Category: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Ben Carson, plagarist

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Ben Carson - Caricature

Hey, he’s a doctor and a Fox News regular! The guy is BUSY!!

Several sections of potential Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson’s 2012 book America the Beautiful were plagiarized from various sources, BuzzFeed News has found.

In many cases Carson cites the works that he plagiarizes in endnotes, though he makes no effort to indicate that not just the source, but the words themselves, had been taken from different authors.

The case is similar to a 2013 report from BuzzFeed News that found Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul plagiarized in his book while citing the works he copied in the footnotes. Paul’s book was eventually updated to include attribution.

In one instance, Carson cites wholesale from an old website that has been online since at least 2002, Socialismsucks.net.

In another example, he plagiarizes from two authors whose works he mentions in passing at earlier points in the book: Cleon Skousen, a conservative historian who died in 2006, and Bill Federer, another conservative historian, who Carson thanks in the acknowledgements for helping get his book published.

Carson’s book sold less than 1,000 copies when it was first published in 2012, according to the New York Times’ 2013 profile of Carson. After his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2013 exploded on YouTube the book sold 46,000 copies in six weeks, the Times reported.

Carson recently said a decision on a 2016 presidential run is coming before May, and has previously said “the chances are reasonably good” that he will run for president.

Chris Christie’s very special treatment

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

David Sirota has an interesting take on Chris Christie’s little junket to the Dallas Cowboys game on Sunday:

As Gov. Chris Christie has appeared at professional football games to cheer on his beloved Dallas Cowboys, he has faced questions about why his favorite team isn’t a New Jersey local like the Jets, Giants or Eagles. But Christie’s bromance with Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones also raises an even thornier question: In accepting owners’ box seats, is the governor complying with New Jersey’s tough ethics rules banning gifts and favors to public officials?

New Jersey’s executive branch ethics rules warns state officials that there’s “a zero tolerance policy for acceptance of gifts offered to you … that are related in any way to your official duties.” The ethics rules specifically prohibits public officials from accepting access to entertainment events from any person or entity that public officials “deal with, contact, or regulate in the course of official business.” The rulesdefine one form of restricted gift as “admission to an event for which a member of the general public would be charged.”

In his role as governor, Christie has had myriad high-profile dealings with the National Football League – many of which have proven highly profitable to the league (and, by extension, Jones). Under Christie’s watch, New Jersey officials delivered almost $18 million of taxpayer money to the league to offset costs associated with the 2014 Super Bowl. That included $8 million worth of sales tax breaks, plus millions more in security costs the state picked up for the league. All that was on top of New Jersey property tax breaks that benefit the league.
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Schumer: Enough votes to uphold KXL veto

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Man wearing tie holding up sign "Keystone Is An Act of War", other protesters next to him.

You ever see big bugs when you flip them onto their backs and their legs flail frantically? That’s how the Republicans will act when we stop the Keystone pipeline:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced on CBS’s Face The Nation that Senate Democrats have enough votes to sustain the widely expected veto that President Obama will issue after Republicans pass a bill authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Schumer said, “I think there will be enough Democratic votes to sustain the president’s veto…Our Republican colleagues say that this is a jobs bill but that really is not true at all. By most estimates it would create several thousand temporary construction jobs and only 35 permanent jobs…Why create very few jobs with the dirtiest of energy from tar sands when you can create tens of thousands more clean jobs using wind and solar? Our Republican colleagues are doing what they always do: they’re appeasing a few special interests — in this case oil companies and pipeline companies and not really doing what’s good for the average middle class family in terms of creating jobs.”

Senate Republicans won’t get anywhere near the 67 votes that they will need to override a presidential veto of the bill to authorize the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. President Obama made it clear that he was leaning towards vetoing the bill during his final press conference of 2014.

The Democrats still need labor

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

thomas geoghegan

Interview with Tom Geoghegan, a very smart and savvy labor attorney and writer:

Timothy Noah: Your book appears at a notably bleak moment for the labor movement. Union density has fallen below 7 percent in the private sector. In the midterms, the AFL-CIO targeted six Republican governors and managed to defeat only one. Nearly half of all states are now “right-to-work,” meaning workers don’t have to pay union dues or their equivalent to a union that bargains collectively on their behalf. Would it be fair to describe this book as a last-ditch effort?

Thomas Geoghegan: For labor, it’s past the last-ditch stage. I think of it as a last-ditch effort for the Democrats. I’d say the book is addressed not just to labor but to the Democratic party — and to the left in general. Without a real labor movement in place, the Democrats will not be the party of the working people. And until it is such a party, it will not be a governing party.

At least in my view, the GOP is just not able to be a governing party — to stop the decay in our institutions, the continued growth in inequality, and a kind of hopelessness among people who just feel abandoned by our institutions — our political ones, corporate ones, and, yes, often labor too.

Labor’s real electoral weakness — which the midterms exposed — is not so much that it couldn’t knock out [Gov. Scott] Walker in Wisconsin. Its real weakness is that it can’t get the Democratic party to present itself as a party with an express commitment to raising wages and benefits for all Americans, including the middle class. This is at a time when even the middle class have stagnant wages, no savings, no private pensions, and we still depend on people going into significant debt to keep up demand.

Yet the Democrats largely believe the answer is not a revived labor movement, or giving people a chance to bargain for higher wages — no, basically, most of the elders in the party think the answer is just to send more people to college. Europeans I know puzzle over this: how is it that the Democrats are not a labor party? Well, they aren’t, because labor is so weak. And because labor is so weak, the Democrats are not a real labor party, and because the Democrats are not a real labor party, they come across as muddled and without a message and often saying things that mean nothing to their base.

TN: You recommend that labor stage protests targeted not at Republicans but at Democrats, and cite the 2012 Chicago teacher’s strike as an example. Can you elaborate?

TG: I think the Chicago teachers strike was a kind of paradigm strike — it really forced Democrats to decide whether the party was to be a neoliberal, corporate-friendly party or a the old time Democratic party for working people — it was symbolically a strike not just against privatization but against shortchanging kids on school books, teachers, and – yes – mental health professionals. For all the spurious talk of how the party believes in education, the Democratic establishment here has protected the business interests in this big global financial center from paying for the education of minority race poor children.

I tried to compare the situation of labor today to that of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s: labor has to force the national Democrats to take sides. The Kennedy administration did not want to take sides, but King and others forced them. Likewise, the party is happy to pay lip service to a higher minimum wage, but it does not want to take sides against business CEOs on the bigger issues of workplace democracy and higher wages and benefits. Well, we have to create situations like the Chicago teachers’ strike where the party has to take one side or other, just as John and Robert Kennedy were forced to do.

TN: You support the pro-labor left’s agenda on unions and the workplace — higher wages, fewer layoffs, more voice for workers in management decision-making — but your strategies for getting there are a bit unorthodox. The one likeliest to upset labor and the left — and to delight the right — is to accept the right’s demand for a national right-to-work law — that is, a law that frees workers from any legal obligation to pay union dues or their equivalent to a union that bargains collectively on their behalf. You’d accept that in exchange for passing a statute that defines the right to organize as a civil right under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Explain why that would be a worthwhile trade.

Too frail to work, too poor to retire

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

I love this rant from Athenae over at First Draft:

This is where we’re at, what we’re doing: We give you a deal, and you take it, because … why the fuck wouldn’t you? You worked hard for these institutions all your damn life. You worked hard for them because they promised to take care of you and up until recently, they mostly did.

(And I know it’s like arguing with a stuffed animal, but who the fuck is asking for MORE GOVERNMENT here? Let’s start asking for MORE CORPORATION, as in do for your employees what you promised them you would do, you selfish fucks.)

I don’t understand what we get as a society out of creating thousands and thousands of desperately elderly people. My grandfather’s pension took care of my grandfather until he died and afterward, that pension kept my grandmother in their home. Which she and her children could afford to keep up, thus saving the neighborhood from blight, while she shopped at the local grocery store and bakery, got her local paper delivered, and paid local taxes which fixed the roads and schools and kept the streetlights on.

What would society have gained if those two people had been kicked out of their home? What does society get out of telling people like them too bad, so sad, know how we promised you a pension well fuck you, Shadow President Paul Ryan says we can’t afford that anymore and every Democrat within shouting distance is afraid Chuck Todd will call them mean, plus the company has to think of the shareholders and you’re just a guy who ruined your knees and eyes and hearing making money for those shareholders so it’s not like we owe you jack shit?

You know what we get? Starved schools and unfilled potholes and the smallness and meanness that comes from fear, ordinary animal fear that we have for us and ours won’t be enough, that we need to build walls around ourselves and man the parapets with guns, fence out the Other and glare at those within.

Right the fuck on.
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’88 seconds’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

That’s how long each congress critter will get to debate the TPP. The holidays are over and it’s back to our depressing work as citizens. We need to stop this trade agreement:

Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida told Acronym TV’s Dennis Trainor that the United States did not go to war in Syria in September 2013 because the American public “rose up”. He says the same response to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) can prevent an unwise, democracy-killing trade bill from passing the Congress into law.

Although Mr. Grayson didn’t mention his theory of the TPP beyond, agreeably, the further concentration of corporate power at the expense of the people and their right to democratic actions in nations signing on to the trade deal, perhaps the real motivation behind TPP – plus the equally gigantic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – is corporate solidification of legal rules in their favor, before the people of the world can gather enough strength in unity to stop the trade deals. The reason both TPP and TTIP are so, so secretive is precisely to prevent the people of the world from becoming fully aware and rising in opposition – strongly enough for the people and democracy to prevail.

The feature of TPP which has outraged the most men and women, one of the few provisions which has become known – through “leaks” by Wikileaks and other avenues, is given the legal term “Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement”. This is how every dispute will become resolved among the signatory nations and their people. The angering aspect is that corporate tribunals – not traditional, neutral, government legal institutions – are given the power to make all the legal determinations.
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Who goes to jail?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Democracy Now reruns Amy Goodman’s interview with Matt Taibbi:

In part two of our holiday special, we feature our April 2014 interview with Matt Taibbi about his book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.” The book asks why the vast majority of white-collar criminals have avoided prison since the financial crisis began, while an unequal justice system imprisons the poor and people of color on a mass scale.
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David Duke To GOP: ‘Treat Scalise fairly or I’ll reveal everyone we met’

~ susie ~ 3 Comments
David Duke is warning the Republican Party that if they punish Steve Scalise for having addressed a white supremacist group, he’ll reveal all the politicians he’s met with. After Duke confirmed yesterday that he knew Scalise and thought he was a “fine family man,” Duke, famous in Louisiana politics for almost getting elected to high office… Continue reading “David Duke To GOP: ‘Treat Scalise fairly or I’ll reveal everyone we met’” →

Caught on tape

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

pedro serrano

There are still cops who have a conscience, thank God:

A top Bronx cop was caught on tape telling an NYPD whistleblower to specifically target “male blacks 14 to 21” for stop-and-frisk because they commit crimes.

Stop “the right people, the right time, the right location,” Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack is heard saying on the recording.

“He meant blacks and Hispanics,” Officer Pedro Serrano, who made the secret recording, testified Thursday in Manhattan federal court.

“So what am I supposed to do: Stop every black and Hispanic?” Serrano was heard saying on the tape, which was recorded last month at the 40th Precinct in the Bronx.

McCormack said to focus on the Mott Haven section, where the problem “was robberies and grand larcenies.”

“I have no problem telling you this,” the inspector said on the tape. “Male blacks. And I told you at roll call, and I have no problem [to] tell you this, male blacks 14 to 21.”

During cross examination, City lawyer Brenda Cooke got Serrano to admit that McCormack never said he wanted Serrano to stop all blacks and Hispanics.

“Those specific words, no,” he told her.

Serrano’s tape and testimony were introduced as evidence in a class-action lawsuit against the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk tactic brought by four black New Yorkers who claim they were targeted because of their race.