaggers.

The dynamic that arises at that point is pretty ugly: the nation as a whole will be dragged rightward, as the Democrats no longer even have to give a passing thought to the progressive flank, while the Teabaggers engage in their own brand of terrorism and stultification of the national dialogue. Even if progressives could somehow grasp the Democratic leadership, we’d never be able to drive a progressive agenda, even with the surge in membership of frustrated and scared Republicans who seek refuge in our party from the putsch.

We need to work now to find a path to liberal enlightenment that will move the country leftward and more in line with the rest of the civilized world, and not be some weird hybrid mutation of Third World democracy and First World aristocracy.

 

 

Is There Something You're Not Telling Us, Mike?

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Because Gun Nuts Are Such Level-Headed Folks

Hm. Maybe we should start profiling gun owners, too.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is the latest high-profile target of poison-tainted letters sent though the mail, police revealed yesterday.The leader of the nation's largest city was threatened anonymously in two letters sent to Bloomberg's offices in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., NYPD spokesperson Paul Browne said. An undisclosed number of New York cops who responded to one of the letters now "are being examined for minor symptoms of ricin exposure," but the potentially dangerous substance never reached the mayor.

"The writer, in the letters, threatened Mayor Bloomberg, with references to the debate on gun laws," Browne said.

Saying he has a "constitutional and God-given right and I will exercise that right 'til I die," the author warned that the government would have to kill him before he would relinquish his weapons, a source told ABC News.

If this had been an arm of Al Qaeda, we’d have raised the terrorist threat level one notch up whatever rainbow we’re using now, and have started locking down mail deliveries.

But because, you know, Christian and likely white, well, we can’t abrogate the freedoms of our citizenry!

Just ask the next swarthy kid you see with a backpack about that.

What is it with gun nuts and the urge to kill people? Why do they think their rights trump the rest of society’s privilege to live in peace and quiet, pursuing what little happiness life provides them in this miserable muck we call “America”? And do they realize that they ARE the muck, and that the rest of society is the boot trying to extricate itself and move forward?

Probably not. That was a self-answering question.

Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead!

Michele Bachmann. We won’t have her to kick around anymore.

Obviously, she is spinning this along the lines of a…well, she never really says why she won’t run, only that it has nothing to do with the various criminal investigations she is about to undergo or with the early polling for 2014 which shows her in yet another dead heat with Democratic challenger Jim Graves, who she barely beat last November. It should also be noted that her district has been jiggered after the 2010 census, which would have forced her to pander to a new, less angry and spitefilled electorate.

Of course, that she featured these so prominently in her announcement is a sure sign that, indeed, she knew she was in deep, deep trouble and would likely be elected out of office in 2014, if in fact she made it that far after the ethics investigation.

Oddly, it was just two weeks ago that she began releasing re-election ads. Campaign ads this far ahead of an election is a move unheard of at, well, any level of politicking.

This development is really just one more nail in the Teabagger coffin, I suspect. After failing miserably in the 2012 elections – nevermind that Obama won re-election, Republicans, Inc. lost the Senate and only by dint of gerrymandering at the state level managed to hold the House – and the subsequent backbiting (remember the dueling responses to the State of the Union address by Rand Paul and Marco Rubio’s water bottle?), the unraveling of the Teabagger moment has arrived, announced not with a bang, but with a YouTube video.

The fap-darling of the Tea Party is on her way off the national stage. One can only hope it’s for good and that her future is filled with grandchildren and family. I suspect that might be all she can handle for now.

I Wonder Who They Meant?

In scanning the news this morning, I found this headline:

Russia says it will help Syria deter "hot heads"

Now who could they possibly mean, I wonder…

All kidding (on the square) aside, this is a bit troubling, although part of the problem could be in translation (or not). “Hotheads” is a pretty demeaning term, and about the only action apart from McCain’s apparently unreported and foolish venture into Syria taken this weekend was taken, or rather not taken, by the European Union when they allowed the arms embargo with Syria to expire, thus allowing weapons manufacturers in the EU to openly sell to the rebels.

Already, there’s been some backlash against Russia swiping its paws at the EU.

I’ve discussed in the past some of the background between Syria and Russia, but let me sum it up quickly: Syria buys Russian arms, maintains the sole Russian naval base in the Mediterranean (at Tartus), has energy development deals with Russia in both oil and natural gas, and is closely allied with Iran, also a major Russian arms customer, but also a big customer for Russian natural gas.

There. Not too painful, right?

So there’s a definite threat from Russia in the area, unlike China and the African continent which has a negotiable position as it is strictly economic/energy. This, above everything else, is why I suspect President Obama has tiptoed carefully in Syria whereas in Libya he felt free to commit resources to the region.

Of course, all bets are off if the French find what they think they’ll find out of Syria. It will be interesting to see what Russia’s response will be if there is definitive proof that the Assad regime used chemical weapons on its own people (supplied by Russia?).

This is turning into a bigger mess than I think anyone imagined it would be. Still, if Russia is willing to back down and twist Assad’s arm a little, this could all end quietly.

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1)  ♪   Chick and kids and gays better hurry

            When I'm writing bills in a hurry

            When I'm writing bills in a hurry

            That infringe on rights ♫

2) Speaking of gays, I'm slightly prouder of my Scouting roots today. It's six of one, but half a dozen of the other, so we must view it as a step forward, not a leap. One thing I take great comfort in from this decision is that polling of Scouts themselves indicates that 61% favored overturning the ban. As worried as I am about the future, I think the world could be in better hands than ours.

3) By the way, I'm still offering this for sale. I remember attending the festivities for the 100^th anniversary. The fireworks show was phenomenal.

4) Someone should tell Bynes a) possession of small amounts of marijuana in private is decriminalized in New York City and b) the wig? Don't. Just don't.

5) He's very very sorry and promises never to do it again, until the next drone strike.

6) On a related note, Medea? Your fifteen minutes are officially over. Not that she was wrong…well, maybe in the case of al-Awlaki she was, but her larger point is spot on, and it would be nice if Obama sat down with a reporter (paging Chris Hayes) who would ask him the same question, but her tactics have to stop. In the long run, the Occupy movement will accomplish more towards her goal than she ever will. This was a sad grasp for attention and funding.

7) Clearly, President Obama is a socialist tool who will destroy the US economy.

8) If you've seen the catalogues, or even the advertisements, you can't possibly be surprised by the CEO.

9) Oooh! Donuts…..

10) Now SHE knows how to party!

Anthony Weiner's Rise

(I promise, that’s the only dick joke in the post)

Anthony Weiner has officially announced his candidacy for mayor of the city of New York, to replace three term gadabout-with-nothing-better-to-do-than-trash-my-city Michael Bloomberg.

I’ll probably end up voting for him in the primary.

That speaks less of Weiner, who has always come off in my book as a bit of a dick (ok, sorry, my bad), than it does about the other candidates running in the Democratic primary, which is essentially the coronation of the next mayor. Weiner polls second currently at 15%, and that poll was taken before he formally announced. Christine Quinn, the “frontrunner” polls at 25%, which speaks volumes about a woman who has been Council Speaker for twelve years.

Quinn should be the presumptive nominee, but at 25% she’s polling very weakly for someone with as much visibility as she’s forced upon New Yorkers, and with good reason: she’s really pretty shitty, unless you live in the West Village or happen to be gay. For those constituents, she’s about as progressive as they come.

For working and middle class New Yorkers, not so much.

We can start with the fact that she flipped on term limits, likely to get access to Bloomberg’s Rolodex of campaign contributors. She was against them before she was for them, and the cynical calculation that went on in her head must have made her dizzy. We can move onto the fact that she aided Bloomberg in defunding program after program designed to help the poor and middle class families of New York, all to help her get some tax breaks for close friends who dabbles in real estate, most notably the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village which was rezoned to a residential property and is being developed by Rudin Management.

I wonder how much money and through what trust Rudin has contributed to Quinn, her campaign, and to political organizations that assist Quinn? He’s not clumsy enough to have given money in his own name to her campaign directly. One way to get around this is to have an entity controlled by Rudin but not directly owned by him contribute money, possibly to the city or state Democratic party, which will then spend it on Quinn. Happens all the time in New York, which purportedly has the cleanest campaign finance laws in the country.

It’s been sad watching Quinn come down from her moral high ground, where she protested the St. Patrick’s Day Parade at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, over the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the march.

And now, she’s just another politico. Very, very sad.

 

Happy World Turtle Day

bonaire january 2011 - turtle 4.jpg, a photo by actor212 on Flickr.

Turtles are a species threatened with extinction, and humans are to blame. We leave nets and trash lying about in the environment where they feed, encroach upon their nesting grounds and upset the delicate birthing process, and are destroying the coral reefs where they live and sleep.

Please, today, give a thought to a turtle (and I don't mean Mitch McConnell!)

The Apple of My Eye

Long-time readers of my blog and friends of Team Actor212 know I’m in the tank for Apple products. By my count, I’ve either purchased for myself or as gifts about two dozen Apple products over the years. Without getting into a Windows v. Mac debate here, I find Apple’s technology and ease of use, combined with its sophistication to be far superior to anything MicroSoft has had a hand in. I use a PC at work, so it’s not like I’m a Luddite.

Well, I am, but an informed Luddite.

Which is why the developments over the past twelve months in the Apple universe have been so distressing:

The Irish government on Tuesday denied it shelters some of the world’s largest corporations, such as Apple, from paying taxes, saying its long-standing low corporation tax regime is transparent and doesn’t make it a tax haven.

The U.S. Senate investigation report, published on Monday by the Senate’s Permanent Committee on Investigations, said that in Ireland, Apple “has negotiated a special corporate tax rate of less than 2%.”

Ireland’s Prime Minster Enda Kenny told lawmakers Tuesday that: “Ireland does not do, let me repeat, does not do special tax [relief] for companies, ” but that companies do exploit loopholes that arise from the interaction of different national tax systems.

To be clear, the issue isn’t confined to Apple. Last week Google was in front of the U.K. Parliament’s Public Affairs Committee to discuss its tax arrangements in the U.K.

Couple this with the ongoing Foxconn controversy, and Apple is starting to become less of an attractive technology supplier to me.

I want to stress something here: none of what Apple has done is either illegal or unique to Apple. And I am not going to go full Rand Paul and demand an apology to Apple.

Apple has taken advantage of perfectly legal tax loopholes written into our tax code by the corporate overlords through their Orc minions, Republicans, Inc. and Corporatist sympathizer Democrats. Likewise, Apple has exploited the fact that Chinese workers in many instances are willing to work as cheaply as American prison inmates.

They still suck for doing so. Let me illustrate with an analogy.

Say I’m walking along the street, and I find a purse or a wallet. Looking inside, I see many thousands of dollars, some unsigned debit cards, and a winning lottery ticket.

The right thing to do is to find the owner’s phone number, call him or her and return the item whole.

Apple has rummaged through the wallet, taken all the cash and cash equivalents, and oh yes, checked the cellphone for the phone numbers of hot women and any naked photos the owner may have had.

It’s one thing to do what is legal, it’s another thing to do what is right.

Now, Senator…and I can’t believe he actually has that title…Senator Paul would claim that Apple did do the right thing. For the investors in Apple, the only audience it needs to please.

Senator… and I can’t believe he actually has that title…Senator Paul is right. But also very wrong.

You see, Apple shareholders are just a small piece of what many economic theorists call “stakeholders.” These are people to whom Apple must also demonstrate what business lingo would call “core competencies.” Stakeholders would include its employees (many of whom even in the US make less than minimum wage,) its landlords, its suppliers – and most important, its customers and the government. All of these groups, along with others, have a “stake” in Apple’s future and its operations.

GM closing a plant in Flint, MI and opening in Mexico may please the shareholders in the short term, but Flint residents losing the income and being unable to purchase GM cars makes GM vulnerable in the longer term, as an examination of the gas crises of the 70s implies: people had less money, so they bought cheaper, more fuel efficient cars. Take the income from their pockets and you can guarantee they won’t buy your cars ever again.

Eventually, your shareholders are impacted by this. It might get lost in the shuffle, but you’ve stopped operating at maximum efficiency by trying to operate at maximum efficiency.

You can sum this up by saying the perfect is the enemy of the excellent. And I want Apple to be excellent.

You Wanna Get Pissed Off? Here's Your Daily Blood Boiler

Inside this rather boring if frightening story about the problems at hedge fund SAC Capital, lies this sentence (highlighted):

A legal deadline looms for prosecutors to bring a criminal case against Mr. Cohen related to charges against Mathew Martoma, a former SAC portfolio manager accused of illegally trading in the shares of two drug companies, Elan and Wyeth. The Martoma case is the first time that Mr. Cohen was linked to questionable trades, which occurred in late July 2008. Under the five-year statute of limitations for insider trading crimes, the government must charge Mr. Cohen by July.

Yet the eliciting of Mr. Cohen’s grand jury testimony is not entirely bad news for the hedge fund manager, at least as it relates to his criminal exposure, legal experts say. A grand jury subpoena seeking Mr. Cohen’s testimony suggests that the government is pursuing a case against SAC, but not Mr. Cohen himself. It is highly unusual for prosecutors to issue a grand jury subpoena to the target of an investigation, indicating that they want to interview Mr. Cohen broadly about his fund’s activities.

But bringing criminal charges against SAC would also be an unusual move by the government. Over the last decade, the Justice Department has moved away from indicting companies after the 2002 indictment of Arthur Andersen was widely seen as having put the accounting giant out of business.

Excuse me?

To refresh your memory, the CPA firm of Arthur Andersen voluntarily surrendered its license to practice in the United States after multiple felony convictions in connection with its audits of Enron. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States later vacated the convictions, but not on the facts: documents relevant to the Enron investigation by the Justice Department were shredded. The case was thrown out for bad jury instructions. The facts were never at issue.

So an auditing firm, charged with making sure its client abided by what is known as GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) lies to people who are relying on their opinion that the firm is operating above board, but then destroys any proof otherwise? They deserved to be put out of business. Enron’s bankruptcy revealed not only the massive greed of conservative “capitalists” and the overwhelming hubris of people who treated customers, clients and shareholders like ants under a magnifying glass, AND warned Andersen (or rather should have) there were irregularities big enough to clog a pipeline, and yet did nothing to stop them.

And if Enron didn’t warn Andersen, they certainly could have dug a bit deeper than they did. Obviously, there was something they were trying to hide in shredding documents, if it was only how badly they were hoodwinked. Nonetheless, they were in deep and deserved to be shut down.

So if you’re wondering why the banksters were never put on trial after the subprime mortgage scandal, there’s your answer: our government is too scared to upset an apple cart or two.

GIN!

Here’s the thing: the best strategy for Republicans is to just let it go:

WASHINGTON — The scandals dogging President Barack Obama are a political gift to Republicans, who could use some good luck after recent election losses. It’s not clear, however, how Republicans can best capitalize on Democrats’ woes, legislatively or politically.

Last November’s election dynamics complicate the picture on both fronts. Republican leaders are urging a bit of restraint in exploiting the White House’s new weaknesses.

Taken together, Republicans say, these three controversies portray a rapaciously political and inept administration. That could be a powerful message in next year’s congressional and gubernatorial elections, and perhaps in the 2016 presidential race.

[…]

[Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla, a close ally of House Speaker John Boehner], however, said Boehner and other party leaders are keenly aware that Republicans can overdo their attacks, and even build sympathy for Obama, if their criticisms appear nakedly political or not supported by facts.

“We’ve actually had a lot of discussions about that,” Cole said.

Since the “scandals,” however factually based one of them actually is, are pretty much made up of spit and chewing gum, there’s not a lot of worry that Republicans, Inc won’t overplay their hands. They will and spectacularly.

Take the AP phone records “scandal”. The government has had the right for over 40 years, ever since Watergate, to target individual reporter’s notes and records (longer, really, but it was rarely used.) Ten years ago, Congress, a Republican Congress, expanded that right under the USA PATRIOT Act to obtain the cooperation of telecos in rooting out suspected terrorism in the nation. And don’t think for one minute the Bush administration didn’t use this power and frequently.

Now, I agree that what the Obama administration did was wrong, but then I protested when the PATRIOT Act was introduced, unlike, ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, nearly every fucking right winger who’s up in arms about it now, and every single Republican, Inc. Congresscritter who voted for it. I was against government snooping before I was even more against it. It was wrong when a Republican could do it, and it’s still wrong now that a Democrat sits in the Oval Office.

But don’t whine to me, Bushites. You made the bed you’re sleeping in.

Likewise, the IRS/Teabagger “scandal.” First, there’s very little evidence either the White House or Treasury department knew or authorized the vetting of Teabaggers. S. E. “Sippy” Cupp of MSNBC (yuck, really guys? This was the best you could do?) and the NY Daily News whined on Bill Maher about a “he said this and so he had to know” chain of illogic that she has yet to verify in any way, shape, or form. This is tantamount to the 9/11 Truthers, Sippy.

Second, the IRS was tasked with vetting and vetting quickly a whole slew of 501(c)4 groups created in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Of course they were going to look for shortcuts!

Third, the only group that hasn’t survived that vetting process was a liberal group. This despite the fact that it is universally acknowledged that the Federal Election and tax laws are being raped by big money lobbyists.

Finally, there’s Benghazi. Already, Republicans, Inc. have been proven to have altered and even made up evidence somehow “proving” the administration had enough time to intervene, when the truth is, Ambassador Hayes was dead before Obama even knew about the situation. Claims of a cover-up hold no water. Period. This is precisely why no one is paying attention.

So there you have it: after a first term of crying “WOLF!,” Republicans, Inc. have had three legitimate scandals, and because they shot their credibility in the foot before 2012, with the birth certificate and the Muslim nonsense, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, they’ve had to already overplay their hands in order to keep their minions in line.

Meanwhile Democrats keep garnering more and more votes and more and more seats.

How’s that working out for ya, Weaker Boener?

Nobody Asked Me, But...

Wow. It feels like years since I’ve written one of these, between vacations and sick days and whateverthehellelse…anyway….

1)  The Bush appointee who headed the IRS investigation of Teabagger groups will testify before Congress today. This ought to be interesting. After all, it was a Republican Congress who set up the 501(c)(4) group and who made very ambiguous guidelines as to what constitutes compliance with said section. A Bush appointee, a Republican, investigating all political groups on a shoestring budget targets groups with “Tea Party” or “Patriot” in their name….because maybe he has firm insider evidence they’re cheating? Just a thought.

2) Facebook started publicly trading one year ago. It opened at $32 a share, and spiked up to near $42. At the time, I called it worth no more than $20 a share. If you had listened to my advice and bought when it hit twenty, you’d hit “Like” on your return. I see it topping out short term at around $30 so there’s still time to get a quick hit if you can. But long term? It’s a $25 share, at best.

3)  Salt of the worth?

4)  “Libertarian” Conor Freidersdorf argues for religion when it comes to extreme porn. I cannot fap to that.

5)  Speaking of civil liberties, here’s an interesting conundrum: you’re a photographer who lives across the street from a luxury high-rise building. You can see into some rooms clearly, as people leave their curtains open. You take photos and exhibit them. Right to privacy v. free speech. Discuss.

6)  My favorite name in all of sports is dead. Apparent suicide.

7)  Some things cannot be unseen.

8)  Attention, Teabaggers: You are terrorist sympathisers. This is not hyperbole!

9)  I’ve got an idea: Why not let Turkey take the lead in overthrowing Assad?

10)  Those Benghazi emails? Support the administration claims. End of story.

Where the Hell Are They Shopping, Then?

Wal-Mart reported earnings yesterday, and it’s a bit eye-opening. If I was an investor¹, I’d be very worried:

Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer by sales, reported an unexpected drop in US sales that pointed to pressure on low-income consumers and sent its shares falling.

The discount chain said on Thursday that its US like-for-like sales in the 13 weeks to April 26 declined by 1.4 per cent. It had previously told investors that it expected sales to be “around flat”.

The company blamed the fall on delayed tax refunds from last year for consumers, a rise in the payroll tax rate this year, lower-than-expected food inflation, and bad weather.

Here’s the thing: the stock market is booming. China is suffering. The US economy is gaining momentum, which only happens when consumers go out and buy, regardless of when they get their tax refunds. So someone is selling to them. And if not Wal-Mart, the bastion of low prices and good selection (despite their irresponsible business practices and outright piratical scavenging of local retailers) then where?

When the economy is in the doldrums, and for what we know at this point in time, it still is, Wal-Mart is where people shop. It’s essentially one giant mall of discount prices on, well, not quality merchandise but certainly “better than a yard sale” stuff. People are still hurting out there, even though the worst of it appears to be over. The jobless numbers are still high and personal income is still declining when adjusted for inflation.

Wal-Mart should be selling like it’s ice cream on a hot summer’s day. And yet…

Now, I don’t have a problem with mass merchants, per se. I loved Sears and K-Mart for things like tools and household goods. I can’t help but to indulge in the slightest bit of schadenfreude when it comes to Wal-Mart. My few experiences with shopping in one have left a bad taste in my mouth. The stores are too large, the merchandise is pretty hard to sort through, and well, there’s the people who shop there.

Don’t cry too much for Wal-Mart: despite the drop in sales, they earned more money than they did for the same period last year, so they must be ripping consumers off harder.

 

¹ Full disclosure: my daughter owns one share, so I can keep abreast of corporate news and so I can vote against the Walton family.

Budget Deficit? What Budget Deficit?

NOW can we start spending some money to fix the nation?

Since the recession ended four years ago, the federal budget deficit has topped $1 trillion every year. But now the government's annual deficit is shrinking far faster than anyone in Washington expected, and perhaps even faster than many economists think is advisable for the health of the economy.

That is the thrust of a new report released Tuesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, estimating that the deficit for this fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, will fall to about $642 billion, or 4 percent of the nation's annual economic output, about $200 billion lower than the agency estimated just three months ago.

The agency forecast that the deficit, which topped 10 percent of gross domestic product in 2009, could shrink to as little as 2.1 percent of gross domestic product by 2015 — a level that most analysts say would be easily sustainable over the long run — before beginning to climb gradually through the rest of the decade.

That’s pretty remarkable. The deficit hasn’t been this low since Fiscal Year 2007, which was also Bush’s lowest deficit, half a trillion dollars.

You read that correctly: Bush’s deficits never once were below $500 billion (Clinton’s last budget did run a deficit of $100 billion, which slopped over into Bush’s first year in office.)

So much for tax cuts stimulating the economy. So much, moreover, for the silly sham that budget deficits are killing us.

Say, You Know Who Else Destroyed Ancient Religious Relics?

The Taliban

Out of My Comfort Zone

Well, writing about boobies is not out of my comfort zone, but writing about celebrities is:

Angelina Jolie has made a tough decision that will forever change her life. The 37-year-old actress reveals that she underwent a double mastectomy in an attempt to reduce the odds that she will get breast cancer. In a New York Times column that came out Tuesday, Jolie admits that she had the surgery back in February and the last of the follow-up procedures done in April.

Jolie decided to get the surgery done because she had a high risk of getting breast cancer. "My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent," Jolie writes. "I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer." Doctors also told her that she has a 50 percent chance of getting ovarian cancer.

Jolie's partner and the father to their six children has been extremely supportive throughout the experience. "I am fortunate to have a partner, Brad Pitt, who is so loving and supportive," she says. "Brad was at the Pink Lotus Breast Center, where I was treated, for every minute of the surgeries."

I have very mixed feelings about this story. On the one hand, I’m glad that she’s gone public with an alert about breast cancer. It will reinforce the point that anyone, man, woman, rich, poor, can contract this horrible disease: money and fame will not insulate you.

On the other hand, a preventative double mastectomy is not something most people can afford or most insurance companies will pay for, and is a fairly radical treatment even given her 5 in 6 chance of developing cancer. If the upshot of her revelation is an huge spike in double mastectomies, we can be pretty sure that a lot of them were unnecessary, which means a lot of doctors and hospitals got a lot of money for what may have been essentially malpractice.

In the end, I guess this story has more benefits to society than a downside, and so I applaud her decision to come forward and reveal, before some tabloid interviewed a nurse at some hospital, a very personal and compelling story. 

The Thing Is...

 

…the IRS was not wrong.

The Soft Bigotry of Short Attention Spans

I realize conservatives have to strike while the iron is hot, but this is pure stupidity:

And they're off: With no defined field of candidates and the last election just six months in the rearview mirror, American Crossroads on Sunday aired the first attack ad of the 2016 presidential campaign, panning Hillary Clinton for her role in the "cover-up" of an attack last Sept. 11 on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

The 90-second paid spot - manufactured by the Karl Rove-founded "super PAC" - was posted Friday online and ran Sunday morning on CBS during a broadcast of "Face the Nation." Previewing the ongoing saga that's likely to haunt Clinton's White House ambitions for the next three years, the ad implicates the former secretary of state - Democrats' top-billed contender to succeed President Obama - in the wildly varying accounts of how administration officials reacted last fall in the wake of the strike.

"Was it because of a protest, or guys out for a walk who decided they'd kill some Americans - what difference, at this point, does it make?" Clinton is shown saying Jan. 23 before a Senate committee. A narrator counters: "The difference is a cover-up, and four American lives that deserve the truth."

To quote Gertrude Stein, “There is no there there.”

Here’s the thing: Benghazi was a tragedy for four Americans in Libya, of that there can be no doubt. And if the election was this year, I’d suggest that this tactic of trying to buffalo Hillary might work. The attention span of Americans is short enough that the noise from the empty can will be more than enough to suggest Hillary Clinton screwed up somehow.

But the election is still three years away, assuming that Mrs. Clinton even runs. That’s a long time. Let’s look at another failure of an administration to protect Americans, and see what we learned within three years.

On September 11, the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked, and roughly three thousand Americans were killed. Fighter jets were scrambled by 8:53, 20 minutes after the first plane hit the Trade Center, yet were unable to stop the rest of the attacks. Right away, a failure of the bureaucracy, but more, even had they been able to somehow catch up with events, they would have had to wait for the White House to approve firing upon a domestic civilian airline in American air space. It’s safe to say that when that order was given (at 10:20) the events had ended.

Where was Republican outrage then?

And yet, four years later, Americans re-elected the same incompetent boobs that screwed that mission up.

How they think that people are going to care in three years about four dead Americans if they didn’t care about three thousand ON AMERICAN SOIL is beyond me.