Your moment of Zen

A rescued rose. [photo from Maeve's garden]

Mitch McConnell threatens Harry Reid

In a facedown between the two old geezers who both have held on to their seats of power for far too long, Mitch McConnell warns Harry Reid about the consequences of shutting down the GOP's obstruction function.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday starkly warned Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) not to eliminate the filibuster on presidential nominations, threatening to end the 60-vote threshold for everything, including bills, if he becomes the majority leader.

“There not a doubt in my mind that if the majority breaks the rules of the Senate to change the rules of the Senate with regard to nominations, the next majority will do it for everything,” McConnell said on the floor.

As if that's not exactly what McConnell would do on the very first day if the electorate is stupid enough to put these crackpot cretins back into the majority. Harry's only and obvious response should be, screw that noise you pompous windbag. Harry should do exactly that to the GOPers now, so at least the Senate can pass some useful policy before the electorate loses it mind again.

Sadly, I doubt Harry Reid, Man of Infinite Indecision, has the balls to do it.

The kings of click-bait journalism

New Republic posts an interview with Politico's head honchos John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei that illuminates their business model. It's an interesting piece if you have a high tolerance for smug pricks, but this is the graf that explains why Charlie Pierce dubbed their rag, "Tiger Beat on the Potomac."

JH: We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate. There really were only a handful of establishments reporting on this stuff and making judgments on its relative importance. People were looking to editors to say, “Tell me what I should think about.” We are in an era where everyone is his or her own editor and will decide what they care about. If we are boring, ... there is no market for that. Nor is there a public calling to be boring.

In other words, informing the public isn't their job. Informing the public with actual facts presented in context is a loser's game. Won't get a Drudge link with real news. All the money is in useless insider gossip and creating fake controversies. For this crapola we give them special protections under rule of law. And they expect a Pulitzer for it too, which isn't as unlikely as it should be since I think one of them sits on the damn prize committee.

I could mock this at great length but, as usual, Charlie Pierce's scathing takedown of the gruesome twosome already says it all.

Your moment of Zen

Green elephants. [photo via]

Obamacare must die

For the GOP's hardcore crackpot caucus there is only one overriding mission. They must kill Obamacare by any means possible and they don't care who gets hurt in the process. So this presents an interesting test for the more practical establishment GOPers.

It's inevitable a law as complicated as the ACA is going to need some tweaking. Only as the provisions go into effect will the unintended consequences resulting from the massive partisan horse trading be revealed. One such problem is the law leaves self-insured religious organizations in the lurch.

Months of outreach to Republican Senate offices by religious leaders have yielded no official GOP support to an appeal from a broad coalition of religious denominations to ensure that church-sponsored health plans can participate in the ACA’s health insurance exchanges. Worse yet, from a partisan Republican point of view, two Democratic senators, Mark Pryor and Chris Coons, were the first responders to this call, introducing legislation late last week. Pryor is widely viewed as the GOP’s number one senatorial target in 2014.

Without the requested “fix,” as many as one million clergy members and church employees now enrolled in church-sponsored health plans could soon face the choice of leaving these plans (designed to meet their unique needs, such as the frequent reassignment of clergy across state lines) or losing access to the tax subsidies provided by the ACA to help lower-to-middle income Americans purchase insurance.

I'd guess this will affect red state fundie churches even more than more liberal denominations. So the question is what are the Republicans going to do? Clearly the crackpot cons, considering they rejected a rather brilliant ploy to sabotage Obamacare simply because it would look like they were helping it succeed aren't going to agree to an actual fix. I imagine they believe they can raise some rage among the conservative congregations by allowing the inadvertent exclusion to stand.

Maybe they're right. It's not like their voters, who largely rely on Fox News, are going to be told Democrats are trying to fix the problem. How this plays out will depend largely on whether the rest of BigMedia focuses on the facts or goes for the click-bait and simply reports the controversy without the context.

Eavesdropping for fun and profit

As I said in my earlier post, private contractors with the ability to hack surveillance programs might be tempted to hack someone for personal reasons. One might be potential blackmail, but it's just as likely to be just for fun. Via Atrios, this piece from 2008 reminds us in Iraq, NSA personnel were hacking calls for amusement.

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

People love gossip and now it's so emminently tweetable. The twitter is rife with reported snatches of conversation caught while eavesdropping in public spaces. The temptation to listen to private conversations is just as strong.

My second real job was an a telephone operator for a telecom. In those days they still used these old plug in switchboards. We had the ability to listen in. I was too much a goody two shoes to do it myself, but many of the operators listened in on the collect calls the guys at the high priced prep school were making. The guys never knew. [photo via]

Snowden isn't lying, he's bragging

Been processing this story for a while now and reviewing the sum of Snowden's leaks so far. The more Snowden talks the less credible he seems, particularly when he has to revise the dramatic details of his life as Edward Snowden, international spy.

Looking at his language carefully, he's not so much telling us what the government is doing. He's describing what he can do, as a paid outside agent of the government. Or at least he could have done if he had stayed undercover. Meanwhile as Snowden makes the story about himself, an important point is being lost. Namely, Snowden is not the only young ambitious superhacker in the ranks of possibly hundreds of thousands of private contract workers. Guessing a not small number would be tempted to sell intel for money rather than expose it as an act of social conscience or in a bid for internet fame.

Also as important as the civil rights violations within the surveillance state are, it's equally scandalous that our government is spending billions subcontracting our national intelligence to private, for profit corporations. I doubt public service is the first priority of these megacorps who hire young hackers with sporadic work histories and no academic credentials to oversee these confidential programs. So when Snowden tells you "the government" is spying on you what he really means is some 29 year old hacker like himself is really the one spying and they don't actually work for the government directly. The potential for some rogue IT kid to conduct a personal vendetta seems rather large to me. Maybe we could talk about that too.

Your moment of Zen

He said, she said and the sun don't care. [Photo credit via Saffron606]

Jan Brewer, crazy but not stupid

No news because, Father's Day weekend, but didn't get around to posting this earlier and it's still worth mentioning. She's been a poster girl for crackpot conservatism, but apparently Jan Brewer understands the value of free money and figured out the economics of keeping uninsured people out of the ER is cost effective for the state's finances.

After a marathon session that lasted until nearly 4 in the morning on Thursday, the Arizona House approved a plan backed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer to expand Medicaid under President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act by providing health insurance coverage to an additional 350,000 low-income Arizonans.

The 33-27 vote followed 9 hours of debate and fiery pleas by conservative Republicans who wanted to kill the expansion and break the bipartisan coalition that ultimately pushed it to victory, according to the Arizona Republic.

“I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut,” Republican Rep. Debbie Lesko told the paper. “And I feel like I’ve been betrayed.”

Because, nothing matters more than screwing Obama and pissing off liberals, no matter how lamebrained the policy or how much it costs. Gotta give Brewer credit for standing up to the constituency that pretty much put her in office in the first place. She forced the crazed cons to do the right thing.

In Arizona this week, black is white, up is down, left is right and Gov. Jan Brewer is getting praised by gay Democrats and slammed by Tea Party conservatives.

But this conservative edifice has come crashing down since she announced in her State of the State address this year, to the shock of everyone, that Arizona would accept Obamacare and expand its Medicaid coverage whether her Republican allies in the state liked it or not. Needless to say, they did not like it. But Brewer’s newfound love of Obamacare was so strong that she vowed to veto every single bill the Legislature sent to her office until they caved on Obamacare.

Ironically Democrats and our President could take a lesson from Brewer here. She won that fight because she didn't back down. Have to respect that kind of political courage. It's too rare.

Click-bait journalism means never having to admit you screwed up

So last night CNet's Declan McCullugh posted a story with the red siren hed, "NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants — National Security Agency." You'll be shocked to learn, by this morning Declan's sloppy click-baiting turned out to be pretty much false, apparently based on his misinterpretation of a stray comment by Congressman Jerrold Nadler at some hearing.

Congressman Nadler corrected the misreporting today. [Transcript of the full convo at the link.] As The Atlantic notes in their piece the NSA click-baiting is even bigger than just this one point.

Seeing the full conversation reveals a slightly different picture than McCullugh was trying push forward. The FBI director testified that PRISM mostly works exactly like we've been told in the weeks since this scandal broke. An unclassified document obtained by Reuters claimed NSA officials looked at raw information for fewer than 300 telephone numbers in 2012. On Saturday, the Associated Press reported any domestic phone information collected by PRISM is stored in a secure server that requires a special warrant to access, supporting Mueller's testimony.

None of this is to say we should take the government's word for anything without a speck of skepticism either, but's it equally clear we can no longer trust the media to give us the real story either. As long as boosting traffic is the prime objective of the new journalistic order, we are mostly without reliable sources for actual facts.

The worst part is Declan's false info is still spreading. The twitter tells me his inaccurate version has 54K likes on Facebook and it's still spreading. Boing Boing picked it up this afternoon. And while Declan did correct some of the disinfo in the piece, he merely changed the headline slightly, disguising but not really refuting his original sensational claims, added a bit to the body of the piece, and then buried his admission of guilt at the very end of the post.

This is a big problem because, the majority of readers don't get past the headline and a very few make it all to the end of any given post of any length. All that gets passed through the social media is the sensational -- and false -- claims. Great for generating hysteria. Horrible for finding solutions to the surveillance state.

Your second moment of Zen

A Lady Liberty, photo taken in 1925. [via]

Your moment of Zen

Happy Dad's Day if it fits your circumstances. For me, it's different now. Second year since my Pop died. Still miss him just as much as the first day he left but you make peace with the absence over time.

Light posting

Visiting friends. Internet access is spotty. So posting will be sporadic at best for the next few days.

Your moment of Zen

St. John's wort in flower. [via]

Your moment of Zen

A bamboo bridge. Location unknown. [via]

Your moment of Zen

Go ask Alice, when she was just small...

Glenn Beck again

By Capt. Fogg

"We are going to be greatly divided as a nation in the next ten days and you are going to witness things in American history that have never been witnessed before" Said Glenn Beck yesterday despite his recent claim that his vocal cords no longer worked. I was hoping that might have been the one true thing ever to escape his mouth.

It's true -- you're going to witness the last half of June, 2013 -- a historical first.  I'm pretty sure you're going to witness another spell of embarrassment for Glenn Beck too, not that he'll necessarily notice or acknowledge it.  There's a document, he says, that will "take down pretty much the whole power structure, pretty much everything" and he's going to announce it sometime today.

Those who remember back to last April, a set which obviously doesn't include his fans, might speculate that this new revelation will be as spurious and idiotic as his earthshaking revelation of a connection between Saudi Arabia and the Boston Marathon bombing.  Is anyone still waiting for an admission of error or a hint of humble retraction?

Of course to those folks who follow Beck in the way people used to mock dancing bears or court jesters, this is nothing new.  Students of buffoonery  and the charlatans who move their card tables and shells from one corner to the next in search of fresh idiots may not even notice this latest tantrum, but the clock is ticking Mr. Beck and there's not much time before the waitress brings you another plate of crow.  Do us a favor -- take a bite.

UPDATE:

Well days have gone by now and no whistles have been blowing and Beck has only some mumbling about immigration which is hardly the stuff of unprecedented division much less something to "take down the power structure."  

Do his faithful listeners remember as far back as a day or two or are they just so choked up on each new day's revelation that they don't care about yesterday?

So, want so fries with that crow Glenn?  Can I supersize it?

Darrell Issa's reckless and dangerous transcripts

Shorter Darrell Issa: I couldn't possibly release the full transcripts because (a) NSA scandal is sucking up all of the news cycles and (b) they would prove my IRS scandal is a partisan scam.

WASHINGTON -- One week after he released partial transcripts of interviews with IRS officials involved in the scandal surrounding the targeting of conservative groups, the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said releasing the full transcripts would be "reckless" and "irresponsible."

Get that? Releasing hand picked excerpts to media is fine. The full transcripts to put the excerpts in context, dangerous. By which he means it's dangerous to Issa's now ruined plan to keep his fakery alive all summer. Ranking Democratic on the committee, Elijah Cummings, called Issa out.

Shorter Cummings: Cut the bullshit Issa. You got nothing. Release the transcripts and end the hearings or I'll release the damn transcripts myself.

Issa is of course, appalled that his good friend across the aisle would utter such a coarse challenge.

"Your decision to publicly announce that the investigation should wrap up was irresponsible, but not surprising," said Issa, in a letter to Cummings. "However, your push to release entire transcripts from witness interviews while the investigation remains active was reckless and threatened to undermine the integrity of the Committee’s investigation."

Cummings is not alone. Apparently even Republicans are grumbling in private. Amusing development in light of the current media meme -- transparency in government. Steve Benen adds more context.

Your moment of Zen

A fairy ring. [source unknown]

All your government surveillance is privatized

As I said in the previous post, we're having the wrong arguments about domestic surveillance. All the chatter is about Snowden and Obama and Bush. What's being lost in the noise is talking about the policy. The bigger scandal than the surveillance is that the surveillance is being contracted out to private corporations. Take for instance Snowden's last employer from whence he apparently hacked his documents, Booz Allen Hamilton.

The company employs about 25,000 people, almost half of whom hold top secret security clearances, providing “access to information that would cause ‘exceptionally grave damage’ to national security if disclosed to the public,” according to a company securities filing.

In January, Booz Allen announced that it was starting work on a new contract worth perhaps as much as $5.6 billion over five years to provide intelligence analysis services to the Defense Department. Under the deal, Booz Allen employees are being assigned to help military and national security policy makers, the company said…

Think Progress points out Booz Allen Hamilton is just one of many contractors.

According to a 2013 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a total of 483,263 contractors held Top Secret clearances in 2012, the highest level one can obtain, with another 582,524 holding them at the Confidential and Secret levels.

Think about that for a moment. How many more young and possibly delusional computer geeks might there be lurking in corporate cubicles with no accountability to the taxpayer at all? Some of those guys might be accessing your personal internet communications, not because they have to, but because they can.

Beyond that, it's not even cost effective. It's a myth that the private sector can deliver public services at a lesser cost. Private industry is profit driven, above all else. Atrios is right when he says "the security/surveillance state industry is just a giant grift, a big scam there to enrich certain communities in Northern Virginia."

Of course surveillance is just one area of government being run by and enriching private industry. Military contractors like whatever Blackwater is being called right now for foreign security forces and Halliburton for military support services are also sucking billions out of our national treasury for services the government could provide at a much lesser cost. It's not just the grift, it's the graft. These corporations are cheating us and even if they get caught cooking the books, or outright stealing, nothing happens to them. They still get paid and they get their contracts renewed forever. That's at the heart of the "small government" scam.

We're having the wrong argument about domestic surveillance

I'm about done with Edward Snowden barring any new corrected information but let's review for a moment the earliest reports about Snowden's revelations:

Snowden:

"All my options are bad," he said. The US could begin extradition proceedings against him, a potentially problematic, lengthy and unpredictable course for Washington. Or the Chinese government might whisk him away for questioning, viewing him as a useful source of information. Or he might end up being grabbed and bundled into a plane bound for US territory. "Yes, I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me. Or any of the third-party partners.

They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets," he said. "We have got a CIA station just up the road - the consulate here in Hong Kong - and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be." Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."

Charlie Pierce:

I am sorry, but this is the stuff of bad airport spy fiction. ("Rendered"? The Triads? Please.) The most likely outcome? China decides to extradite him because it has higher priority issues on which it needs to deal with the United States than the future of Edward Snowden. Which, I suspect, is when he and his sponsors will discover that Hong Kong's "spirited committment to free speech and the right of political dissent' -- which may be the funniest line to emerge from this whole saga -- is not what they believe it to be. But there are issues beyond Edward Snowden, and whatever comes next, and these are issues worthy of an open and national debate, and they should be examined in the light of day.

Read the whole thing. Charlie is right. We having the wrong arguments because too many people are uncritically buying the media hype and the fights are all about who's to blame. We didn't suddenly turn into a surveillance society overnight. The government has been spying on us in various ways our entire lives. That's surely not acceptable but let's not forget the Obama admin has not broken any laws. You want to get mad, then target the people who made all this stuff legal -- Congress.

Your moment of Zen

Creativity is greater than negativity. [artist unknown]

Snowden's long game on leaking

Here's a curious side note on Snowden's epic leaks. He contacted this documentary film maker in January, Interestingly "she is filming the story behind the story — including her co-author on the Guardian story and former Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald — for her forthcoming documentary on whistle-blowers and leaks."

We now know Snowden ultimately contacted a slew of media people by the time he produced any hard evidence. Now they're fighting over credit for the scoop. It also apparently took him a long time to come up with the documents.

We were contacted, we didn’t know what he was up to, and at some point he came forward with documents.

Think Progress has more on Snowden's actual work history. He changed jobs a lot. He was just an IT guy, not an intelligence officer. He was an accomplished computer geek and made a ton of money privately contracting out his skills. But he clearly didn't have “the authorities to wiretap anyone," it appears he simply had the ability to hack further into the systems than he was cleared to do. And this is interesting:

He wasn’t just worried that data was being collected, but that it would eventually be used selectively to derive sinister conclusions from the actions of people living innocent lives.

In other words he has no proof that innocent people were being targeted with intrusive data intercepts, he just decided it was going to happen someday. In other words he lied, or exaggerated if you prefer, to get the media's attention. Which still makes me wonder if he either invented those powerpoints himself or if they were really a sales pitch from one of his many jobs with outside contractors and not from the NSA at all.

The more real information that comes out, the more it looks to me he's more interested in fame than in exposing actual government wrongdoing. I hope you'll forgive me for finding that less than heroic.

Media fails on Snowden story

So I'm still catching up the Snowden story. It's not that easy because it seems the facts keep changing and there's a metric ton of noise with everybody fighting about whether this kid is a hero or a traitor. Jeffrey Toobin doesn't think Snowden is a hero. He thinks he's " a grandiose narcissist." At this point, I tend to agree with that. It's not that I don't appreciate the guy restarting the debate about domestic surveillance, but I'm finding Snowden vaguely sociopathic for a number of reasons.

A lot of fighting appears to be based on incomplete information. Media has been flooding the zone with a grand rush to be first with any hot rumor they can get their hands on. Then stealthily correcting the record after the rumors turn out to be bogus.

Ed Bott continues to track the ever changing stories being quietly corrected. Guessing few people caught this correcton on the WaPo story.

Update June 10: And one more thing. In its original story, the Post calls the source of the documents "a career intelligence officer" who provided these materials "in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy." We now know that the source was Edward Snowden, who was not an intelligence officer but an "infrastructure analyst" who had been in his current position with an external contractor for only three months. The "career intelligence officer" description seems exaggerated.

Seems exaggerated? How about entirely made up to point of near delusional? Suggests to me Snowden never had the authority to "wiretap the President" as he initially claimed. Seems to be a correction that big deserves a headline, but I haven't seen one yet. This is why I don't trust the media to get the story right anymore than I trust government claims of national security necessity. As Ed put it:

In short, one of the great journalistic institutions of the 20th Century is now engaged in outright click-baiting, following the same “publish first, fact-check later” rules as its newer online competitors.

Click-bait reporting is the new business model of the news biz. It's killing what's left of the profession of journalism and it's at the root of the ruination of civil society.

Edward Snowden, drama queen

"He was capable of melodrama but wrote with some eloquence about his beliefs."

Just catching up on this story of our intrepid leaker. Snowden claims he's not comfortable in the spotlight but everything I've read about this so far reads like a bad spy novel starting with his code name Verax which means “truth teller” in Latin.

Furthermore, he obviously planned to come forward from the beginning, making elaborate plans to secure asylum.

To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source.

I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when. (The Post broke the story two weeks later, on Thursday. The Post sought the views of government officials about the potential harm to national security prior to publication and decided to reproduce only four of the 41 slides.)

Snowden replied succinctly, “I regret that we weren’t able to keep this project unilateral.” Shortly afterward he made contact with Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper the Guardian.

Glenn of course, ran with the whole story without an apparent shred of skepticism, including publishing all the powerpoint slides. Speaking of those slides, this doesn't seem to have received a whole lot of attention. Declan McCullagh of CNET is skeptical. He noticed the WaPo surrepitiously revised their initial account. [See the complete revisions here]

Declan also found a named expert who wasn't impressed.

The biggest problem was that the Post took a leaked PowerPoint presentation from a single anonymous source and leaped to conclusions without supporting evidence. McCullagh quotes one of his named (not anonymous) sources, former general counsel of the NSA Stewart Baker, as saying the slides look “flaky."

Not saying Snowden made the whole thing up. We all know the program exists. Just saying it's entirely possible he's embellished his data to make it a better story.

Your moment of Zen

A bonsai hobbit house. [photo via]