A Feature, Not a Bug

A CBO analysis has shown that the Senate Republican tax bill is even worse for the poor than previously thought:

The Senate Republican tax plan gives substantial tax cuts and benefits to Americans earning more than $100,000 a year, while the nation’s poorest would be worse off, according to a report released Sunday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Republicans are aiming to have the full Senate vote on the tax plan as early as this week, but the new CBO analysis showing large, harmful effects on the poor may complicate those plans. The CBO also said the bill would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, a potential problem for Republican lawmakers worried about America’s growing debt.

Democrats have repeatedly slammed the bill as a giveaway to the rich at the expense of the poor. In addition to lowering taxes for businesses and many individuals, the Senate bill also makes a major change to health insurance that the CBO projects would have a harsh impact on lower-income families.

By 2019, Americans earning less than $30,000 a year would be worse off under the Senate bill, CBO found. By 2021, Americans earning $40,000 or less would be net losers, and by 2027, most people earning less than $75,000 a year would be worse off. On the flip side, millionaires and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 would be big beneficiaries, according to the CBO’s calculations. (In the CBO table below, negative signs mean people in those income brackets pay less in taxes).

Silly rabbit.  Republicans think that people are poor because they are evil, and that people are rich because they are virtuous.

Just ask the Kochs.

The Evil James O'Keeve Is at It Again

This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O'Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, a cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

Please note that there are two James O'Keefes, 

This time, he unsuccessfully tried to plant a false story with the Washington Post:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the organization’s offices on Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside.

“I am not doing an interview right now, so I’m not going to say a word,” O’Keefe said.

In a follow-up interview, O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.

The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has denied that he did anything improper.

A spokesman for Moore’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The woman who approached Post reporters, Jaime T. Phillips, did not respond to calls to her cellphone later Monday. Her car remained in the Project Veritas parking lot for more than an hour.

The Post positioned videographers outside the group’s office in Mamaroneck, N.Y, after determining that Phillips lives in Stamford, Conn., and realizing that the two locations were just 16 miles apart. Two reporters followed her from her home as she drove to the office.

After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous off-the-record comments.

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”

Your Kung Fu is weak, old man.

Get a real job Mr. O'Keefe. 

I would suggest a night watchman, a lighthouse keeper, or the Taliban.

You really need to separate yourself from civilized society.

Who Says that Irony is Dead?

White House Memo Justifying CFPB Takeover Was Written By Payday Lender Attorney

Seriously. We live in Bizarro World.

Travis Kalanick Continues to Leave a Trail of Slime

It turns out that Uber had a major data breach, with frightening levels of personal data taken about their drivers, and their response was to pay off the hackers and cover the whole affair up:

Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies Inc., a massive breach that the company concealed for more than a year. This week, the ride-hailing firm ousted its chief security officer and one of his deputies for their roles in keeping the hack under wraps, which included a $100,000 payment to the attackers.

Compromised data from the October 2016 attack included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, the company told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The personal information of about 7 million drivers was accessed as well, including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card information, trip location details or other data were taken, Uber said.

I'm not inclined to believe Uber's statements as to the limited scope of the breach.

At the time of the incident, Uber was negotiating with U.S. regulators investigating separate claims of privacy violations. Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers to delete the data and keep the breach quiet. Uber said it believes the information was never used but declined to disclose the identities of the attackers.

That is so Uber.

Hackers have successfully infiltrated numerous companies in recent years. The Uber breach, while large, is dwarfed by those at Yahoo, MySpace, Target Corp., Anthem Inc. and Equifax Inc. What’s more alarming are the extreme measures Uber took to hide the attack. The breach is the latest scandal Khosrowshahi inherits from his predecessor, Travis Kalanick. 

Like the chicken said, "You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred."

BTW, Kalanick knew of the hack almost as soon as it happened.

Dara Khosrowshahi may have the worst job on the face of the earth.

Being Evil………

Guess what? Google is using Android to collect your location information even when you have turned off location services:

Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?

Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.

Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.

Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.

………

The practice is troubling for people who’d prefer they weren’t tracked, especially for those such as law-enforcement officials or victims of domestic abuse who turn off location services thinking they’re fully concealing their whereabouts. Although the data sent to Google is encrypted, it could potentially be sent to a third party if the phone had been compromised with spyware or other methods of hacking. Each phone has a unique ID number, with which the location data can be associated.

The revelation comes as Google and other internet companies are under fire from lawmakers and regulators, including for the extent to which they vacuum up data about users. Such personal data, ranging from users’ political views to their purchase histories to their locations, are foundational to the business successes of companies like Facebook and Alphabet, built on targeted advertising and personalization and together valued at over $1.2 trillion by investors.

Clearly the solution to Google cyber-stalking us is to eliminate regulatory oversight.  That way the market will solve everything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Commitment to Transparency, My Ass

After a protracted court battle, the US Government has turned over documents regarding the WWII prosecution of a journalist for publishing classified information.

There was never an indictment, because it was determined that this would serve to alert the Japanese that their codes had been broken, but what was interesting to me was that, 70 years after the fact, the government was still trying to keep this cloaked in secrecy:

Newly published documents by the National Security Archive reveal why a grand jury refused to prosecute a Chicago Tribune reporter during World War II for a leak.

Correspondent Stanley Johnston was accused of revealing the United States cracked a Japanese code, which alerted the military to Japanese war plans before the Battle of Midway. A Tribune editor attributed the source of information to “naval intelligence.”

A prosecution was contemplated under the Espionage Act, but the government backed off because they feared what may happen if a trial publicized that the U.S. compromised the Japanese code.

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama fought against a lawsuit filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It lost when a district court ruled in 2015 that disclosure would “result in a more complete public record of this historic event” and affirm the government is “open, in all respects, to scrutiny by the people.”

Yet, the government appealed, and it was not until September 2016, when the appeals court ruled against the government’s claim that a federal court had no jurisdiction to order the release of transcripts, that an effort to keep 75 year-old documents secret came to an end.

This is a 75 year old secret, and Barack Obama and his Evil Minions^™ felt compelled to keep it under wraps, because ……… Worst Constitutional law professor ever.^™

One would think that Obama was working for the US state security apparatus, not the other way around.

A Bit Late to Admit This

The New York City board of elections has admitted that they engaged in an illegal voter purge in the 2016 Democratic primary.

As I noted in April, the rag-f%$#ing of likely Sanders voters did not appear the result of, "Entirely innocent incompetence."

The New York City Board of Elections is admitting it broke state and federal law when it improperly removed voters from the rolls ahead of the presidential primary last spring, including more than 117,000 voters in Brooklyn.

That’s according to a draft consent decree announced Tuesday— nearly a year after the Board was sued in federal court for violating the National Voter Registration Act and state election law.

The Brooklyn voter purge was first reported by WNYC just days before last spring’s primary election.

As a part of the settlement, the Board agreed to a series of remedial measures that will be in place at least through the next presidential election, November 2020 — pending court approval. The deal restores the rights of improperly purged voters and establishes a comprehensive plan to prevent illegal voter purges in future elections.

You know, the fact that these bastards got to say, "My bad," and walk into the sunset without being frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs kind of honks me off.

Yeah, I'm still bitter over this sh%$.

Corruption Much?

A company owned by a Trump donor which has just 2 employees, was just awarded a $300 million contract to rebuild the Puerto Rico power grid.

The outbreak of corruption makes the Katrina recovery effort look honest and competent:

For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico’s crippled electrical grid, the territory’s state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall.

The company, Whitefish Energy, said last week that it had signed a $300 million contract with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to repair and reconstruct large portions of the island’s electrical infrastructure. The contract is the biggest yet issued in the troubled relief effort.

Whitefish said Monday that it has 280 workers in the territory, using linemen from across the country, most of them as subcontractors, and that the number grows on average from 10 to 20 people a day. It said it was close to completing infrastructure work that will energize some of the key industrial facilities that are critical to restarting the local economy.

The power authority, also known as PREPA, opted to hire Whitefish rather than activate the “mutual aid” arrangements it has with other utilities. For many years, such agreements have helped U.S. utilities — including those in Florida and Texas recently — to recover quickly after natural disasters.

The unusual decision to instead hire a tiny for-profit company is drawing scrutiny from Congress and comes amid concerns about bankrupt Puerto Rico’s spending as it seeks to provide relief to its 3.4 million residents, the great majority of whom remain without power a month after the storm.

………


Whitefish Energy is based in Whitefish, Mont., the home town of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Its chief executive, Andy Techmanski, and Zinke acknowledge knowing one another — but only, Zinke’s office said in an email, because Whitefish is a small town where “everybody knows everybody.” One of Zinke’s sons “joined a friend who worked a summer job” at one of Techmanski’s construction sites, the email said. Whitefish said he worked as a “flagger.”

Zinke’s office said he had no role in Whitefish securing the contract for work in Puerto Rico. Techmanski also said Zinke was not involved.


………


The scale of the disaster in Puerto Rico is far larger than anything Whitefish has handled. The company has won two contracts from the Energy Department, including $172,000 to replace a metal pole structure and splice in three miles of new conductor and overhead ground wire in Arizona.

Shortly before Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, Whitefish landed its largest federal contract, a $1.3 million deal to replace and upgrade parts of a 4.8-mile transmission line in Arizona. The company — which was listed in procurement documents as having annual revenue of $1 million — was given 11 months to complete the work, records show.


………


Kent McNellie, an investment professional at HBC, the Texas investment firm that is now the largest financier of Whitefish, said the company’s experience reconstructing a one-mile power line destroyed in a wildfire in Washington state was more relevant to Puerto Rico’s needs than is the experience of many companies on the mainland. The span in Washington included an elevation change of about 5,000 feet, and the terrain required crews and equipment to be delivered by helicopter.

HBC investments, sounds familiar  ……… Gee, I wonder why:

The private-equity firm that finances Whitefish, HBC Investments, was founded by Joe Colonnetta, who serves as its general partner.

Federal Elections Commission data compiled by The Daily Beast shows Colonnetta contributed $20,000 to the Trump Victory PAC during the general election, $2,700 to Trump’s primary election campaign (then the maximum amount permitted), $2,700 to Trump’s general election campaign (also the maximum), and a total of $30,700 to the Republican National Committee in 2016 alone. Colonnetta’s wife, Kimberly, is no stranger to Republican politics either; shortly after Trump’s victory, she gave $33,400 to the Republican National Committee, the maximum contribution permitted for party committees in 2016.

(emphasis mine)

Nothing to see here, move along.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

Someone leaked the ICE asset forfeiuture guide to The Intercept, and it is a truly chilling:

An internal handbook obtained by The Intercept provides a rare view into the extensive asset seizure operations of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, an office that trains its agents to meticulously appraise the value of property before taking it.

HSI’s 71-page “Asset Forfeiture Handbook,” dated June 30, 2010, underscores the role seizures play in “helping to fund future law enforcement actions” and covering costs “that HSI would otherwise be unable to fund.” It thus offers an unprecedented window into ICE’s wide-ranging asset forfeiture operations and the premium the agency places on seizing valuable property. Forfeiture proceeds can bolster ICE’s partnerships with local police departments, which are now the subject of heightened debate given the Trump administration’s hard-line immigration agenda.

 We need to change the rules on asset forfeiture, because we have cops engaging in shakedowns

This May Be the Worst Thing That I Have Ever Said

We just had a workplace shooting in Maryland and Delaware yesterday.

3 dead and 6 wounded. Just another day at the office.

My wife and I were discussing this as I was getting ready to go to work, and I said, "My advice is always to shoot the boss, not your co-workers."

Sharon,^* ever the optimist, asked a very wise question, "How about not shooting anyone."

Without thinking, I replied:

This is America, that's not an option.

That was literally the first thought in my head, like some kind of like a Rorschach test.

That may have been the worst thing that I have ever said in my entire life.

I'm not sure if it reflects poorly on me, on our society, on my understanding of our society, or the universe.

^*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

This is Why Obama's Knifing Ellison in the DNC Race Makes a Difference

DNC Chairman Tom Perez has appointed a fierce opponent of the minimum wage to its finance committee, because ……… Hell because the New Dem wing of the Democratic Party needs to accommodate abusive employers, slumlords, Wall Street, and evil people in general, because they want their money to pay for overpriced incompetent consultants:

Various sources have reported that Tom Perez, the Chair of the Democratic National Committee, has appointed Atlanta native Dan Halpern to the finance committee of the party.

Tom Perez just appointed a lobbyist for an anti-minimum wage group in the South as a DNC Finance Chair. I'm not joking.

— spooky neesins🌹 (@LaDemSoc) October 12, 2017

Specifically, he will be part of a squad of deputy national finance chairs. As the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports:

Halpern chaired Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s mayoral campaign in 2009 and served as a trustee for then-President-elect Barack Obama’s 2008 inaugural committee. Halpern also is immediate past chairman of the Atlanta Housing Authority Board of Directors and a past chairman of the Georgia Restaurant Association.

In a party that says it’s trying to be progressive, Halpern is a strange direction. As the head of Jackmont Hospitality and the GRA, Halpern has reliably opposed the minimum wage. His record thus far suggests a hostility towards the kind of worker-friendly policies that the Bernie-era Dems are supposedly pursuing. It suggests Perez, and Perez’s backers and friends, have not gotten the memo about economic justice.

In Halpern’s home state of Georgia, according to Politifact “Senate Bill 314 called for raising Georgia’s minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, but it didn’t get so much as a hearing.”

Why? Halpern’s people—the Georgia Restaurant Association—claimed that there would be a potential loss of 21,000 jobs, ignoring the increased possibility for consumer spending, for new jobs, for giving hungry people a hand up. Everything must benefit the boardroom, you see, or it’s not worth doing. As Politifact helpfully reminds us, “Georgia’s minimum wage is technically $5.15 an hour (Georgia Code 34-4-3) and has been since 2001. But the vast majority of Georgia employers (some say more than 99 percent) must comply with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, which means they have to pay their employees the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.” If given god-like sway over the business, Halpern and his GRA would probably prefer to keep this amount even lower.

Hardly surprising. When a guy is described by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as a “Georgia Democratic moneyman,” it’s safe bet he couldn’t give two hoots in hell for a single mother making minimum wage at McDonald’s.

Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party brand is in the sewer?

This sort of crap is toxic.

As If Roy Moore Could Not Be Any More Contemptible………

In 2004, Alabama tried to amend the state constitution to remove (unenforceable) provisions requiring school segregation and poll taxes.

Roy Moore led the successful (the referendum failed) campaign to keep these provisions in the state constitution:

In 2004, a bipartisan coalition of Alabama leaders moved to eliminate sections of the state constitution mandating school segregation and poll taxes. They assumed it’d be an easy feat — until Roy Moore got involved.

Democrats and Republicans led by then-Gov. Bob Riley (R) worked together on an amendment to remove language in the state constitution mandating “separate schools for white and colored children” and allowing poll taxes, Jim Crow-era requirements that people to pay to vote that disenfranchised most black people.

The changes were purely symbolic — all of the state constitutional language had already been struck down by state and federal courts — but civil rights and business leaders saw it as a way to heal old wounds and make the state more attractive to big business.

The opposite happened instead, and Moore’s fierce opposition likely made the difference.

Modern conservatism is indistinguishable from racism, and has been since William F. Buckley filled The National Review with full throated endorsements of segregation in the 1950s and 1960s.