This morning, before I went to work.
With the exception of voting for Peter Franchot as state comptroller, it was a thoroughly depressing lesser of two evils experience.
And now, I am watching MSNBC, where Rachel Maddow is so happy to be covering the election that it looks like she is having a newsgasm.
The head of Naval intelligence has unable to do his job because his clearance has been suspended:
The head of naval intelligence has not been able to view classified information for an entire year.Yes, the biggest concern is that they don't have a 3-star to engage in dick swinging at the annual Intelligence Community Sock Hop.
Vice Adm. Ted Branch, the director of naval intelligence, had his security clearance suspended in November 2013 after being investigated for possible misconduct. In the year since, no charges have been filed and there is no sense of when they might be, leaving the Navy in an untenable situation.
If classified information is being discussed at a meeting, the director of naval intelligence has to leave the room.
If Branch drops by a subordinate’s office, the space must be sanitized of any secrets before he enters.
Branch can’t attend morning intelligence briefs, or sit with the other services’ intel chiefs when they meet with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, said a naval intelligence source, who spoke on background because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
This festering situation has sown resentment among some in naval intelligence, who feel they don’t have the pull in national security circles that comes with having a three-star at the table. Meanwhile, the Navy brass is hamstrung — with no idea when or if Branch will be charged or cleared.
Branch’s clearance was suspended along with that of a deputy, Rear Adm. Bruce Loveless, the director of intelligence operations, for possible connections to Glenn Defense Marine Asia — the husbanding firm at the center of one of the Navy’s biggest bribery scandals in decades. Their clearances were pulled while the Justice Department investigated their connections to GDMA and its larger than life CEO, Leonard Glenn Francis, who is accused of bribing Navy officers to steer ships to ports where he allegedly overcharged the Navy in exchange for junkets, prostitutes, even “Lion King” tickets.Why the f%$# is this guy still in charge there?
Mother Jones has an article describing the sordid history of the the Koch family's involvement in politics, The Making of the Kochtopus. (Also, they have a fairly complete list of their web of shell organizations here.)
These people have been a cancer on the American body politic for half a century:
The John Birch Society likes to point out that its members were tea partiers before the tea party existed. And indeed, some of today's conservative fears—from a socialist president to a United Nations-driven "one-world government"—wouldn't have sounded out of place in the early 1960s, when Birch Society leader Robert Welch commanded a right-wing movement that Republican establishmentarians viewed as a mortal threat.They have been very evil for a very long time.
The connective tissue linking the Birchers of the past to today's tea partiers meanders through the libertarian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and de
tours into the tobacco wars of the 1980s and the Hillarycare battle of the 1990s. At the nexus of this throughline is the Koch family, which for more than six decades has helped to finance and cultivate the ideological uprising that has now, at long last, established itself at the very heart of Republican power.
Patriarch Fred Koch—a leader of the successful effort to make Kansas a right-to-work state in the late 1950s—was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Fred was in the room the day in 1958 when Welch addressed a small group of prominent conservatives to plan a movement that would place its weight on "the political scales in this country as fast and as far" as possible. Charles Koch, a Birch Society member like his father, would later join a group of fellow Birchers committed to growing the Freedom School, a Colorado-based educational center founded by a controversial libertarian guru named Robert LeFevre.
Through the Freedom School—which taught free-market dogma and whose leader postulated that any rights the government conferred, it had first robbed you of—passed many of the luminaries who founded the modern libertarian movement, not least of them Charles and David Koch. Together, the brothers would go on to play a pivotal role in bringing the libertarian ideology (a "radical philosophy," Charles readily admitted) to the masses.
It has been reported that the FCC will be reclassifying ISPs as common carriers, which will allow for real regulations to protect consumers and establish a competitive market:
The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reportedly close to proposing a "hybrid approach" to network neutrality in which Internet service providers would be partially reclassified as common carriers, letting the commission take a harder stance against Internet fast lane deals.
However, the proposal would not completely outlaw deals in which Web services pay for faster access to consumers.Let's be clear about this: The FCC did not want to do this.
As reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, the broadband service that ISPs offer to consumers would be maintained as a lightly regulated information service. But the FCC would reclassify the service that ISPs offer at the other end of the network to content providers who deliver data over Internet providers' pipes. This would be a common carrier service subject to utility-style regulation under Title II of the Communications Act.
"People close to the chairman" say that Chairman Tom Wheeler is "close to settling on a hybrid approach," the Journal wrote, continuing:The plan now under consideration would separate broadband into two distinct services: a retail one, in which consumers would pay broadband providers for Internet access; and a back-end one, in which broadband providers serve as the conduit for websites to distribute content. The FCC would then classify the back-end service as a common carrier, giving the agency the ability to police any deals between content companies and broadband providers.
The emerging plan reflects proposals submitted by the Mozilla Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology, though it departs from both in parts. The main advantage of the hybrid proposal, as opposed to full reclassification, is that it wouldn’t require the FCC to reverse earlier decisions to deregulate broadband providers, which were made in the hopes of encouraging the adoption and deployment of high-speed broadband. The authors of the new proposal believe that not having to justify reversing itself would put the FCC on firmer legal ground.
It was patently obvious at the time, but now we have evidence on tape:
The federal government agreed in August to a request by the police to restrict about 37 square miles of airspace over Ferguson, Mo., for 12 days for what they said were safety concerns, but audio recordings show that the local authorities privately acknowledged that the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests.Seriously, this is America, and this is not acceptable.
On Aug. 12, the morning after the Federal Aviation Administration imposed the first flight restriction, the agency’s air traffic managers struggled to redefine the flight ban to allow commercial flights to operate at nearby Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and for police helicopters to fly through the area — while still prohibiting flights.
“They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out,” one administration manager said about the St. Louis County Police Department in a series of recorded telephone conversations obtained by The Associated Press. “But they were a little concerned of, obviously, anything else that could be going on.”
At another point, referring to the temporary flight restriction, a manager at the administration’s center in Kansas City, Mo., said the police “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this T.F.R. all day long. They didn’t want media in there.”
And I made the first one a few years back, and it wasn't that good.
Well, Chris Rock hits it out of the park:
On the eve of the New York City Marathon, “Saturday Night Live” host Chris Rock opened his monologue with jokes about last year’s Boston Marathon bombings. Too soon? Well, the joke was pretty tame, all things considered. But that was just the warm-up for Rock’s main riff on the Freedom Tower, the new One World Trade Center building that’s now America’s tallest skyscraper. He went there — to the 9/11 joke.It's really funny.
“What were they thinking?” Rock demanded with trademark incredulity. “What kind of arrogant Floyd Mayweather crap is this?” then “Who’s the corporate sponsor, Target?
