REMEMBER ALL THE FUSS OVER NET NEUTRALITY?

The wingnuts were oppose to net neutrality mostly because Glenn Beck and other wackos said it was a bad idea.  Now, they have something else they can make stupid, ignorant remarks: oversight of ICANN.  In Wingnut World, this is another sign of the deliberate collapse of the United States and if you want a few chuckles, read some of the comments here.

JOSE RODIGUEZ WAS THE HEAD OF CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS AT THE CIA

(h/t emptywheel)

He ordered the destruction of 92 torture videos and until now I thought he did that over the objections of the CIA's counsel.  I was wrong:

Bush Doctrine Stalls Holder Confirmation
By Carrie Johnson and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 25, 2009

Former CIA clandestine branch chief Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who ordered the destruction of the tapes, has said through his attorney that he based his decision on legal advice from agency lawyers. The lawyers, Steven Hermes and Robert Eatinger, did not endorse the tapes' destruction but rather concluded there was "no legal impediment" to disposing of them, according to sources briefed on their advice.

CONSERVATIVES ARE FOR STATES' RIGHTS EXCEPT WHEN IT HELPS THE POORS

Speaker Boehner is very upset that a few states found a workaround to the GOP's food stamp cuts:

Montana becomes fifth state to block food stamp cuts

by Laura Clawson
Thu Mar 13, 2014 at 03:30 PM PDT
DKOs

And then there were five. Montana has become the fifth state to avert cuts to food stamps:

On Wednesday, Governor Bullock increased payments from the state's energy assistance program to eligible snap participants so they could meet the increased amount. The move costs the state about $24,000 more per year.

That $24,000 per year will preserve $2 million in nutrition assistance for Montana families. Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Oregon had already done so.

WE NEED TO START PROTESTING CRAP LIKE THIS

The WaPo coverage of the US decision to relinquish control of ICANN included this bit of garbage:

But former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) tweeted: “What is the global internet community that Obama wants to turn the internet over to? This risks foreign dictatorships defining the internet.”

Newt isn't in office, doesn't have a large following and is not a scholar of the Internet, so why bother citing him?

A COROLLARY OF "TOO BIG TO FAIL"

James Kwak makes an interesting point about Big Banks:

One reason, of course, is that it’s too big to manage.

The Department of Defense & HHS are also too big to manage.

LIMBAUGH TAKES ANOTHER STEP CLOSER TO THE EDGE

Today, Limbaugh was in peak form.  He not only uttered an absurdity, he once again edited the transcript to make it seem more plausible:

The Soviets shot down KAL 007, remember, 'cause there was a guy who was opposed to the Trilateral Commission on board.  Remember that?  What was his name?  Big Bircher guy, John Birch Society member, was on board KAL 007, and the Russians shot it down not far from the Kamchatka peninsula.

Limbaugh originally said that the guy was on the Trilateral Commission AND a Bircher.  BTW, I Googled this theory and found out that a passenger on KAL 007 was a prominent Bircher: Rep. Larry McDonald.  This is from the Bircher site:

On March 14, 1983, Larry succeeded Robert Welch as Chairman of The John Birch Society. Later that year, in an attempt to expand the Western Goals Foundation overseas, he boarded Korean Air Lines flight 007, from New York City to Seoul, South Korea. On September 1, 1983 while en route to Seoul, following a refueling stop in Alaska, KAL 007 deviated off course into Soviet airspace where it was shot down by a Soviet MIG fighter jet over Sakhalin Island. This resulted in the loss of KAL 007’s crew and its passengers, 269 people, including Rep. McDonald. Missing in Action, Larry McDonald was the only U.S. Congressman lost to the communists during the Cold War. A memorial highway has been named in his honor in Georgia.

THE SYSTEM ISN'T WORKING VERY WELL

US multinational corporations have an estimated $1.95 Trillion in cash sitting abroad, safe from the IRS and that does nothing good for the US economy:

Cash Abroad Rises $206 Billion as Apple to IBM Avoid Tax
By Richard Rubin Mar 12, 2014 11:47 AM MT

The largest U.S.-based companies added $206 billion to their stockpiles of offshore profits last year, parking earnings in low-tax countries until Congress gives them a reason not to.

The multinational companies have accumulated $1.95 trillion outside the U.S., up 11.8 percent from a year earlier, according to securities filings from 307 corporations reviewed by Bloomberg News.

The increase in profits held outside the U.S. has been particularly large and steady at technology companies, many of which have moved patents and other intellectual property to low-tax locales.

U.S. multinational companies reported earning 43 percent of their 2008 overseas profits in Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland, more than five times the share of workers and investment they have in those jurisdictions, according to a 2013 Congressional Research Service report.

In 1909, Congress enacted penalties on cash hoarding but they were changed during the Age of Reagan:

The great corporate cash-hoarding crisis
by David Cay Johnston
March 14, 2014
AL-JAZEERA AMERICA

Congress understood this in 1909, when the corporate income tax was adopted. Worried that companies would become bloated with cash, slowing the economy, Congress put a stiff 15 percent penalty tax on excessive pools of cash. Thousands of small business owners who have hoarded cash have had to pay that penalty over and above their taxes.

But in 1986 Congress changed the rules, retaining the penalty tax on domestic cash hoarding but allowing multinationals to hold unlimited amounts of cash so long as they sent the money offshore. This act incentivized the enormous world of offshore tax avoidance we see today, as chronicled in my book “Perfectly Legal” and other books such as Nicholas Shaxson’s excellent “Treasure Islands.”

HHS NEEDS A CLEAN SWEEP

After botching the Obamacare rollout, we now learn that the very important Office of Research Integrity in the biomedical sciences is also dysfunctional.  It would be nice if some of the Baggers in the House & Senate would call for an overhaul but I suspect at best they would call for the Offfice's elimination.

A LITTLE MORE REALITY ABOUT THE UKRAINE

(h/t ntodd)

This tidbit involves St. Ronnie Raygun...

In reality, there seems to be little correlation between the willingness of Moscow to assert its power in areas within its traditional spheres of influence and who occupies the White House: The Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 when Eisenhower was president; the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 when Johnson was president; the Soviets successfully pressed for martial law in Poland in 1981 when Reagan was president; the Russians attacked Georgia in 2008 when Bush was president. In each case, as much as these administrations opposed these actions, it was determined that any military or other aggressive counter-moves would likely do more harm than good. Washington cannot realistically do any more in response to Russian troops seizing Crimea in 2014 in the name of protecting Russian lives and Russian bases than Moscow could do in response to U.S. troops seizing Panama in 1989 in the name of protecting American lives and American bases.

IAN WELSH MAKES A GOOD POINT

In this post, he makes an observation that should be common knowledge but isn't:

Every economic theory; every political theory; is ultimately a theory about human nature.

I especially wish people would ask economists exactly what is their profession's concept of a person because their answers would go a long way toward demystifying the dismal science.

ON THE USE OF THE TERM "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS"

Conservatives LOVE to claim that liberals invoke "political correctness" to stifle free speech and I've been curious about the history of the term.  In "Report of the subcommittee of the Joint legislative committee to investigate procedures and methods of allocating state moneys for public school purposes and subversive activities. (1942, New York State)" I found this reference:

to a Communist publication of 1935.  Based on my online searches, the spike in usage of the phrase by conservatives began sometime around 1990 and in 1991 Michael Kinsley wrote a column that poked some fun at the Right: "Hysteria Over 'Political Correctness': Where's this left-wing reign of terror on campus?", WaPo, May 3, 1991.

THIS IS NOW GETTING PRETTY WEIRD...

From the WSJ:

Aviation investigators and national security officials believe the plane flew for a total of five hours based on data automatically downloaded and sent to the ground from the Boeing Co. 777's engines as part of a routine maintenance and monitoring program.

The engines' onboard monitoring system is provided by their manufacturer, Rolls-Royce PLC, and it periodically sends bursts of data about engine health, operations and aircraft movements to facilities on the ground.

As part of its maintenance agreements, Malaysia Airlines transmits its engine data live to Rolls-Royce for analysis. The system compiles data from inside the 777's two Trent 800 engines and transmits snapshots of performance, as well as the altitude and speed of the jet.

Those snippets are compiled and transmitted in 30-minute increments, said one person familiar with the system.

A total flight time of five hours after departing Kuala Lumpur means the Boeing 777 could have continued for an additional distance of about 2,200 nautical miles, reaching points as far as the Indian Ocean, the border of Pakistan or even the Arabian Sea, based on the jet's cruising speed.

THIS COULD HAPPEN TO FATS LIMBAUGH 5 DAYS A WEEK...

Rush Limbaugh says Barack Obama turned NASA into a 'Muslim outreach department'

BECAUSE ONLY CONSERVATIVE BUDGET PLANS GET NATIONAL COVERAGE

(h/t digby)

Here are the highlights of  the "Better Off Budget" by the Congressional Progressive Caucus:
MAKING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BETTER OFF

Creating Good Jobs – creates 8.8 million jobs by 2017.
- Long-term Unemployed – provides access to training and employment services to match employee potential with employer demand.
- Infrastructure – creates jobs in building and construction industries to repair and
modernize our ailing roads, bridges and water infrastructure.
- State Aid – provides assistance to states to allow them to hire and rehire public employees such as police, firefighters and health care workers.
- Public Works and Education – a direct hire program that includes seven jobs corps to hire physicians, students, construction and community workers and an education program boost to hire more teachers and improve schools.
- Reversing Harmful Cuts – repeals the Budget Control Act and Sequester, restores Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, restores unemployment insurance, fully funds the Prevention and Public Health Fund, and ends the federal worker pay freeze.
- Equity for Women and People of Color – enhances federal programs targeted at creating equity and improving outcomes for women, people of color, and their families.
- Protecting Veterans and Workers through Retirement –adopts a cost-of-living adjustment that takes into account realistic retiree expenses and fully funds veterans programs in advance.

If you want the details, go here.

I'VE HEARD THIS WOMAN ON THE STEPHANIE MILLER (RADIO) SHOW

and she's stupid and ignorant.  I'm surprised it took this long for others to find out:

Dem Congresswoman Says The Constitution Is 400 Years Old (VIDEO)
Sahil Kapur – March 12, 2014, 4:09 PM EDT
TPM

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) says the Constitution is 400 years old.

I HAVE TO GIVE PAUL "AYN RAND" RYAN SOME CREDIT

He didn't use dog-whistle phrases on his recent appearance on Bill "Slots" Bennett's radio show:

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed his upcoming legislative proposals for reforming America’s poverty programs during an appearance on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America Wednesday, hinting that he would focus on creating work requirements for men “in our inner cities” and dealing with the “real culture problem” in these communities. “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with,” he said.

This doesn't mean he would support an increase in the Estate Tax because few of the folks who benefit from it are black or live in th inner city.

CATCHING UP ON MY NOTES

I use Evernote to save web posts that I want to read later and later sometimes turns into never, so here's one of the posts I saved.  The passage of this bill indicates that money still talks loudly in the House.

House Passes Bill That Could Lead to Another Financial Crash—But Reformers Claim Victory

—Erika Eichelberger on Thu. June 13, 2013 12:47 PM PDT
Mother Jones

On Wednesday evening, the House passed a bipartisan bill that would allow US banks to avoid new financial regulations by operating overseas.

The bill in question, the clunkily titled Swap Jurisdiction Certainty Act, was introduced earlier this year by Reps. Scott Garrett (R-N.J.), Mike Conaway (R-Tex.), John Carney (D-Del.), and David Scott (D-Ga.). It would exempt foreign arms of US banks from the new regulations on derivatives (which are financial products with values derived from from underlying variables, such as crop prices or interest rates) that are required by the Dodd-Frank Act, the big post-crisis Wall Street reform law.

WTF DID FEINSTEIN EXPECT?

If a Security State official will lie under oath, then you should have guessed you were also on the master spying list.

Feinstein: CIA searched Intelligence Committee computers
By Greg Miller, Ed O’Keefe and Adam Goldman,
Updated: Tuesday, March 11, 4:24 PM
WaPo

Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accused the CIA of ­secretly removing documents, searching computers used by the committee and attempting to intimidate congressional investigators by requesting an FBI inquiry of their conduct — charges that CIA Director John Brennan disputed within hours of her appearance on the Senate floor.

Feinstein described the escalating conflict as a “defining moment” for Congress’s role in overseeing the nation’s intelligence agencies and cited “grave concerns” that the CIA had “violated the separation-of-powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution.”

THE SPECIAL ELECTION IN FLORIDA

This House seat was held by C.W. Bill Young almost forever and to find out what he was like, I turned to the American Conservative Union.  The Union has rankings for House members from 1971-2013. In 2011, the average House GOP rating wasn't given but Young's rating was 73.91. In 2012, the GOP average was 83.94% and Young's rating was 76.00. In 2013, the GOP average was 76.48% and Young's rating was 71.

It looks like Young wasn't a crazy (the WaPo article linked above described him as "genteel") so if the Democrat wins, it won't be a big deal although I'm sure many will try to spin it to their advantage.

IGNORE FOX NEWS & TALK RADIO ON THE UKRAINE

These two guys avoided the hysteria and told us what's most likely:

Robert Gates (former SECDEF under Bush and Obama):

GATES: Well, I think that, first of all, we have to look at the reality of the options. There really aren't any direct military options that we have. I think that some of the sanctions that are being discussed and the actions being taken, whether it's limitations on visas or travel, on potentially freezing assets of specific individuals, frankly I don't believe are going to be any deterrent for Putin.

Anatole Kaletsky:

The West has no intermediate option between accepting the Russian invasion and full-scale war because it seems inconceivable that Putin would voluntarily withdraw from Crimea. [snip]...the idea that Putin would respond to Western economic sanctions, no matter how stringent, by giving up his newly gained territory is pure wishful thinking. Throughout its history, Russia has accepted economic hardships unimaginable to Western observers in pursuit of geopolitical goals.

Putin has created a situation in which the West’s only alternative to accepting the occupation of Crimea as a fait accompli is war. Since a NATO military attack against Russia is as inconceivable as Russia’s withdrawal from Crimea, Putin’s redrawing of the Ukraine’s borders seems bound to prevail.

I'VE LOST COUNT

The conservative noise machine has portrayed maybe a dozen people as victims of Obamacare and upon investigation, this is the typical finding:

Woman Who Said Obamacare Was Unaffordable Is Saving Over $1.2k a Year on it
Sara Morrison
THE WIRE

Remember Julie Boonstra, the cancer patient who claimed in a Koch Brothers-funded ad that Obamacare got her good insurance plan cancelled and now her new insurance plan's "out-of-pocket costs are so high, it's unaffordable?"
It turns out that she's actually saving at least $1,200 a year with her new "unaffordable" insurance plan.
Boonstra's ad has come under fire before, with Sen. Harry Reid saying it (and other anti-Obamacare ads) was "untrue" last week. (Boonstra has called Reid's statement hurtful and demanded an apology.) Today, the Detroit News did even more digging and found that Boonstra's old plan cost her $13,200 a year in premiums alone. That's not including what she spent on out-of-pocket expenses, like co-pays and deductibles.
Boonstra's new "unaffordable" plan, on the other hand, will cost her $11,952 in premiums and out-of-pocket costs, which means she's saving at least $1,200 a year -- probably a lot more than that, as out-of-pocket maximums are usually several thousand dollars.

IT'S NOT JUST CAMPAIGNS THAT CONSERVATIVES FUCK-UP

(h/t William Rivers Pitt)

FOX News has a history of mangling on-air headlines:

GOING FOR THE BIG BUCKS

Sheryl Attkisson has worked out an early release from her contract with CBS News because she "grown frustrated with what she saw as the network's liberal bias."  Next up, a cozy wingnut welfare "job" & a book deal, probably with Simon & Shuster's Threshold Editions.

UPDATE: According to POLITICO, I was wrong about the publisher:

She is currently at work on a book — tentatively titled “Stonewalled: One Reporter’s Fight for Truth in Obama’s Washington” — that addresses the challenges of reporting critically on the administration.

She said she will now turn her attention to the book, which is being published by HarperCollins, a division of NewsCorp (and not by Simon & Schuster, a division of CBS Corp.).

THIS IS ONE OF THE REASONS I PUT ANN COULTER...

in the Kook Category:

Ann Coulter: Cruel for rich people not to shame poor people for having too much sex
By Eric W. Dolan
Monday, March 10, 2014 13:19 EDT
THE RAW STORY

“The one thing that has really changed besides, I mean you have the government often subsidizing bad behavior, you have Hollywood rewarding bad behavior, but there’s also an overwhelming cultural sense, I think it is a political correctness, to end shaming,” she said Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “No, shaming is good. It’s almost a cruel and insensitive thing for the upper classes, the educated, the college graduates, to refuse to tell poor people ‘keep your knees together before you get married.’”

WHITHER THE BAGGERS?

Theda Skocpol thinks they will be around for a long time:

Now, will they still be around? You can bet that those elite funders will still be around. They’re not going anywhere. The activists are committed, organized, fiercely aroused people, but they are older. And they’re not recruiting others, so they’re not going to last forever.

But they’re not standing down anytime soon.

Others point out that the GOP Establishment is pushing back hard and that means that the Baggers have lost some influence:

In Tuesday's first-in-the-nation primaries in Texas, the movement mostly settled for having an impact on key races rather than actually winning them. That may become a pattern in other states as primaries continue into the fall, many national GOP strategists believe.

To me, the Baggers seem to have declined from a serious political movement to just fodder for conservative talk radio. 

FIRST OF ALL...

it's a disgrace that Face the Nation had former VP Cheney as a guest to discuss the situation in the Ukraine.  Cheney is without doubt guilty of war crimes, has no credibility on foreign affairs and is a known liar.  In fact, he lied in this interview when he described missile defense:

We could go back and-- and reinstate the ballistic missile defense program that was taken out. It was originally going to go in Poland, Czech Republic, Obama took it out to appease Putin.

That system was so fucked up it wouldn't work in the rain! Pres. Obama dropped it for a more effective system.

I NEED TO LOOK THIS UP...

but for the moment, I'll share an incredible tidbit I got from this article in Slate:

Here’s a factoid: a Roper poll a month before the 1944 presidential election found that 68 percent of respondents said that they would not favor a political and economic system no matter what it was called that didn’t pivot off of a fundamental right to a job, that didn’t rest on the fundamental premise that everyone in a society who is willing and able to work should have a right to a job.

AT MOTHER JONES...

Tim Murphy asks "Has the Conservative Political Action Conference Purged the Kooks?" and he claims that it has but I don't think so because the following kooks were official speakers: Michele Bachmann, Rich Lowry, Dr. Ben Carson, Jim DeMint, and Ann Coulter.  To be fair, the vicious anti-Muslims like Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller were absent but the conservatives have a very deep kook bench.