Aaron Burr's Gift to the Republic

While Alexander Hamilton was clearly a highly intelligent man, an examination of who and what he was reveals that he was the founding most hostile to the idea of a constitutional republic, and the one most likely to turn the US into a monarchy or dictatorship.

Among other things, he:

• Advocated for the creation of a standing permanent army run by and for the Federalist party.
• Called for the use of military force to prevent Thomas Jefferson becoming president after he was elected.
• Attempted to foment a coup against the US government.
• Was a slave trader, not an abolitionist.
• Attempted to put that day's big finance in charge of the government.

 Hamilton was a bad guy, and here is the money quote of this article:

But the agenda is hidden, because in America, no political leader, not even Donald Trump, can credibly come right out and pronounce democracy a bad thing and agitate for rule by big finance. And the reason for that is that Alexander Hamilton, despite his success in structuring Wall Street, lost the battle against American democracy. Thank God for that.

Quote of the Day

Bill Clinton Was A Horrible President

He really was. 20 years later I am tired of people defending him. Impeachment was bullsh%$ but he was a bad man and a bad Democrat and a bad president.

—Atrios

(%$# mine)

Mass incarceration, destroying welfare, repealing Glass-Steagall, privatizing core government functions, DADT, DOMA, etc.

He's right.

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.

If There Were a Nobel Prize for Snark………

Then I know who would win the award this year.

Emmett Rensin decided to write a review of Hillary Clinton's campaign memoir, What Happened, as if she had never heard of either Hillary Clinton or the 2016 campaign.

It is an inspired bit of sarcasm, and it is absolutely brutal.

I cannot excerpt it in a way to justice.

Just read it.

Remember Those Apocryphal Stories of Vietnam Vets Being Spat On?

One Case, and it was a war suppporter

There have been many claims over the years that returning Vietnam vets were spat on by protesters.

It turns out no one had been able to find a single contemporaneous report of this ever happening.

Well, someone has finally found one, only the veterans being spat on were VVAW members protesting the war, and the spitter was a war supporter:

A couple of days ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Jerry Lembcke “The Myth of the Spitting Antiwar Protester.” Lembcke wrote a book a few decades ago debunking that myth but it is still going strong… stronger than ever, actually. The trope of “they’re spitting on our veterans” is popular with anti-kneeling fanatics who maintain that athletes who protest during the national anthem are “spitting on the graves” of those who died to defend the flag and the freedom to do as you’re told and stand during the national anthem.

I have always found Lembcke’s argument and evidence compelling but I don’t like to take anything for granted. So I did a little extra digging. Some of that was digging through a stash of old Amex/Canada magazines that I have held onto for 45 years or so. A Vietnam veteran named Al Reynolds wrote an account published in the May-June 1973 issue reporting on the Vietnam Veterans Against the War contingent in the “Home with Honor” parade staged in New York City at the end of March of that year.

………

So there it is, folks. The making of a myth. An older woman in a fur coat, with carefully teased hair, her face distorted with rage, spitting at Vietnam veterans protesting against the war is transformed into a Legionnaire, with a red face, waiting at the airport gate to spit on returning G.I.s for not winning the war and finally into anti-war “maggots” protesting poor little John Rambo who was just doing what he had to do to win. So where does that leave us in October 2017? My, my, look at all the rhinestone Rambos!

There you have it. One report, and it was a war supporter spitting on veterans who were trying to end the war.

Not exactly what draft-dodger Sylvester Stallone raged about in Rambo.

Headline of the Day

Thanks, Obama: Trump Plans to Make It Easier to Kill Civilians with Drones

True dat.

Interesting Twitter Fact

Ukraine honors nationalist leader blamed 4 pogroms https://t.co/zeeFMVW5hj
Ukraine has more statues 4 killers of Jews than any other country

— Efraim Zuroff (@EZuroff) October 17, 2017

I would note that most, if not all, of these statues to genocidal anti-Semites have been erected since the fall of the USSR.

It ain't just history.

H/t Mark Ames.

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.

You Have Got to be F%$#ing Kidding Me

pic.twitter.com/z8cyxrd693

— Seth MacFarlane (@SethMacFarlane) October 11, 2017

And then he sang, "I saw your boobs."


Notice the Slightly Uncomfortable Audience Reaction?

The story about Harvey Weinstein's long history of harassment and assault of women in Hollywood continues to get more horrifying.

It also gets weirder. Now we have an explanation for a Seth McFarlane joke at the 2013 Oscars, and basically it's him seizing the moral high ground.

You hear heard that right, "Seth McFarlane seizing the moral high ground."

Now THERE is a phrase I never expected to write.

He had been told in confidence by a friend what had been done to them, and given those constraints, he went after Weinstein with a joke:

As allegations against disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein pile up, more and more celebrities are coming forward to either confirm or deny their own preexisting knowledge about the situation.

On Wednesday, Seth MacFarlane explained the origins of a 2013 joke he made at Harvey Weinstein's expense during the announcement of Academy Award nominations.

MacFarlane cracked his joke immediately after he listed the nominees for supporting actress. "Congratulations," he said. "You five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein," which got a considerable response from the room.

"In 2011, my friend and colleague Jessica Barth, with whom I worked on the ‘Ted’ films, confided in me regarding her encounter with Harvey Weinstein and his attempted advances," MacFarlane said in a statement on social media Wednesday. "She has since courageously come forward to speak out. It was with this account in mind that, when I hosted the Oscars in 2013, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to take a hard swing in his direction."

I still find it hard to believe that Seth F%$#ing McFarlane is seizing the moral high ground.

We are living in profoundly strange times.

Adding to the List of They Who Must Not Be Named

Former football coach and tight end Mike Ditka, who just said that, "there has been no oppression in the United States in the past 100 years:

Even before this NFL season, which has featured team owners linking arms with players as shows of solidarity amid sharply critical comments from President Trump, some players were noting that the original message of protests during the national anthem had been largely lost. To them, the cause of bringing attention to racial injustice, in particular police brutality against black men, had been overshadowed by a heated national discussion over the merits of taking a knee during the national anthem.

To former NFL coach and ESPN analyst Mike Ditka, however, that cause made no sense to begin with. In a pregame interview before a radio broadcast of Monday night’s game between the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings, he said, “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of.”

The Germans have a term for this, Fachidiot, (Google Translate) which refers to an expert who is a complete moron outside of his limited area of expertise.

Thus, I add Michael Keller Ditka to my list of They Who Must Not Be Named, unless he decides to do something like running for office, (please God no) you will here nothing about him from me

Of course, I haven't posted about him before, so carry on.

Quote of the Day

There I was, the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps, it was, but then again, perhaps, the anthem could be called the theme song for a drama called The Noble Experiment. Today, as I look back on that opening game of my first world series, I must tell you that it was Mr. Rickey’s drama and that I was only a principal actor. As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

—Jackie Robinson, in his autobiography.

(emphasis mine)

The Motives of Leakers Don't Matter

What matters is what they leaked, and the context of that information.

Case in point, if one looks at the history perhaps the most prominent leaker of all time, Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, it becomes clear that he was motivated by a desire to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the FBI, not concerns about either the bureau or the rule of law:

The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt—the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights—was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. Or, as David Remnick spelled out in the New Yorker—echoing Deep Throat’s original hagiographers, Woodward and Bernstein—Felt “believed that the Nixon administration was corrupt, paranoid and trying to infringe on the independence of the bureau.” The president and his top aides ran, Felt believed, “a criminal operation out of the White House, and [Felt] risked everything to guide” the Post reporters. A new biopic about Felt, starring Liam Neeson, is due out on September 29 and shows every sign of continuing to portray Deep Throat as a profound patriot and dedicated FBI lifer.

But here’s a heretical thought: Mark Felt was no hero. Getting rid of Nixon was the last thing Felt ever wanted to accomplish; indeed, he was banking on Nixon’s continuation in office to achieve his one and only aim: to reach the top of the FBI pyramid and become director. Felt didn’t help the media for the good of the country, he used the media in service of his own ambition. Things just didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way he wanted.

Only recently, more than four decades after Nixon’s downfall, has it become possible to reconstruct Felt’s design and what really happened during those fateful six months following the Watergate break-in. Doing so requires burrowing through a great number of primary documents and government records against the backdrop of a vast secondary literature. Nixon’s surreptitious tape recordings rank first in importance, but only mark the starting point. One has to also research documents from the FBI’s vast Watergate investigation; the bureau’s subsequent internal leak investigation; records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; documents from Felt’s own FBI file; and lastly, two unintentionally rewarding books: Mark Felt’s original 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, and the slightly reworked version published in 2006, A G-Man’s Life. What you’ll end up with is the real story of Deep Throat. And you might be left with this realization: No matter what happens to Donald Trump—whether he’s absolved, exposed or neither—you should hope there’s nobody as duplicitous as Mark Felt manipulating our understanding of Russiagate.

Here's the important thing:  Felt's motives do not matter.


Except to the degree that they effect credibility,^* a source's motives never matter.

What matters was that he was telling the truth.

What matters is the accuracy of the information and the significance of the information.

If reporters refused to take information from disgruntled bureaucratic climbers, there would be very little real news out there.

^*Yes, I acknowledge that the trustworthiness of the source is a big f%$#ing deal. But once you are past that not inconsiderable hump, motive does not matter.

9/11 Thoughts

It's the 16^th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

My only deep thought involves citing a work of science fiction.

I would suggest that anyone who hasn't read Eric Frank Russell's magnum opus Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke an overreaction by the authorities:

"Phew!" Mowry raised his eyebrows.

"Finally, let's consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face."

"It nearly happened to me once."

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, "The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn't even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap."

………

"However," Wolf went on, "the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain." He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, "Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk."

The country has changed, and none of these changes to our benefit, and none of them were really required, but rather the product of mindless over-reaction.

We are those drivers in that doomed car.

In terms of my personal recollections:

• My first thought when someone said that a plane had hit the WTC, was, "What took so long?", because I had always seen private planes and helos flying low around the area, and I assumed that it was a private plane accident.
• When I realized that it was something big, I wondered if this was done by Chileans, since 9/11 is the anniversary of Pinochet's CIA sponsored coup against Allende.
• I wondered whether it was another Reichstag fire.

Interestingly enough the memory that sticks with me is the most trivial:  When I was driving home that afternoon, the roads were empty.

When I passed the I-695/I-83 interchange I marveled how little traffic there was and how easy my commute was.

Normally, I would have at least a 5 minute slowdown, but there was NO ONE on the road that day.

Memory is weird.

Libel Troll Fraudster Gets Case Thrown Out of Court

Shiva Ayyadurai claimed to have created email in 1978.

The facts, of course speak otherwise.

Email predates his high school freshman programming exercise by at least 10 years, email actually accounted for over half of all ARPANet traffic two years before he wrote his program, but that didn't stop him from attempting to sue Techdirt out of existence, possibly in collusion with wannabe Bond villain and literal vampire Peter Thiel.

Well, the judge just threw out his whole case.

It's not a complete win for the defendant, because the federal judge did not strike the case under California's anti-SLAPP law, which would have have allowed them to sue for legal fees and penalties, but this is still an unambiguous win:

As you likely know, for most of the past nine months, we've been dealing with a defamation lawsuit from Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email. This is a claim that we have disputed at great length and in great detail, showing how email existed long before Ayyadurai wrote his program. We pointed to the well documented public history of email, and how basically all of the components that Ayyadurai now claims credit for preceded his own work. We discussed how his arguments were, at best, misleading, such as arguing that the copyright on his program proved that he was the "inventor of email" -- since patents and copyrights are very different, and just because Microsoft has a copyright on "Windows" it does not mean it "invented" the concept of a windowed graphical user interface (because it did not). As I have said, a case like this is extremely draining -- especially on an emotional level -- and can create massive chilling effects on free speech.

A few hours ago, the judge ruled and we prevailed. The case has been dismissed and the judge rejected Ayyadurai's request to file an amended complaint. We are certainly pleased with the decision and his analysis, which notes over and over again that everything that we stated was clearly protected speech, and the defamation (and other claims) had no merit. This is, clearly, a big win for the First Amendment and free speech -- especially the right to call out and criticize a public figure such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who is now running for the US Senate in Massachusetts. We're further happy to see the judge affirm that CDA Section 230 protects us from being sued over comments made on the blog, which cannot be attributed to us under the law. We talk a lot about the importance of CDA 230, in part because it protects sites like our own from these kinds of lawsuits. This is just one more reason we're so concerned about the latest attempt in Congress to undermine CDA 230. While those supporting the bill may claim that it only targets sites like Backpage, such changes to CDA 230 could have a much bigger impact on smaller sites like our own.

We are disappointed, however, that the judge denied our separate motion to strike under California's anti-SLAPP law. For years, we've discussed the importance of strong anti-SLAPP laws that protect individuals and sites from going through costly legal battles. Good anti-SLAPP laws do two things: they stop lawsuits early and they make those who bring SLAPP suits -- that is, lawsuits clearly designed to silence protected speech -- pay the legal fees. The question in this case was whether or not California's anti-SLAPP law should apply to a case brought in Massachusetts. While other courts have said that the state of the speaker should determine which anti-SLAPP laws are applied (even in other states' courts), it was an issue that had not yet been ruled upon in the First Circuit where this case was heard. While we're happy with the overall dismissal and the strong language used to support our free speech rights, we're nevertheless disappointed that the judge chose not to apply California's anti-SLAPP law here.

This guy is running for Senate in Massachusetts, as a Republican, and he gave a speech at the recent white supremacist rally in Boston.

He also claims that anyone who knows the history of email is a racist.

What a lovely fellow.

Why I Quote Rather Extensively

The Million Dollar Web Page Then


And now

Because I am aware of link rot, where much of the information on the information in the internet is peripatetic, notwithstanding the meme that the Internet is forever:

In 2005, one of the most intriguing advertising stunts of the internet age was hatched.

Alex Tew launched the The Million Dollar Homepage, where anyone could “own a piece of internet history” by purchasing pixels-plots (minimum of 10×10) on a massive digital canvas. At the price of just one dollar per pixel, everyone from individual internet users to well-known companies like Yahoo! raced to claim a space on the giant digital canvas.

Today, The Million Dollar Homepage lives on as a perfect record of that wacky time in internet history – or so it seems. However, the reality is that many of the hyperlinks on the canvas are now redirects that send incoming users to other sites, while over 20% of them are simply dead.

I feel that I need to quote extensively enough that the basic context is clear without clicking through.

I learned this lesson when the New York Times took over full management of the International Herald Tribune, and broke all the exiting links to the archives. (Also, Yahoo's shutdown of Geocities, but Geocities really did suck.)

You may be able to find the page with a search, but link will never work.

That's why I quote rather extensively.

Tweet if the Day

a good statue:
a bronze shoe statue built for Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at Bush pic.twitter.com/oGg0fuZpR0

— SubMedina (@SubMedina) August 22, 2017

H/t naked capitalism for finding this engaging bit of history.

These days, we have a surfeit of targets for such a protest.

Headline of the Day

Removing Confederate Statues Isn't Sanitizing History—It's Fumigating History

—Charlie Pierce

Insert cockroach metaphor here.

Hurray Charm City!

Last night, without any advance notice, the City of Baltimore removed the 4 Confederate monuments in the City.

If the Neo-Nazis show up to protest, I recommend that every policeman assigned to protect their sorry ass get a case of severe existential nausea that day, and don't show up to protect them.

Epic Troll

Over at The Register, they discuss how the Royal Navy will maintain offensive capability now that they will have no antiship weapons between 2018 and 2020.

Their proposal is to put the biplane Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber on their aircraft carriers:

The solution to the Royal Navy’s post-2018 problem of having no anti-ship weapons is already in service and can even equip the UK’s new aircraft carriers.

The Fairey Swordfish (pictured above) is a versatile, rugged torpedo bomber first introduced into service in the 1930s. Having outlived everything introduced to replace it during the WWII, two flying examples remain in service with the RN Historic Flight.

These two aircraft could each be assigned to HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, the 70,000-ton aircraft carriers due to enter naval service in the near future.

Although neither carrier has catapults (or, indeed, aircraft until the year 2021), the Swordfish is capable of taking off within 540ft at full power* with the ship steaming into a 20kt wind – which compares very favourably with the QE-class’s 920ft flight deck.

The Swordfish has a noble and proud history of delivering the Navy’s ship-sinking capability, most notably over the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940 and crippling the battleship Bismarck later in WWII. It is a proven war-winning platform with a straightforward wood-and-canvas construction that means spares and logistic trains will cost infinitely less than the heart-stoppingly expensive F-35B fighter jet (at around $130m per aircraft, according to some estimates) which will not be able to fly from the British carriers until 2021 at the earliest.

Snerk!

Do You Want to Feel Really, Really Old?

Keith Richards Abides

The Rolling Stones played their first ever gig 55 years ago today, at the Marquee Club.

The Marqee moved three times, and then closed over 20 years ago, but the Stones are still touring.

Keith Richards, of course, is probably going to outlive the heat death of the universe.