Month: September 2014

No good deed …

by digby

That’s depressing. Here you have Muslims literally taking to the streets to protest extremism and as you can see (click on the pic if you haven’t) the responses prove that doe the people who are demanding they do such a thing it doesn’t matter at all.

Sample:

“I still don’t see these as “good” Muslims. Do they tear out the pages relating to the kill or convert parts?”

“I see signs but I don’t see them going to Iraq and taking up arms to fight the “extremists”. It’s all a sham.

Sunday Funnies

by digby

… not so funny edition:

Funny, how that works
by Tom Sullivan

Perhaps it is not just a coincidence or a quirk of American policy-making that the words “innovation” and “reform” lately seem to attach themselves to ideas that drive more public money, public infrastructure, and public control into the hands of private investors. Nor that this meme is driven by lobbyists for public-private partnerships (P3s) where corporations stand to rack up profits by privatizing the commons.

Whether it is turning over state prisons to for-profit Corrections Corporation of America or public education over to publicly traded K12 Inc., we are to believe that despite the scandals and poor outcomes, the private sector will always do a better job than big gummint. We hear the private sector is more “efficient” than efforts run by the people and for the people. But more efficient at what?

This last week, as we noted, ITR Concession Co, and its parent company, the Spanish-Australian consortium Cintra-Macquarie declared bankruptcy on its concession to operate the Indiana Toll Road. The 75-year deal fell apart after only eight.

But getting back to efficiency. Think maybe the Germans could do it better? Maybe not.

… a study by the Federal Audit Office has found that costs may actually be higher for ÖPP [P3] project [sic] than they are for conventionally funded enterprises. The auditors examined seven large, privately financed road-construction projects. They found that five of them would have been cheaper had they been paid for in the usual manner — that is, with taxpayer money. The total savings were estimated at €1.9 billion. In the A1 expansion project, the Transportation Ministry had assumed that the public-private partnership would be 40 percent cheaper than tax financing, but the final cost was a third higher.

ÖPP projects “did not achieve significant goals” and projects conducted to date have been “uneconomical,” the auditors concluded.

Funding costs are higher for public-private deals in Germany than with government-backed loans in the U.S. Still, Berlin infrastructure economist Thorsten Beckers estimates that “the capital costs of such projects amount to almost 28 percent of construction costs. Therefore, Beckers argues, the supposed financial advantages of ÖPP autobahn expansion projects are ‘extremely implausible.'”

Writing for Thinking Highways regarding new P3 highway projects in Virginia, Randy Salzman writes that despite the positive press, the Congressional Budget Office sees financial benefit to taxpayers from P3s [emphasis mine]:

“The cost of financing a highway project privately is roughly equal to the cost of financing it publicly after factoring in the costs associated with the risk of losses from the project, which taxpayers ultimately bear, and the financial transfers made by the federal government to states and localities,” the CBO’s Microeconomic Studies director told congress in March. “Any remaining difference between the costs of public versus private financing for a project will stem from the effects of incentives and conditions established in the contracts that govern public-private partnerships.”

And those contracts tend to be one-sided, win-win deals for investors – aided by financiers “mining” the tax code. Borrowing from the work of former Penn State law professor Ellen Dannin, Salzman describes the setup and the sting [emphasis mine]:

A private creates a shell company with a major finance – usually foreign – arm and an international construction contractor to bid on the P3. It sells private bonds, bonds generally backed by federal guarantee, and includes those funds as the major part of its “private” contribution. Any state’s representatives at negotiations are outclassed because they have little background in finance or contract law and its legal consultants, like Allen and Overy, are conflicted. The privates’ upfront financing allows the project to get underway quicker and it is implied that private efficiency is overcoming bloated public bureaucracy while heavily inflated traffic projections indicate the privates will be compensated through tolls…

Once the highway is built, the shell company – and we used that word consistently with Secretary Layne – accelerates the depreciation and about 15 years later, just when the highway is actually needing much repair, often goes bankrupt. The bond holders, however, are protected because of federal financing guarantees and taxpayers find themselves facing the costs of a highway re-build when all of the toll income has gone to the shell company backers, now protected by bankruptcy laws from having to pay back loans, bonds or depreciation.

Except as we noted, besides the Indiana Toll Road deal going belly up in 8 years, similar P3 deals have failed in Texas and California in just 2 and 3 years respectively. Is there a pattern here?

In North Carolina, the deals sound familiar. Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Rep. Thom Tillis, has been promoting a P3 to put toll lanes on I-77 in his own district. Tillis is aided by legislative lieutenants fanning out across the state and by lobbyists working the country like so many Professor Harold Hills to sell boys’ bands to the rubes.

When are they going to fire the Ferguson police chief?

by digby

Good lord. It took the Justice Department to put a stop to this?

Federal officials intervened Friday to stop police in Ferguson, Mo., from wearing “I am Darren Wilson” bracelets in solidarity with the police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black 18-year-old there last month.

Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson agreed to bar his officers from wearing the bracelets while in uniform and on duty, and to ensure that other local police agencies did too, according to a letter released Friday by Christy Lopez, deputy chief of the special litigation section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

He did so after Justice Department officials brought the issue to his attention, alerted by residents during community meetings earlier in the week who complained they had seen officers wearing the bracelets on patrol during protests Tuesday, according to the letter.

“These bracelets reinforce the very ‘us versus them’ mentality that many residents of Ferguson believe exists,” Lopez wrote.

Lopez also urged the chief to ensure that his officers wear their name tags in keeping with department policy. Critics had noted officers were patrolling without them or with their names covered by black tape, according to the letter.

“Allowing officers to remain anonymous when they interact with the public contributes to mistrust and undermines accountability,” Lopez had written to Jackson in a letter earlier this week, also released Friday. “The failure to wear name plates conveys a message to community members that, through anonymity, officers may seek to act with impunity.”

This chief is a menace. Anyone with half a brain would have put a stop to all this petulant behavior on the part of the cops immediately. It’s going to lead to something very, very bad.

They need to get rid of him.

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The problem is the execution

by digby

Following up on Tom’s post from this morning, I notice that the right wing is having a full blown hissy fit over the beheading murder in Oklahoma by a Muslim convert. I can’t tell if they think that this is an ISIS conspiracy or if they think the government should immediately jail all American Muslims just in case (maybe both) but they are very exercised.

The story is this: an African American man with a prison record converted last year to Islam. He was fired from his job on Thursday (no idea why) and immediately attacked two women who worked there, decapitating one and stabbing the other. The COO shot him and stopped the attack. It’s a horrible story. Now, this man may be completely sane and driven by a desire to commit jihad. But it appears on the face of it that he’s actually a disgruntled employee seeking revenge — a sadly common story in America. The mode of death is likely tie to his conversion to Islam but his motive appears to be the same as many other other workplace killings — anger at being dismissed.

It’s also important to recognize that it’s not only sicko terrorists who decapitate their victims (although, as I said, this one was very likely to have been inspired by the ISIS murders, although the motive appears to be much more banal.) Here’s an absolutely sickening one, committed by an insane person. And heinous criminal drug gangs have been employing this method for a while. Check out this story from 2012:

In September 2006, gunmen opened the doors of the Sol y Sombra discotheque in Uruapan, in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, and threw five human heads onto the dance floor.

As frightened partygoers looked on, the gang left a scrawled message at the scene, announcing the arrival of a new, breakaway drug cartel called La Familia Michoacana, and walked out as coolly as they had entered.

For many, it represented a shocking new degree of brutality by the country’s drug traffickers. It made headlines around the world.

Francisco Castellanos is the correspondent for the respected Mexican magazine, Proceso, in Michoacan.

He sees the 2006 beheadings as a game-changing moment in the conflict:

“The five were local drug dealers in Uruapan”, he says in an email from the embattled Pacific state, adding that the hastily-written threat left at the crime scene spoke of “divine justice”.

“It generated great fear and terror.”

[…]

Such a violent form of execution is generally associated with the sort of radical Islamist groups who killed US journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or British civil engineer Kenneth Bigley in Iraq.

Cult of death

But the Mexican context is very different, says Mr Gonzalez Ruiz. He argues the practice comes from Guatemala:

“In 2000, the Zetas began to extend their reach into Central America, and they incorporated into their ranks members of the elite jungle squad, the Kaibiles.”

A statue of “Saint Death” is seen in Mexico City March 7, 2012.
The cult of La Santa Muerte is on the rise and some see a link to the extreme violence
“The Kaibiles had been trained in using decapitation to threaten the local population since the times of the country’s dirty war (1960-1996).”

Others see links to a religious cult popular with the drug gangs called La Santa Muerte, or Holy Death.

Some commentators have even drawn comparisons to pre-Columbian human sacrifices by the Aztec and the Mayan civilisations.

Wherever it stems from, the gruesome practice is now a staple in the lexicon of violence of the drug cartels in Mexico.

This month has been perhaps the worst in terms of decapitations.

In the past 10 days alone, there have been an unprecedented 81 beheaded bodies discovered in the country.

In early May, 14 decapitated bodies were found in Nuevo Laredo, just over the border from Texas.

Last week, 18 bodies and severed heads were left in two mini-vans near Lake Chapala, an area popular with tourists in western Mexico.

Finally, in one of the most shocking incidents of its kind since the current drug war began, 49 headless and mutilated bodies were left in plastic bags on a road outside the industrial city of Monterrey.

I only bring this up because it’s important to remember that this form of execution is not specific to Islam. Obviously, some radical Muslims are using the method for much the same reason as the criminal drug gangs and … the Saudi government, which uses beheading for the same reason: to scare the hell out of people. And it works.

It wasn’t always that way. The list of historical beheadings is very, very long. Virtually every nation did it although the English and the French really made a fetish out of it, particularly applying it to the nobility because it was considered a humane form of execution. (Just goes to show you how things change…) It’s horrible to us in the modern world for good reason. It’s brutal and primitive. But the truth is that executing people by any method is brutal and primitive … even the supposedly humane lethal injection.

So let’s just call it what it is: cold-blooded murder. And murder, whether at the hands of a terrorist, a criminal, an insane person or the state is immoral and wrong.

Update: Oh boy

Hamid Karzai’s last major act as president of Afghanistan may well be ordering the execution of five men who were convicted of rape after a trial that the United Nations’ top human rights official has denounced as unfair.

The convictions were based entirely on the defendants’ confessions, which all five men testified during the appeals process were obtained by torture at the hands of the police. One of the five men said he was beaten so badly that he would have confessed to incest with his mother.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, called on Mr. Karzai and his successor, Ashraf Ghani, who will be inaugurated on Monday, not to carry out the death penalty “and to refer the case back to courts given the due process concerns,” according to a statement issued by his spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani.

Mr. Zeid’s appeal may well come too late, because there were indications that the executions would be carried out speedily. Mr. Karzai has already promised to see the men executed once the Supreme Court upholds their convictions, which it now has done.

It seems to me that the method employed to execute these men — or anyone — is beside the point. It’s about the killing.

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Caught in their own (drag)net

by digby

I don’t use the iPhone so this isn’t particularly relevant to me.  I use Android and have encrypted my phone since they first began offering it. (The new ones will default to encryption I understand.) I understand why law enforcement is upset, but really, this is a case of the boy crying wolf:

“There will come a day when it will matter a great deal to the lives of people . . . that we will be able to gain access” to such devices, [FBI director James] Comey told reporters in a briefing. “I want to have that conversation [with companies responsible] before that day comes.”

Comey added that FBI officials already have made initial contact with the two companies, which announced their new smartphone encryption initiatives last week. He said he could not understand why companies would “market something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law.”…

“Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,” said John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department. “The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got to get an Apple phone.”

People might not be so anxious to encrypt their phones if the government wasn’t hoovering up everything they can get their hands on and storing just in case they might want to use it against them in the future. It’s intrusive and creepy and you cannot blame companies or users for wanting to put a stop to it. What did they expect?

But it seems to me that what’s really happened is that the power to encrypt has just been handed off from the company to the individual. I assume that the law can legally compel a user to turn over her phone if they have probable cause. This would be in line with a search warrant for someone’s home. Here’s the 4th Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That certainly reads to me as if it’s aimed at the person whose persons, houses, papers and effects are to be searched. The convenient work-around of going to the “owner” of the server through which the information passes through and is stored is what’s being thwarted. And the even more convenient work-around of sweeping up everything “just in case” — the equivalent of the government in 1800 having the post office copy everyone’s mail and keeping it on file for future use — is also thwarted. I would guess that had the government had the good sense not to do the latter, they would be far less likely to have to deal with the former. Companies would not have felt the need to encrypt phones in this way if they weren’t forced to be part of a huge dragnet that angered their customers and made them paranoid. What the phone companies have done is toss the problem back to the individual out of sheer self-preservation.

Having said that, I’m sure the government will figure out a work-around, whether legal, technological or both. And they can still search emails and everything else through the usual methods. People do still use computers. But there’s little doubt that they wouldn’t be in the situation they are today if they had just adhered to the spirit of the constitution and issued warrants the proper way. Their illegal dragnet has caught them in their own web.

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Laura Ingraham lectures people about decency.  Lulz.


by digby

So the woman who shot to wingnut stardom by appearing on the cover of New York Magazine in a leopard print mini skirt is now lecturing young women about dressing modestly in public so they don’t get raped:

Yes, that’s a shockingly revealing dress. It shows the girl’s arms and upper chest as well as her legs below the knee. Why she might as well be naked.

Ingraham elaborated on her radio show:

INGRAHAM: These are still girls. There are probably young women, probably 9th or 10th grade. And at the same time we’re worried about date rape. At the same time we’re worried about misogynistic behavior or making comments about peoples’ appearances and bullying and all these other things. How about start with the way we appear in public. The way we treat people. How we speak to them. The language we use. And I’m sure a lot of these girls that dress this way, I’m sure they don’t know any better.

“If we are trying to remind people that it’s what’s inside that counts, your heart, your spirit, the whole person,” Ingraham instructed, “let’s really ensure that the first thing a young boy sees in a girl is not her cleavage, or, you know, her pubic area because her skirt is so short.”

Yeah. Let’s have them covered from head to toe like the Dugger girls. Or maybe a burka. No, not that. Burka’s are worn by dirty foreigners who are polluting our culture just by existing in this world. A nun’s habit.

But perhaps Ingraham should have a chat with some of her friends who might be giving the impression that dressing in a sexy fashion is ok:

Or maybe Ingraham could have a talk with her boss, Roger Ailes:

The number of Fox News upskirt screenshots on Google is mind-boggling. It seems to be an entire industry.  And most of them are far more revealing than the one I posted above. I’ll bet those women would love to wear pants once in a while, just for comfort’s sake. But they’re not allowed to. I wonder why?

I do agree with Ingraham about one thing, however:

How about start with the way we appear in public. The way we treat people. How we speak to them. The language we use

Uhm, Pot?  This is the kettle calling.  You’re black.

Here’s was one of the most disgusting things anyone has ever done on hate radio and that’s saying a lot considering her cohort. It was on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination:

Conservative radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham attacked the speakers at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, at one point using the sound of a gunshot to cut off a sound bite of civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) — a man whose skull was infamously fractured by a state trooper on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, AL, in 1965. Ingraham used the speech’s anniversary to race-bait about black-on-white crime statistics and hosted Pat Buchanan to bemoan the idea that minorities face any higher level of adversity in America 50 years later.

Actually, now that I think about it, when she said that girls should be mindful of how they treat people and the language they use, she probably meant that they should treat racial and ethnic minorities like dogs and denigrate them as often as possible. Of course.

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At least they aren’t plotting a coup Part II (yet)

by digby

Well, it looks like this is becoming a trend. Here’s the notorious Allen West:

Morning folks. While you were sleeping, Barack Hussein Obama took out his pen and ordered our Military to enlist illegal aliens. In other words, this charlatan has allowed those who have disrespected our Constitution and are not citizens to take an oath to support and defend the very document, our rule of law, of which they are in violation. Obama has no constitutional authority to make any laws or rules concerning naturalization as stated in Art I Sect 8 Clause 4. This is an illegal order and should not be followed by our Military. As well, we are pink-slipping men and women in uniform, Americans, and Obama wants to enlist illegals. We are already outsourcing our national security to Syrian Islamists. This is intolerable and just another reason why we must flip the Senate and begin to reverse Obama’s tyranny. Any Democrat supporting this illegal order needs to be voted out!

This tracks with Armed Services Committee member congressman Brian Lamborn suggesting that he and others are conferring with Generals about resigning en masse in protest of the president’s policies. It would appear that the Republicans are finally getting their flag on. Hooah!

Eric Hanonoki at Media Matters delved into what the hell West is going on about:

The Military Times reported that the Department of Defense will expand an existing program, Military Accessions Vital to National Interest (MAVNI), to allow recruiters “to target foreign nationals with high-demand skills, mostly rare foreign language expertise or specialized health care training.” The program “is capped at 1,500 recruits per year. Officials say it’s unclear how many of those might be unlawful DACA status immigrants as opposed to others who are also eligible for military service under MAVNI, including those with legal, nonpermanent visas such as students or tourists.”

The Times noted that “the military recruits about 5,000 noncitizens each year, nearly all of them permanent U.S. residents, or so-called ‘green card’ holders. Starting in 2006, DoD began accepting some foreigners with nonpermanent visas, such as students or tourists, if they had special skills that are highly valued. After entering military service, foreigners are eligible for expedited U.S. citizenship. Since 2001, more than 92,000 foreign-born service members have become citizens while serving in uniform.”

That’s an emergency for sure. The last thing we need is special skills in the military. All we need is some manly men who can kick ass and take names. Maybe we could get those Duck Dynasty guys to sign up. I hear they’re Real Americans.

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This will not go well


by Tom Sullivan

So after getting fired, the former convict walks into the front of the Oklahoma business with a knife, attacks two women, and beheads one before being shot and disabled by a company employee, a county reserve deputy:

Mr. Nolen, 30, was convicted in 2011 of multiple drug charges, assault and battery on a police officer, and escape from detention, according to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. He had earlier arrests on drug and assault charges.

Per another report:

According to the department’s database, Nolen had “Jesus Christ” tattooed across his chest, an image of praying hands on his right arm and “As-salaamu Ataikum,” tattooed on his stomach, which could be a misspelling of “As-salaamu Alaikum,” a standard Muslim greeting that means “Peace be upon you.”

Did we mention the suspect with the Jesus and praying hands tatoos recently converted to Islam? Fox News is already talking about the “ISIS effect.”

More fodder for the fear-mongering campaign ads Gail Collins runs down in the New York Times:

The most popular terrorism-connected campaign theme is overall border security, since it allows conservative candidates to roll up ISIS terrorists with illegal Hispanic immigrants. “She’s for amnesty, while terrorism experts say our border breakdown could provide an entry for groups like ISIS!” announced that David Perdue ad against Michelle Nunn in Georgia. Some experts believe that even at this early hour, Perdue has wrapped up the title of Worst Commercial of the Campaign. 

The “terrorism experts,” by the way, are actually the Texas Department of Public Safety.

From there, the ads descend from revoking the passports of American terrorists to Scott Brown, now the Republican candidate for Senate from New Hampshire, bragging how “he sponsored a bill to revoke the citizenship of anyone who gives aid to a terrorist group.” Terrorist, terrorist group, and anyone, of course, being in the eye of the fear-mongerer. Collins notes that Perdue’s ads suggest that Nunn “funded organizations linked to terrorists” when running George H. W. Bush’s Points of Light charity.

Now a beheading. This will not go well.

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