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.

Republican Family Values

Wes Goodman, a Republican state representative in Ohio who has made the protection of, "Natural Marriage," a center piece of his poltical personae, has resigned after being caught having an affair with another man.

To paraphrase James Carville, it's the hypicrisy, stupid:

A Christian “family values” Republican lawmaker has stepped down from his post in Ohio’s state House over revelations that he engaged in “inappropriate conduct” with another man at his legislative office, said The Columbus Dispatch on Thursday.

Wes Goodman, 33, a married former aide to U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), submitted a two-sentence resignation letter to the state Republican Party on Wednesday after a meeting with state House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger (R).

“I was alerted to details yesterday afternoon regarding his involvement in inappropriate behavior related to his state office,” said Rosenberger in a statement on Wednesday. “I met with him later in the day where he acknowledged and confirmed the allegations. It became clear that his resignation was the most appropriate course of action for him, his family, the constituents of the 87th House District and this institution.”

No charges of harassment or abuse were filed against Goodman. The details of the incident are not clear, but apparently a witness to the two men’s liaison reported Goodman to House Chief of Staff Mike Dittoe on Tuesday.

“Rumors about Goodman’s questionable conduct, including his use of social media, have been swirling at the Statehouse in the past few weeks and include stories dating back years to when he worked in Washington. His Facebook account was taken offline,” said the Dispatch.

Anyone surprised by this?  I'm not.

And Roy Moore Takes His Clown Show to a New Level

Cannot post this without invoking Lily Allen

I was surprised when I read of allegations that Alabama candidate for the US Senate Roy Moore has been alleged to have had sexual encounters with teen girls, but only because I was expecting that the skeletons in his closet to be pre-teen boys, because that is how homophobe hypocrites tend to roll.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.

“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.”

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

“I wanted it over with — I wanted out,” she remembers thinking. “Please just get this over with. Whatever this is, just get it over.” Corfman says she asked Moore to take her home, and he did.

Two of Corfman’s childhood friends say she told them at the time that she was seeing an older man, and one says Corfman identified the man as Moore. Wells says her daughter told her about the encounter more than a decade later, as Moore was becoming more prominent as a local judge.

Aside from Corfman, three other women interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks say Moore pursued them when they were between the ages of 16 and 18 and he was in his early 30s, episodes they say they found flattering at the time, but troubling as they got older. None of the three women say that Moore forced them into any sort of relationship or sexual contact.

………

Neither Corfman nor any of the other women sought out The Post. While reporting a story in Alabama about supporters of Moore’s Senate campaign, a Post reporter heard that Moore allegedly had sought relationships with teenage girls. Over the ensuing three weeks, two Post reporters contacted and interviewed the four women. All were initially reluctant to speak publicly but chose to do so after multiple interviews, saying they thought it was important for people to know about their interactions with Moore. The women say they don’t know one another.

………

The legal age of consent in Alabama, then and now, is 16. Under Alabama law in 1979, and today, a person who is at least 19 years old who has sexual contact with someone older than 12 and younger than 15 has committed sexual abuse in the second degree. Sexual contact is defined as touching of sexual or intimate parts. The crime is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

Moore, of course, is claiming that it's all a political hit job.

Me, I have a simpler explanation:  You are a skeevy perv.

If you are wondering why this is happening now, you could put it down to happenstance, or increased awareness following l'affaire Weinstein, but I have a simpler explanation:  God hates you, Roy Moore.

OK, So Bob Mueller has Just Busted Paul Manafort………

This is not particularly surprising.

Manafort was clearly on the hit list (I was hoping that he would take down Roger Stone).

What's more, Manafort is a longtime professional lobbyist, and therefore dirty.

It just comes with the business.

I think that Mueller is hoping to flip him, or his side kick Rick Gates, to flip.

What I should note here is that the charges have to do with his lobbying practices, and not any alleged coordination with Russia.

Still, it appears that there is some real good over this, because it has put a bipartisan fear of God in lobbyists across the political spectrum, as evidenced by Tony Podesta, John's uber-lobbyist brother, stepping down from his lobbying firm amid because he was acting as a foreign representative without properer registration.

It appears that DC lobbyists are freaking out, because ignoring foreign registration rules has been the rule for many years, and they are now worried that the worm has turned.

Good.  Turning over the rocks in DC influence peddling is a good thing.

Ironically, Trump's nemesis might be draining that swamp he kept talking about on the campaign trail.

An Old Hollywood Story

Here is a gem buried in a discussion about plans for the tech giants to take over the entertainment world:

Several times in conversations with people in Hollywood, I heard the tech people referred to as “dumb money” — the sort of outsiders (in the past, they came from oil, then from finance) who parade through town looking to call the shots. One Hollywood executive who has worked often with tech companies told me: “I wouldn’t say we’ve looked at them with fear, no.”

Yeah, pretty much.

Buh Bye

Anti-abortion firebrand Tim Murphy (R-PA) was caught pressuring his mistress to get an abortion.

First, he announced that he would not be running for reelection, and now he has resigned from Congress

Rep. Tim Murphy said Thursday that he will resign from Congress this month, a day after the eight-term Pennsylvania Republican announced that he would not seek reelection amid a personal scandal.

“Upon further discussion with my family, I have made the decision to resign my position” effective Oct. 21, Murphy wrote in a letter to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan. “I am grateful for the opportunity to have served the people of southwestern Pennsylvania and to have worked with the talented and dedicated men and women of the United States Congress.”

………

The resignation of Murphy, a clinical psychologist, comes after a news report claimed that the married Republican had asked a woman with whom he had an extramarital affair to get an abortion.

Alpha Mike Foxtrot, Mr. Murphy, Alpha Mike Foxtrot.

More of This

A group of people on Twitter known as "Sleeping Giants" has taken to visiting Breitbart, taking screenshots showing the ads and then naming and shaming the advertisers:

Hardly anyone paid attention last November when a strangely named Twitter account, Sleeping Giants, sent its first tweet into the digisphere. “Are you aware that you’re advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right’s biggest champion, today?” read the tweet, aimed at a consumer lending outfit called Social Finance. “Are you supporting them publicly?”

Within 30 minutes, Social Finance replied, tweeting that it would stop running ads on Breitbart.

It was, it turns out, the start of an odd, and oddly effective, social media campaign against Breitbart, the influential conservative news site headed by Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former campaign chairman and ex-chief White House strategist.

………

Sleeping Giants’ basic approach is to make Breitbart’s advertisers aware that they are, in fact, Breitbart advertisers. Many apparently don’t know this, given that Web ads are often bought through third-party brokers, such as Google and Facebook. The brokers then distribute them to a network of websites according to algorithms that seek a specific target audience (say, young men) or a set number of impressions.

………

So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story.

The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.”

This apparently happens a lot. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure, though one hard to confirm because some ad buys recur. Nevertheless, it’s not an implausible number. During one 24-hour period, advertisers such as the air-conditioning manufacturer Rheem, transport operator Caltrain, Sutter Health Plus and Rose Medical Center of Denver all publicly acknowledged that they had blacklisted Breitbart in response to a Sleeping Giants tweet.

………

The group decided to single out Breitbart almost by happenstance. “It really happened as a reaction to Steve Bannon’s rise,” the spokesman says. “We weren’t familiar with Breitbart at the time and were obviously pretty shocked at the articles. . . . To be honest, we weren’t familiar with [other conservative] sites,” so those weren’t even considered, he says.

The group has raised about $1,500 from T-shirt sales and about $7,000 from an online fundraiser, but it otherwise operates with little overhead, he notes. “If I had a nickel for every claim that we’re being funded by [liberal billionaire activist] George Soros, I’d be well off. It’s crazy. There’s not much need for funding. Tweeting is free.”

Two points here:

• People have been writing to advertisers about where their ads appear since Madison Avenue was a cow path.
• The fact that the big players in the online advertising market are this cavalier with how they serve up ads.  If you buy ads, be aware of this, or maybe beware of this; your choice.

I think that I might know someone who knows who these guys are.

Wah ……… Wah ……… Wah ……… Waaaaahhhhhh

Cue Sad Trombone Music

Mitch McConnell just threw in the towel in the last attempt to repeal Obamacare:

Senate Republican leaders on Tuesday abandoned their latest campaign to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, conceding that their plan lacked key support. But they showed little interest in moving swiftly to shore up the seven-year-old law with the crucial funding it needs.

The official collapse of the Cassidy-Graham health-care bill once again leaves the party short of fulfilling a signature promise, which some Republicans worried could inspire a backlash among their base heading into the 2018 midterm elections.

And the failure of that alternative to the ACA, combined with the GOP’s reluctance to fix weaknesses in the existing law, leaves states, insurers and millions of consumers who rely on its coverage with substantial uncertainty. Enrollment begins in barely a month for 2018 health plans in marketplaces created under the law.

The Senate leaders said they would turn their attention to their next major legislative undertaking. “Where we go from here is tax reform,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters after holding a closed-door policy lunch with members of his caucus.

Republicans already are bracing for the political fallout from the measure proposed by Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.)., which McConnell had hoped to bring to a vote this week. They said the pressure to pass a tax overhaul bill was higher than ever and hoped the Republican base would give them a bit more time to take another shot at repealing the ACA.

Sucks to be Mitch McConnell today, then again, it sucks to be Mitch McConnell EVERY day.

About the only thing that sucks worse is being Elaine Chao.

Jimmy Kimmel Wins

During his monologue, he noted that Senator Ted Cruz had liked some MILF porn in Twitter.

He made the following observation:

I honestly don't think it was Ted Cruz.

I don't think Ted Cruz looks at porn. Ted Cruz masturbates to pictures of poor people without health care.

Kimmel didn't just win the late night monologue Tuesday night, he won the world Tuesday night.

Video below:

Pass the Popcorn, Uber Edition

As I have noted earlier, Travis Kalanick was removed as CEO of Uber, and I noted that the company is having problems finding a replacement, because, among other problems,^* is that Kalanick imagines himself to be Steve Jobs, and has been meticulously planning a comeback.

While Kalanick shares some characteristics with Steve Jobs, most notably they are both frequently described as sociopaths, but Jobs actually had an eye for design and a vision beyond being a professional asshole.

But Kalanick is trying for a return to the captain's chair, and has been marshaling his forces, while the people who are concerned about parade of increasingly toxic revelations are fighting him.

The main advocate of keeping Kalanick away from management is Benchmark Capital, a private equity firm, and they just upped the stakes by filing a lawsuit against Kalanick for fraud:

Benchmark Capital sued Uber Technologies Inc.’s former chief Travis Kalanick in an effort to oust him from the board, exposing a clash between two of the ride-hailing company’s most powerful and contentious shareholders during the middle of a CEO search.

The lawsuit on Thursday alleges Mr. Kalanick defrauded directors into giving him more control over the board by hiding a range of “inappropriate and unethical directives.”

The allegations center around a decision in June 2016 by Mr. Kalanick to expand the board to 11 seats from eight, effectively giving him control over the designation of those additional seats, the firm said.  

Benchmark, which has a seat on the board, said it never would have authorized that move had it known about the company’s “gross mismanagement and other misconduct at Uber,” citing sexual-harassment allegations at the company, the handling of a rape incident involving a passenger in India and a lawsuit from Google parent Alphabet Inc. over the alleged theft of trade secrets.

In a statement, Mr. Kalanick’s spokesman said the lawsuit is without merit and “riddled with lies and false allegations.” He said Benchmark is attempting to deprive Mr. Kalanick of his rights as a founder and shareholder and silence his voice.

It's pretty clear that Kalanick was concealing this stuff from the board, as evidenced by the alacrity with which they defenestrated him when the revelations came to light.

Another group of investors, comprised of Kalanick bros and people who value a complete lack of ethics in the executive suite, are calling for Benchmark to leave the board.

I have a feeling that Benchmark is in a win-win situation:  Either they will beat Kalanick, or they will be bought out at significant profit.

I do think that Benchmark thinks that they will prevail in their lawsuit, because they gave Kalanick a month's notice before filing the lawsuit, which implies to me that either they have incontrovertible evidence of fraud, or that the revelations of a trial would be disastrous for Uber's investors:

The saga between the powerhouse venture firm Benchmark and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick continues. Following last week’s lawsuit revelation, Benchmark penned a public letter to Uber employees explaining why it is taking legal action against Kalanick, who remains on Uber’s board and controls two other, empty board seats.

Today, Benchmark doubled down on its decision, writing a note addressed to Uber employees, saying that not only should it sue, but “perhaps the better question is why didn’t we act sooner.” The firm said that when the CEO search began more than 50 days ago, Kalanick agreed in writing to “modify the company’s voting agreement to ensure that the board was composed of independent, diverse, and well qualified directors.” Benchmark is alleging that Kalanick has not followed through on this agreement and that he was warned more than a month ago that he would be subject to potential litigation.

(emphasis mine)

I plan to milk this for as much entertainment value as possible.

It's like trying not to stare at a car wreck.

^*Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Pass the Popcorn

I've always felt that the whole Russia hysteria is primarily about those who screwed the pooch in 2016 finding a scapegoat upon which they would attach the blame.

At best, the underlying criminal act is a violation of campaign finance law, and given the current dysfunctional nature of the Federal Elections Commission mitigates against even that.

That being said, in this sort of situation, it's frequently not the crime, it's the coverup, and when the FBI executes a predawn raid on one of the principals in the matter, it's starting to get really interesting:

FBI agents raided the home in Alexandria, Va., of President Trump’s former campaign chairman, arriving in the pre-dawn hours late last month and seizing documents and other materials related to the special counsel investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The raid, which occurred without warning on July 26, signaled an aggressive new approach by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team in dealing with a key figure in the Russia inquiry. Manafort has been under increasing pressure as the Mueller team looked into his personal finances and his professional career as a highly paid foreign political consultant.

Using a search warrant, agents appeared the day Manafort was scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and a day after he met voluntarily with Senate Intelligence Committee staff members.

The search warrant requested documents related to tax, banking and other matters. People familiar with the search said agents departed the Manafort residence with a trove of material, including binders prepared ahead of Manafort’s congressional testimony.

Investigators in the Russia inquiry have previously sought documents with subpoenas, which are less intrusive and confrontational than a search warrant. With a warrant, agents can inspect a physical location and seize any useful information. To get a judge to sign off on a search warrant, prosecutors must show that there is probable cause that a crime has been committed

This must have rattled their cages.

Schadenfreude Overload

New favorite German word: Backpfeifengesicht, a face that needs to be slapped.

— Sarah Sh. (@psygh) July 11, 2017

Roll Tape!

Martin Shkreli has been found guilty of fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison:

Martin Shkreli, 34, has confidently courted controversy in recent years, bulldozing his way into Wall Street and the drug industry, raising the price of a lifesaving drug by 5,000 percent overnight, boasting that he would outwit prosecutors in his federal fraud case, and live-streaming and tweeting throughout his five-week trial.

But on Friday, after five days of deliberations, jurors convicted him on three counts of fraud in federal court, and he now faces up to 20 years in prison on each of the first two counts, and up to five years on the final count.

Mr. Shkreli looked shaken as the judge read the verdict. But not long after, he appeared outside of court and returned to form, saying that he was “delighted, in many ways,” with the verdict. “This was a witch hunt of epic proportions, and maybe they found one or two broomsticks,” he said.

Later in the afternoon, he was live-streaming once more, sipping beer and joking about prison life from his Manhattan apartment.

………

He never seemed to take his case seriously, meeting with federal authorities without a lawyer, making faces during testimony, calling the prosecution “junior varsity” and reading a book during final statements.

Jurors convicted Mr. Shkreli of three of the eight counts: securities fraud in connection with his hedge fund MSMB Capital; securities fraud in connection with MSMB Healthcare; and conspiracy to commit securities fraud related to the Retrophin stock scheme, in which he tried to quietly control a huge portion of Retrophin stock.

It would be nice if something like this happened to Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon, though.

You shouldn't have to be as Backpfeifengesicht as Shkreli in order to be prosecuted.

The Streisand Effect Benefits Us All

I've written a bit about the increasingly larcenous and parasitic scientific journal industry.

I have in fact said that the giant of the industry, Elsevier, "Is determined to suck the marrow out of learning, and dance on its bones."

I have on occasion (first link) noted that there is a site, Sci-Hub, based in Russia, which is making much of the previously paywalled material freely available.

Elsevier has aggressively gone after Sci-Hub in court, with the result that Sci-Hub's profile and hence access on the internet, has skyrocketed:

Techdirt has been covering the story of Sci-Hub, which provides unrestricted access to a massive (unauthorized) database of academic papers, for a while now. As several posts have emphasized, the decision by the publishing giant Elsevier to pursue the site through the courts is a classic example of the Streisand Effect: it has simply served to spread the word about a hitherto obscure service. There's a new paper exploring this and other aspects of Sci-Hub, currently available as a PeerJ preprint. Here's what one of the authors says in a related Science interview about the impact of lawsuits on Sci-Hub:

 In our paper we have a graph plotting the history of Sci-Hub against Google Trends -- each legal challenge resulted in a spike in Google searches [for the site], which suggests the challenges are basically generating free advertising for Sci-Hub. I think the suits are not going to stop Sci-Hub.

That free advertising provided by Elsevier and others through their high-profile legal assaults on Alexandra Elbakyan, the academic from Kazakhstan who created and runs Sci-Hub pretty much single-handedly, has been highly effective. The surge in searches for Sci-Hub seems to have led to its holdings becoming incredibly comprehensive, as increased numbers of visitors have requested missing articles, which are then added to the collection: 

As an FYI the Streisand effect is where an attempt to suppress information results in further publicizing and popularizing the data.

Considering the nature of peer reviewed journals, where the publishing houses neither pay the authors, the reviewers, and frequently the editors, and prices have increased largely because of industry consolidation.

If Sci-Hub and its ilk sends these publishers into bankruptcy, the world will benefit.

Let him go! We will not. Let him go! We will not.*

Selected Tweets

---

#Scaramucci sells his company, loses his wife & then his job. Sounds like a rich man's country song.#YouGotTrumped

— Jonathan (@CrashDavis757) July 31, 2017

Anthony Scaramucci has resigned to spend more time with his... well, no, that's not gonna work.

— Matt Goldich (@MattGoldich) July 31, 2017

aww congrats to Scaramucci for taking his paternity leave!!! love when men set such good examples!!!!!!

— Elaine Filadelfo (@ElaineF) July 31, 2017

Comedians Protest Anthony Scaramucci’s Ouster. Has Trump blamed Obama yet? https://t.co/wesFNRastr

— Jay Novarra (@Ominabeshi) July 31, 2017

RT if you've had a period that lasted longer than Scaramucci

— Allure (@Allure_magazine) July 31, 2017

It should be illegal to fire anyone before SNL does their bit. #MoochOut #Scaramucci @Scaramucci

— Askhole (@BlowNob) July 31, 2017

The Trump administration really is a sh%$ show.

After last week's Night of the Long Knives, which saw the Press Secretary quitting and the Chief of Staff fired and left on the tarmac to find his way home, Anthony Scaramucci, the architect of these changes, was fired today.

Seriously, I've had encounters with the Department of Motor Vehicles that have taken more time to go through the system than this guy did:

President Trump on Monday removed Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, the White House announced, ousting him just days after Mr. Scaramucci unloaded a crude verbal tirade against other senior members of the president’s senior staff.

“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving his role as White House Communications Director,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best.”

Mr. Scaramucci’s abrupt removal came just 10 days after the wealthy New York financier was brought on to the West Wing staff, a move that convulsed an already chaotic White House and led to the departures of Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, and Reince Priebus, the president’s first chief of staff.

In a Twitter message just before 5:30 on Monday morning, just hours before the announcement about Mr. Scaramucci, Mr. Trump insisted that there has been “No WH chaos!”

The decision to remove Mr. Scaramucci became public as Mr. Kelly, who replaced Mr. Priebus as the top adviser in the White House, began his first day in charge of the White House staff. He told aides gathered in early-morning staff meetings that he intended to impose a new sense of order and operational discipline that had been absent under his predecessor.

Mr. Scaramucci had boasted about reporting directly to the president, not the chief of staff. But the decision to remove him came at Mr. Kelly’s request, the people said.

It was not clear whether Mr. Scaramucci, who is known informally as “The Mooch,” will remain at the White House in another position or will leave altogether. The White House had originally said that his official start date as a government employee was to be August 15, although he appeared to begin performing his duties immediately.

I called my dad about potential metaphors for Mr. Scaramucci's short tenure this afternoon, and he was extremely amused at recent developments.

He made an interesting observation, that new White House Chief of Staff John Kelly just had what is probably the best day in his job that he will ever have.

It's all down hill from here.

We do, however need to have a few moments of silence for all the gags that have been written, and now must be thrown away.

The writers for the late night shows must be furiously rewriting opening monologues as we speek.

^*Not my bon mot. DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS came up with it.

Cue New Labour Whining

Jeremy Corbyn has been saying that local constituencies should be able to select candidates by themselves, and the New Labour MPs who have been trying to overthrow him are having a freakout.

First, if you shoot at the king, don't miss, second, if your local constituency hates your flabby white ass, it's your own fault:

Jeremy Corbyn has opened the door to deselections of MPs critical of his leadership, by saying that it is a matter for local parties.

The Labour leader was asked about local activists' threats to overthrow Labour MPs they see as hostile to him.

Mr Corbyn told the BBC's Andrew Marr show: "I don't quite see why people should go to the party leader and say we want to influence what is happening in a constituency.

"The whole point of a democracy is that people decide."

………

The Labour leader was asked about reports that Tony Blair had personally intervened to prevent him being deselected by activists in his Islington North constituency when he was a backbencher.

Hilary Armstrong, who served as chief whip for five years of Mr Blair's premiership, recalled in an interview how Mr Corbyn's constituents had expressed concern that he was a serial rebel - voting against his party some 500 times - and tried to have him removed.

………

Talk of mandatory reselection of MPs was rife last year in areas where Momentum, the group of Corbyn supporters, was strong in local parties.

But Theresa May's decision to call an election at short notice meant the idea had to be dropped, and sitting MPs allowed to stand again.

………

Mr Corbyn said in 2015 when he became leader: "I wish to make it absolutely crystal clear that I do not support any changes to Labour's rules to make it easier to deselect sitting Labour MPs."

But last year, following a wave of resignations from his frontbench, he backed a "full and open selection process" in every seat.

Under the current rules, MPs can already be deselected if they lose a "trigger ballot" of the local party and affiliated groups.

The Labour leader's allies have called for a change in the rules, such as a requirement that 75% of members must support an MP for them to be reselected.

The Blairites are terrified because they realize that they are about as popular as a case of the clap, and if reselection (basically a local party caucus) were made routine, a lot of them would lose their jobs.

My heart bleeds borscht for those back-stabbing ratf%$#s.

They were actively trying to sabotage Labour in the last election in an attempt to take Corbyn down.

Oh, Snap!

In the Senate there is something known as the Byrd Rule.

Basically, it states that only items that effect the deficit can be placed in the budget resolution.

This is significant because the budget resolution is not subject to the filibuster.

Well, the Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that the most recent budget resolution, which includes Trumpcare, includes provisions that run afoul of the Byrd Rule:

The Senate Republican bill to dismantle the Affordable Care Act encountered huge new problems on Friday night after the Senate parliamentarian challenged key provisions that are needed to win conservative votes and to make the health bill workable.

The provisions appear to violate Senate rules, the parliamentarian said, giving Democrats grounds to challenge them as the Senate prepares for a battle next week over the future of the Affordable Care Act.

One provision questioned by the parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, and cherished by conservatives would cut off federal funds for Planned Parenthood for one year. Another would prohibit use of federal subsidies to buy insurance that includes coverage for abortions.

A third provision would penalize people who go without health insurance by requiring them to wait six months before their coverage could begin. Insurers would generally be required to impose the waiting period on people who lacked coverage for more than about two months in the prior year.

If formally challenged, the provisions could survive only with 60 votes, a near-impossibility in the partisan, narrowly divided Senate. The abortion-related provisions are important to many conservatives, not just in the Senate but also in the House.

………

The waiting period provision is fundamental to the working of the bill. Because the legislation would end the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that most Americans have health insurance, the waiting period was designed to ensure that people could not simply wait to get sick before they purchased a policy.

………

The parliamentarian also objected to a narrowly written provision that would shift Medicaid costs from New York’s counties to its state government. This provision, tagged by opponents as the “Buffalo Bailout,” was included in a repeal bill passed by the House in May to secure the votes of Republican House members from upstate New York.

The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, suggested that other provisions written specifically for different states could also be at risk.

“This will greatly tie the majority leader’s hands as he tries to win over reluctant Republicans with state-specific provisions,” Mr. Schumer said. “We will challenge every one of them.”

Heh.

It Ain't the Crime, It's the Coverup

While I am dubious of any major law breaking on the links between Russia and the Trump campaign, I have noted that the coverup may very well take down Trump and his Evil Minions^™.

It is, after all, how a "Third rate burglary" forced Nixon from office.

We now have evidence that Jefferson Beauregard Sessions lied to the Senate about the nature of his contacts with the Russian ambassador.

Rather unsurprisingly, the US State Security Apparatus monitors the ambassador's communications, and they have what looks a lot like a smoking gun:

Russia’s ambassador to Washington told his superiors in Moscow that he discussed campaign-related matters, including policy issues important to Moscow, with Jeff Sessions during the 2016 presidential race, contrary to public assertions by the embattled attorney general, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s accounts of two conversations with Sessions — then a top foreign policy adviser to Republican candidate Donald Trump — were intercepted by U.S. spy agencies, which monitor the communications of senior Russian officials in the United States and in Russia. Sessions initially failed to disclose his contacts with Kislyak and then said that the meetings were not about the Trump campaign.

One U.S. official said that Sessions — who testified that he had no recollection of an April encounter — has provided “misleading” statements that are “contradicted by other evidence.” A former official said that the intelligence indicates that Sessions and Kislyak had “substantive” discussions on matters including Trump’s positions on Russia-related issues and prospects for U.S.-Russia relations in a Trump administration.

Sessions has said repeatedly that he never discussed campaign-related issues with Russian officials and that it was only in his capacity as a U.S. senator that he met with Kislyak.

“I never had meetings with Russian operatives or Russian intermediaries about the Trump campaign,” Sessions said in March when he announced that he would recuse himself from matters relating to the FBI probe of Russian interference in the election and any connections to the Trump campaign.

I am amused.

Fail

Mitch McConnell and his merry band of psychopaths have failed even worse on their 2^nd try to repeal Obamacare:

Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, announced Tuesday morning on the Senate floor that the Republicans’ effort to repeal and replace Obamacare had failed.

This turn of events marks a stunning defeat for President Trump, who has made a “repeal and replace” of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) one of his central policy goals. Although he has issued executive orders on immigration, deregulation, and taken other reactionary initiatives, no major legislation has been moved through Congress for him to sign.

McConnell was unable to bring the latest version of Senate Republicans’ Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) to a vote after two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, came out in opposition to the bill, leaving the Senate leadership at least two votes short of the number needed to begin debate on the measure.

Two other Republicans, Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine, had already signaled their opposition. With a slim 52-48 majority in the Senate, the measure could only lose the support of two Republicans, with Vice President Mike Pence brought in to break a tie.

Senate Republicans then pivoted to “Plan B,” described by McConnell as legislation that would include a “repeal of Obamacare combined with a stable two-year transition period.” This measure was scuttled almost as soon as it was advanced, as three Republican senators indicated that they would not vote to bring it to the Senate floor.

I  believe that the source of Republican problems is that, as Stephen Colbert noted, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

This interferes with Republican attempts to impoverish and inmiserate the American public.

FAIL

Two more Republicans have come out against the Senate version of Trumpcare, which means that even with the tie breaking vote of Mike Pence, they are two votes short to passing their healthcare clusterf%$#:

Two more Senate Republicans have declared their opposition to the latest plan to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, potentially ending a months-long effort to make good on a GOP promise that has defined the party for nearly a decade and been a top priority for President Trump.

Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Jerry Moran (Kan.) issued statements declaring that they would not vote for the revamped measure. The sudden breaks by Lee, a staunch conservative, and Moran, an ally of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), rocked the GOP leadership and effectively closed what already had been an increasingly narrow path to passage for the bill.

They joined Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Susan Collins (Maine), who also oppose it. With just 52 seats, Republicans can afford to lose only two votes to pass their proposed rewrite of the Affordable Care Act. All 46 Democrats and two independents are expected to vote against it.

Republicans, who have made rallying cries against President Barack Obama’s 2010 health-care law a pillar of the party’s identity, may be forced to grapple with the law’s shift from a perennial GOP target to an accepted, even popular, provider of services and funding in many states, which could make further repeal revivals difficult.

They are running into a classic problem from history:  Invading barbarians tear things down, but then find that they can neither build nor maintain things, and so they cannot maintain control.

The Republicans are constrained by their philosophy, they have come to believe that government is an unalloyed evil, and as such they cannot propose something that might be seen as an improvement by all but the most delusional right wingers.

Unfortunately, those, "Most delusional right wingers," have large enough numbers within the party to swing a primary, but there aren't enough to swing a general election. (They already vote 'Phant in the general now)

Mitch McConnell, meet the Kobayashi Maru.

While We Are on the Subject of, Treason, Bribery, or Other High Crimes and Misdemeanors ………

It does appear that Donald Trump (père, not fils) may have been using his position as President in an attempt to secure a bailout for a disastrous real estate deal made by Jared Kushner.

Specifically, Trump's immediately taking the side of the House of Saud in their dispute with Qatar on Twitter may very well have been retaliation for their turning down a deal with his son-in-law:

Not long before a major crisis ripped through the Middle East, pitting the United States and a bloc of Gulf countries against Qatar, Jared Kushner’s real estate company had unsuccessfully sought a critical half-billion-dollar investment from one of the richest and most influential men in the tiny nation, according to three well-placed sources with knowledge of the near transaction.

Kushner is a senior adviser to President Trump, and also his son-in-law, and also the scion of a New York real estate empire that faces an extreme risk from an investment made by Kushner in the building at 666 Fifth Avenue, where the family is now severely underwater.

Qatar is facing an ongoing blockade led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and joined by Egypt and Bahrain, which President Trump has taken credit for sparking. Kushner, meanwhile, has reportedly played a key behind-the-scenes role in hardening the U.S. posture toward the embattled nation.

That hard line comes in the wake of the previously unreported half-billion-dollar deal that was never consummated. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Jared Kushner and his father, Charles, negotiated directly with a major investor in Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, known as HBJ for short, in an effort to refinance the property on Fifth Avenue, the sources said.

Trump himself has unsuccessfully sought financing in recent years from the Qataris, but it is difficult to overstate just how important the investment at 666 Fifth Avenue is for Kushner, his company, and his family’s legacy in real estate. Without some outside intervention or unforeseen turnaround in the market, the investment could become an embarrassing half-billion-dollar loss. It’s unclear precisely how much peril such a loss would put Jared’s or his family’s finances in, given the opacity of their private holdings.

HBJ, a former prime minister of Qatar who ran the country’s $250 billion sovereign wealth fund, is a billionaire and one of the world’s richest men. He owns a yacht worth $300 million called Al Mirqab, the same name he gave to the private investment firm that Kushner pitched. The former emir of Qatar summed up HBJ’s power with a quip: “I may run this country, but he owns it.”

HBJ ultimately agreed to invest at least $500 million through Al Mirqab, on the condition that Kushner Companies could raise the rest of a multibillion refinancing elsewhere. The negotiations continued long after the election, carried out as recently as this spring by Charles Kushner. “HBJ basically told them, we’re good for 500, subject to a lot of things, but mainly subject to you being able to raise the rest,” said one source in the region with knowledge of the deal. The talks were confirmed by two additional sources with knowledge of the talks. One of those sources claimed that the potential deal was not contingent on the rest of the money being raised and that the HBJ investment was on hold as the overall structure of the financing was reconsidered. None of the sources would agree to talk on the record about a private financial transaction that has until now remained a secret.

………

The revelation of the half-billion-dollar deal raises thorny and unprecedented ethical questions. If the deal is not entirely dead, that means Jared Kushner is on the one hand pushing to use the power of American diplomacy to pummel a small nation, while on the other his firm is hoping to extract an extraordinary amount of capital from there for a failing investment. If, however, the deal is entirely dead, the pummeling may be seen as intimidating to other investors on the end of a Kushner Companies pitch.

………

On June 6, President Trump took sides, taking credit for the moves by the Gulf nations.

...extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar - look!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

On June 9, after Saudi Arabia and the UAE had begun to blockade Qatar, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sought to calm nerves, calling for mediation and an immediate end to the blockade.

Within hours, Trump, at a White House ceremony, contradicted Tillerson, slamming Qatar again and claiming it had “historically been a funder of terrorism at a very high level.”

Trump’s White House remarks, Tillerson came to believe, had been written by UAE Ambassador Yousef Al-Otaiba and delivered to Trump by Jared Kushner.

(emphasis mine)

This is Teapot Dome level crap.

It's easy to understand, and the violation of the law is clear.

What's more from a power politics perspective, if this becomes a major political issue, it would scare off any potential investors for 666 5^th Avenue, which would likely cripple the Kushner Company empire when the balloon payment comes due.


Quoting Billy Ray Valentine from the movie Trading Places, "The best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people."