Category: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Assholes of the week

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Talking about standing up against the tide! This idiots are just trying to delay the inevitable:

Gay rights activists were ecstatic: Come Jan. 6, they thought, Florida same-sex couples would be lining up at courthouses around the state to get married.

But that is not what the people who issue marriage licenses in Florida — county clerks of court — say.

They are trying to determine whether a Tallahassee law firm is right when it says that every Florida clerk, except the one in Washington County, would be committing a crime if he or she issues marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The firm of Greenberg Traurig, legal counsel to the Florida Association of Court Clerks and Comptrollers, this week updated a memo it sent July 1 that says the same thing: If you issue a marriage license to two people of the same sex, you’ve committed a first-degree misdemeanor and could spend a year in the county jail.

All minuses, no pluses in crude oil train shipments

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Oil Train Halted by Tripod Blockade Action- Rising Tide Seattle

No one really gives a shit about ordinary people’s concerns anymore:

(Reuters) – For the past 18 months, Americans from Albany to Oregon have voiced growing alarm over the rising number of oil-laden freight trains coursing through their cities, a trend they fear is endangering public safety.

In at least a handful of places, the public is also helping fund it.

States and the federal government have handed out tens of millions in public dollars to rail companies and government agencies to expand crude oil rail transportation across the country, a Reuters analysis has found.

The public assistance in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma and Oregon comes as railroads are posting record profits, and as state and federal authorities press for safety overhauls that the oil and rail industries have opposed, following several explosive derailments.
Continue reading “All minuses, no pluses in crude oil train shipments” →

Microsoft to the U.S.: You’re not the boss of our overseas servers

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Microsoft Headquarters

Yep. Microsoft and other cloud services are furious that U.S. surveillance is ruining their overseas business:

Microsoft’s fight against the US position that it may search its overseas servers with a valid US warrant is getting nasty.

Microsoft, which is fighting a US warrant that it hand over e-mail to the US from its Ireland servers, wants the Obama administration to ponder a scenario where the “shoe is on the other foot.”

“Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany,” Microsoft said. “They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter’s box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei.”

In a Monday legal filing with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, Microsoft added that the US government would be outraged.

“This case presents a digital version of the same scenario, but the shoe is on the other foot,” the Redmond, Washington-based company said in its opening brief in a closely watched appeal.

The appeal is of a July court decision demanding that Microsoft hand over e-mail stored on an overseas server as part of a US drug trafficking investigation. Microsoft, which often stores e-mail on servers closest to the account holder, said the e-mail is protected by “Irish and European privacy laws.”

But a US judge didn’t agree. “It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information,” US District Judge Loretta Preska ruled. The order from the New York judge was stayed pending appeal.

High school according to the Kochs

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

No Koch in Schools

What could possibly be wrong with allowing high-spending right-wing billionaires to dictate what’s taught to high school kids?

Public high school students in North Carolina will be taught from a lesson plans and worksheets prepared by a organization closely tied to the billionaire Koch brothers, if the state’s Department of Public Instruction gets its way. According to the Raleigh News and Observer, the Virginia-based Bill of Rights Institute received a “$100,000, sole-source contract with [North Carolina] to help develop materials for teachers to use in a course on founding principles that the state requires students to take.”

The N&O also notes that the organization receives funding directly from David Koch and from two Koch family foundations, although, if anything, this description understates the Institute’s ties to the conservative billionaires. Two of the Institutes four board members are employed by Koch entities — one is a senior vice president at Koch Industries and another is director of higher education programs at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation — and many of the Institute’s other top leaders also appear likely to push a political agenda in line with the Koch brothers’ anti-government views. Board member Todd Zywicki, is a George Mason law professor and a leading opponent of Wall Street reforms such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Institute’s president, David J. Bobb, founded two centers at Hillsdale College, a conservative institution of higher education that proclaims its opposition to “the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity.’”
Continue reading “High school according to the Kochs” →

Sticking up for the Eagles

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

DNC Convention Committee Visits Philly Art Museum

Oh, if only Ed Rendell cared as much about the working class as he does about the Eagles:

TRENTON — Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell unleashed on Gov. Chris Christie’s football preferences on the radio today, calling New Jersey’s executive “pathetic” for being a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Rendell, a former two-term governor and former Philadelphia mayor, savaged Christie for his NFL allegiance to the Texas team. Christie has long made public his support for the Cowboys, saying he roots for them because he was a fan of former quarterback Roger Staubach.

That doesn’t sit well with the former Democratic governor, a die-hard fan of the Eagles, the NFL favorites of South Jersey. The Eagles and the Cowboys will play Sunday in Philadelphia.

“How can a Jersey guy be a Cowboys fan? It’s pathetic,” Rendell said today.

When the radio host jokingly asked Rendell if it’s legal to be a Cowboys fan and the governor of a New Jersey, Rendell confirmed there’s no laws against it – but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

“It’s legal but it indicates a basic inferiority complex,” he said. “If you are a Jerseyite or a Pennsylvanian and you’re rooting for the Cowboys, it means you’re not secure in yourself and you wanted to root for a team that was a team in your youth that was a constant winner.”

The host suggested Christie and the former governor duke it out.

“Tell him I think he’s nothing but a wuss,” Rendell said.

No. 20

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Beverly Johnson Reveals Her Scary Supermodel Diet From The '70s

It almost feels like there should be a mercy rule. How many times did he do this?

Supermodel Beverly Johnson has joined the ranks of Bill Cosby’s accusers with allegations that the comedian lured her to his home in the mid-1980s and drugged her “with the intention of doing God knows what.”

There was no immediate response from Cosby’s representatives, but he has steadfastly denied sexually assaulting the string of women who have come forward with accusations.

In an essay for Vanity Fair magazine, the fashion icon Johnson said Cosby invited her to audition for a small part on his television show, invited her and her daughter to his New York brownstone, and then asked her to come back and read for the part a few days later. Johnson wrote that Cosby insisted she have a cappuccino from a large espresso machine, and she took a few sips.

“I knew by the second sip of the drink Cosby had given me that I’d been drugged — and drugged good,” she wrote. “My head became woozy, my speech became slurred, and the room began to spin nonstop. Cosby motioned for me to come over to him as though we were really about to act out the scene. He put his hands around my waist, and I managed to put my hand on his shoulder in order to steady myself. As I felt my body go completely limp, my brain switched into automatic-survival mode. That meant making sure Cosby understood that I knew exactly what was happening at that very moment.”

Johnson said she cursed at Cosby and he angrily pulled her out of the house and hustled her into a cab. When she awoke the next day, she said, “I sat in there still stunned by what happened the night before, confused and devastated by the idea that someone I admired so much had tried to take advantage of me, and used drugs to do so.”

Co-president Dimon whips Dem votes

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

teamwork

Geeze, they’re not even subtle anymore. If there was any doubt that the fox was in the henhouse, this little episode has clarified things considerably, am I right? Think about this: The president of the United States and unindicted criminal Jamie Dimon were working together to push a bill that will bail out Wall Street’s losses at the gambling table.

That’s a potential of $303 TRILLION for which taxpayers are on the hook:

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made calls to lawmakers on Thursday urging them to support the “cromnibus” spending bill, House Financial Services Committee ranking member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) told reporters.

Dimon’s involvement came amidst progressives enraged that the House “cromnibus” included a provision that they said would weaken Wall Street regulations.

“I think we got hurt when Jamie Dimon and the president started to whip,” Waters told reporters after the vote. “That’s when I think we lost some votes.”

The Washington Post first reported news of Dimon’s involvement in the negotiations.The House voted to approve a $1.1 trillion bill funding most of the government through September on a 219-206 vote. Fifty-seven Democrats voted for the bill, while 139 Democrats — including Waters — opposed it.

Waters and progressives opposed the budget due to changes to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Law that were supported by Dimon and other big banks.

“What does it say? It just seems very odd,” Waters said. “It is just very strange that the two of them would be working for the support of this bill.”

When asked if she thought that Obama had sold out to Wall Street, Waters replied: “That’s not for me to determine. I know that the president was whipping. I know that Jamie Dimon was whipping and calling directly into members’ offices. And that’s odd. That’s an odd combination.”

In other news, Jamie Dimon has been pronounced free of cancer. Now he just spreads it around Washington instead!

Intravenous bullshit

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Michael Hayden, War Criminal

Jake Tapper shows occasional signs of actually doing his job:

Former CIA director Michael Hayden on Thursday defended the agency’s use of rectal rehydration, calling it a “medical procedure.”

The back and forth with CNN’s Jake Tapper was in reference to the Senate’s report released this week that describes interrogation techniques the CIA employed in the years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

When Tapper began talking about specific torture methods and mentioned the use of rectal rehydration, Hayden interrupted the host, saying, “Stop, that was a medical procedure that was done because of detainee health.”

Hayden said officials saw dehydrated detainees and had “limited options” and that using an intravenous needle would be “dangerous with a non-cooperative detainee.”

Tapper retorted, “But puréeing hummus and pine nuts?”

“Jake, I’m not a doctor and neither are you, but what I am told is this is one of the ways that the body is rehydrated, these were medical procedures,” Hayden said.

“You’re really defending rectal rehydration?” Tapper asked.

CRomnibus passes House

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Party at Jamie Dimon’s house!

berniesez

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Fred Rogers with the Neighborhood Seen on his show. ONE TIME USE

So you have to figure we have a one out of four chance at guessing, right?

WASHINGTON — For several months before the Senate Intelligence Committeereleased a summary of its controversial report on the CIA’s torture program on Tuesday, Senate Democrats were locked in a well-publicized battle with the executive branch over whether to redact the aliases used for CIA officials used in the document.

But even as the White House and the CIA engaged in this dispute with the Senate, a separate, and potentially more serious, set of revelations was at stake.

According to several U.S. officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify the many countries that aided the CIA’s controversial torture program between 2002 and roughly 2006. These countries made the CIA program possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring U.S. detainees abroad without due legal process, and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of U.S. law where those detainees were subjected to torture.

The officials all told The Huffington Post in recent weeks that they were nervous the names of those countries might be included in the declassified summary of the Senate report.

The names of the countries ultimately did not appear in the summary. This represents a last-minute victory for the White House and the CIA, since Senate staff was pushing to redact as little as possible from its document.