From the Keyboard of Surly1
Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on July 29, 2013
Discuss this article here in the Diner Forum.
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
~Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
Like Whitman’s “learned astronomer,” we hear “experts” way in on both sides of the debate, wherever a debate can be found or manufactured. Peak oil? Climate change? The age of the earth? Many of those unimpressed by modernism, and especially those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, urge their hirelings to “teach the controversy.” In other words, manufacture a controversy where none exists, in the face of a mountain of available evidence to the contrary. Thus do we have petroleum industry shills bleating mightily about subsidies for windmills at a time when carbon dioxide had reached 400 ppm in the atmosphere, a level said to herald a threshold of impending doom. At a time when we’re burning everything we can get our hands on, we’re also destroying the last great aboriginal rain forest in Brazil, ripping out the earth’s lungs one forest at a time. All in the name of the only religion worth mentioning, certainly the only one practiced in this nominally Christian country, the worship of money. In spite of the evidence, the proofs, the theorems, we are unable to rouse ourselves to do anything about getting off the petroleum crack pipe; about ending domestic spying; about economic justice; about saving a once great city, mostly because poor people live there. Little wonder, then, that so many of us simply want to wander off by ourselves, and consider the perfect silence of the firmament. Perhaps the answer lies there? We doubt it: as another poet, William Shakespeare, once said, “the answer lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
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A onetime friend of mine Posted this on my Facebook wall. It purported to be from an organization called the Institute for energy research. A posted an article included the following:
One of the largest wind facilities in the world is benefiting from millions of dollars in state tax credits it is not qualified for and does not need, according to a recent series of investigative reports in The Oregonian.
The 845 megawatt Shepherds Flat wind facility that opened in 2012 received final approval last month from the Oregon Department of Energy (ODOE) for three separate tax credits totaling $30 million. Caithness Energy, owner of Shepherds Flat, was able to secure the credits by defining the project as three separate wind facilities. But as the new reports reveal, Shepherds Flat likely qualifies for just one out of three Business Energy Tax Credits under explicit ODOE rules that determine what constitutes a “separate and distinct” facility.
Now there may be merits in the report, as far as the operations of the business and the qualification for certain tax credits, especially as the story originated with a newspaper. yet what interested me was this “Institute for energy research.” Wouldn’t an organization interested in energy research be interested in alternative energy sources, including more efficient turbine generation for windmills? So I looked under the hood. It didn’t take long to find a dead cat on the engine. Here is what you need to know about IER:
The Institute for Energy Research (IER), is a Washington, DC-based non-profit corporation that conducts “research and analysis” on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets.
[quote]The Institute’s CEO, Robert L. Bradley, Jr., was formerly a director of policy analysis at Enron, where he wrote speeches for Kenneth Lay. He has written seven books, including Capitalism at Work and Edison to Enron,[5] and he maintains the website Political Capitalism. He is also an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Robert L. Bradley, Jr., President of the Institute for Energy Research, wrote an article published by Competitive Enterprise Institute, entitled “Heated Debate”[8] to respond to a negative review by Harvard Professor John P. Holdren of the 2001 international best seller The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg. Lomberg was inspired to write his book after he read an article entitled “The Doomslayer”[9] profiling Julian L. Simon. Lomberg was honored in 2003 with the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Julian L. Simon award. The award was given to Robert L. Bradley in 2002 and more recently in 2012 to Matt Ridley, who is also skeptical about climate change.
Once again, we see the long arm of the Koch brothers at work. Rust never sleeps. It gets better:
The Institute for Energy Research has a political arm, the American Energy Alliance, which is responsible for multi-million dollar television advertising campaigns that have attacked energy policy, ideas and positions of the Obama Administration that are contrary to the those held by IER. The American Energy Alliance is run by Thomas (Tom) Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. According the its website, the Alliance engages in “grassroots public policy advocacy and debate” regarding energy.
Both IER and the American Energy Alliance are partly funded by the Koch Brothers and their donor network, according to Politico’s research, sources – and to reports by Koch-controlled charitable foundations themselves. The American Energy Alliance, as a matter of policy, does not disclose the names of its donors.
American Energy Alliance provide an online petition to U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry regarding the US federal government administration’s approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline extension. American Energy Alliance compare the extended time for the application approval to the time it took for the Allies “to win World War II.”[11]
Wind Production Tax Credit (PTC)
Benjamin Cole, a spokesman for American Energy Alliance told Politico in October 2012 that, “Our [American Energy Alliance] goal is to make the United States Wind Energy Policy#Wind Production Tax Credit so toxic that it makes it impossible for John Boehner to sit at a table with Harry Reid and say, ‘Yeah, I can bend on this one.’”
By their deeds shall we know them. Their work certainly speaks for itself.
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Congress affirms NSA spying
Or maybe this should be filed under, “You’re Shitting Me, Right?
A vote vote in the House this past week on an amendment to curtail domestic spying failed, in a result that was much closer than either side realized. It also smoked out those members of the so-called “liberal” party that think it’s a really good idea that the NSA sniff your crotch.
“There is a real division within each party on this issue,” Norman J. Ornstein, a renowned expert on U.S. politics, said.
This was evident in the U.S. Congress on Wednesday, when a vote to curtail domestic spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) sundered the Democratic and Republican parties alike.
The vote was the first of its kind to take place since the revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden which, when published by The Guardian newspaper, exposed a degree of domestic surveillance far greater in scale and scope than was previously understood by the public.
The 217-205 decision to reject an amendment blocking spending on NSA domestic spying was so close that one political commentator called it a “nail biter”. Of the 205 votes in favour, 111 were from Democrats and 94 from Republicans, and of the 217 votes opposed, 83 were from Democrats votes and 134 from Republicans.
“You’re not going to see many votes like this,” says Ornstein.
The divisions mirror popular opinion in the country. I myself am the wrong one to ask with the mood of the people is, as I was gobsmacked when Reagan beat Carter in 1979. So the fact that the Pew Research Center says that 57% of Democrats approve of government spying along with 44% of Republicans, all I can do is shake my head, go outside, and stare at the stars.
As noted above, the vote did result in “the outing of the shills.” As this vote illustrates, both sides of the aisle are equally corrupt and controlled. One could be impressed by the fact that Debbie Wasserman Shultz voted the same way as John Boehner. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Although perhaps not so strange, if you follow the money.
Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash. The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the house voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.
Overall, political action committees and employees from defense and intelligence firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Technologies, Honeywell International, and others ponied up $12.97 million in donations for a two-year period ending December 31, 2012, according to the analysis, which MapLight performed with financing data from OpenSecrets. Lawmakers who voted to continue the NSA dragnet-surveillance program averaged $41,635 from the pot, whereas House members who voted to repeal authority averaged $18,765.
Res ipsa loquitor.
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The Snowden Effect
Not surprisingly, Charlie Pierce observed this entire trail of tears and had a few trenchant observations of his own:
With defunding stuff all the rage among Washington Republicans these days, you could have missed Rep. Justin Amash’s long-bomb attempt to defund the National Security Agency’s secret attempts to Hoover up cellphone records from millions of Americans.Some Democrats in the House have signed aboard, which apparently has given the administration sufficient agita as to cause a sudden lapse into illogic and incoherence. This is the argument that the White House is making to try and get Democrats not to support Amash’s Hail Mary.
“In light of the recent unauthorized disclosures, the President has said that he welcomes a debate about how best to simultaneously safeguard both our national security and the privacy of our citizens… However, we oppose the current effort in the House to hastily dismantle one of our Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism tools. This blunt approach is not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process.”
The hell you say.
A bill is being proposed and debated in a public session of the national legislature and that’s not an “informed, open, or deliberative process.” As opposed to what, a secret program, validated on the basis of secret evidence, by a secret court? Hell, the Amash bill is the only informed, open and deliberative thing about this whole mess. If you’re welcoming a debate, then welcome the debate. If you don’t, then don’t. But don’t throw out laughable statements like this one. You sound like a bunch of East Germans.
And, once again, his mad international PR skillz aside, if Edward Snowden had not done what he did, the debate is not happening.
Interestingly, Bill Maher made very same point at the end of this program on Friday night. Clearly either Maher or his writers read Pierce. No matter: it’s the truth.
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Woman Wants Possessions Back After Bank Tried To Repossess Wrong House
You think it would be straightforward. The bank tried to repossess the wrong house. The wrong woman would like her belongings back. No, this is the FSA, were banks can do no wrong, and if you’re a citizen and run afoul of one, well, it sucks to be you.
Katie Barnett says that the First National Bank in Wellston foreclosed on her house, even though it was not her bank.
“They repossessed my house on accident, thinking it was the house across the street,” Barnett said.
Barnett, who had been away from the house for about two weeks, said she had to crawl through the window of her own house in order to get in after she used her own key that did not work.
Some of the items in her house had been hauled away, others were sold, given away and trashed.
It turns out the bank sent someone to repossess the house located across the street from Barnett’s house, but by mistake broke into hers instead.
“They told me that the GPS led them to my house,” Barnett said. “My grass hadn’t been mowed and they just assumed.”
She called the McArthur Police about the incident, but weeks later, the chief announced the case was closed.
Barnett said that according to the bank president, this was the first time something like this has happened.
She presented him with an $18,000 estimate to replace the losses, but the president refused to pay.
“He got very firm with me and said, ‘We’re not paying you retail here, that’s just the way it is,’” Barnett said. “I did not tell them to come in my house and make me an offer. They took my stuff and I want it back.”
An update to this story shows the bank has responded in its most bankly way: they apologized on their website, while telling Ms. Barnett to go fuck herself.. They asked Ms. Barnett to produce receipts for her belongings, but any receipts that she may have had were probably with the belongings that the bank looted and confiscated, then disposed of. But don’t think that the First National Bank of Wellstone doesn’t have Barnett’s best interest at heart: they offered to replace her missing bow flex machine with a bow flex they found on the side of the road. In a just world the story would be getting serious play, and the bankers made to suffer the kind of public humiliation generally reserved for pederasts and men who have sex with livestock. But the good bankers will probably show up at the next Chamber of Commerce breakfast, backslapping their buddies, and gloating over this quarter’s results. And probably sitting next to the chief of police. And Katie Barnett? All she wants is her stuff back. Her, and the rest of the country. . .
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No Singing Zone
The state rotunda in Madison Wisconsin is now declared a no singing zone.
Capital police last week arrested protesters of Gov. Scott Walker on the charges of violating state permanent rules by singing in the Statehouse rotunda. According to the Journal-Sentinel,
Twenty-two of the roughly 60 protesters — including a pair of Madison talk radio hosts — were led away in flex-tie restraints as dozens of legislative aides and journalists looked on from a few steps away and from higher floors.
Demonstrators have continued to gather in the Capitol for their near-dailysinging protest despite a recent federal judge’s ruling partially backing the Walker administration’s stance and repeated declarations by police that it was an “unlawful event.”
Police once again warned demonstrators early in Wednesday’s singalong, both by loudspeaker and by a handwritten sign in the Capitol rotunda, to leave or be “subject to arrest.” But many kept on singing.
The Capitol police have already issued hundreds of citations over the past several years for the crime of assembling in the peoples’ House. Not surprisingly, Pierce had a take on this.
Ever since Walker began his campaign to turn Wisconsin into a client state for various corporations, which is to say, practically since he was elected in 2010, and certainly since he was reaffirmed in office a year later, people who don’t necessarily enjoy being residents of a corporate client state have been gathering in the rotunda of the capitol building to sing various songs of opposition and resistance. They call themselves the Solidarity Singers, and they apparently have into the Gulf of Mexico something of an annoyance to Scott Walker, probably because none of them own a mining company, so, this week, his pals in the legislature sic’ced his capitol police on the singers, busting the lot of them, including elderly men and women, and the odd journalist …
This being Wisconsin, where most of the progressive notions of the 20th century were born, which is why Walker and his various sugar-daddies are trying to roll them back in the 21st, there are old rules and traditions that were put in place to make sure the state capitol was not garrisoned against the people and their right, however musically they exercise it, to petition their government for a redress of grievances. The ACLU of Wisconsin, which won an injunction against the capitol police in response to an earlier spate of arrests, considers this latest action a question of fat men with clubs squeezing through a loophole.
Under the new permitting policy, groups as small as four were forced to obtain prior permission from the government before they engaged in expression “for the purpose of actively promoting any cause.” The new rules also prohibited people from gathering in the Capitol for any performance, ceremony, presentation, meeting or rally without a permit. In his 47-page decision, Judge Conley wrote that the Capitol’s “design was intended to embody… the pursuit of fair and open government informed by an educated, politically involved citizenry and the ‘Wisconsin idea.’”
This has nothing to do with public safety. I’ve been in that rotunda. It’s huge. You could bring in Up With People, and there’d still be room for the daily business of selling Wisconsin off wholesale to get done around them. This is about inconveniencing a guy who wants to run for president based on his record of selling Wisconsin off wholesale. This is about video he doesn’t like and people who harsh his mellow. Which happens to be what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and Article I of the constitution of what once was the state of Wisconsin, are all about, too.
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Halliburton: “What, Me Worry?”
I know we are a people who have no memory, but does anybody else remember that BP fiasco? You know, the one where millions of gallons of crude oil went gushing into the Gulf of Mexico? That deepwater Horizon thingy? You might think that if there were a functioning rule of law anywhere in this country, that if the Corporation admitted destroying evidence that led to to spoil and a significant natural resource and fishery, they might face a fine greater than $200,000. But I answer myself. The rule of law functions just fine in this country thank you very much, in accordance with the operating principles of those who purchased the legislators:
Halliburton has admitted destroying evidence in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and will plead guilty to a criminal charge, the Justice Department announced Thursday.
Under the plea agreement, which requires court approval, Houston-based Halliburton will also face three years’ probation, pay the maximum fine of $200,000 and continue to cooperate in the Justice Department’s criminal investigation of the April 2010 explosion and fire on the drilling platform, which killed 11 rig workers off Louisiana.
The Justice Department said it would not pursue further criminal charges against Halliburton or its subsidiaries.
Separately, Halliburton made a $55 million “voluntary contribution” to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
In a statement Thursday night, Halliburton noted that the Justice Department “acknowledged the company’s significant and valuable cooperation during the course of its investigation, and the company has agreed to continue to cooperate … in any ongoing investigation related to or arising from the incident.”
The spill was the largest in U.S. history: Nearly 5 million barrels of crude oil poured into the Gulf before the sea-floor gusher was capped three months later.
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Michael Hastings Watch: $25 gadget lets hackers seize control of a car
After journalist Michael Hastings’s death, there were rumours that his car had been hacked. Now two researchers say they can do it for real
IN THE early hours of 18 June, a Mercedes coupé travelling at extremely high speed along a Los Angeles street smashed into a palm tree. It exploded into flames, killing the driver; the impact ejected the engine 50 metres clear of the car. Was it an accident? Or was the car hacked, allowing it to be driven off the road by remote control?
The very idea might sound crazy – but it’s one that Richard Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to the US National Security Council, has raised after the driver was identified as Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings. Known for his revealing articles on the US military and its intelligence agencies, Hastings had emailed colleagues the day before he died to say that he was going “off the radar for a bit” to chase down a “big story”.
“What evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car cyberattack,” says Clarke in a Huffington Post interview. Intelligence agencies, he says, can remotely seize control of a car to make it accelerate wildly or brake suddenly, for instance.
Clarke cited research, carried out for the US National Academy of Sciences, showing that “connected cars” – equipped with built-in cellular technologyused by dashboard apps and engine-monitoring software – can be hacked remotely. But proof that it could be done in practice has been lacking.
That looks set to change on 27 July, when Spanish engineers Javier Vázquez Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera will give a demonstration at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They have built a $25 device that lets them bypass security in a car’s electronic control unit.
The brains of a modern car, the ECU is a computer that controls engine power, transmission and braking. Mechanics can diagnose faults by plugging a laptop into it via standard wired connectors such as the CAN bus.
Alternatively, remote diagnostics and software updates can take place over a cellular network, as happens with services such as General Motors’ OnStarand Mercedes-Benz’s Mbrace.
Vázquez Vidal and Garcia Illera will show how their device – which they claim uses a $1 chip to break encryption – can read from and write data to the flash memory of commonly used ECUs, made by Bosch of Germany.
Whatever the causes of Michael Hastings’s crash, the need to make cars secure against hacking will only become more acute. The next version of Vázquez Vidal and Garcia Illera’s device won’t even need plugging in to the target car. “I am already working on a wireless version,” Vázquez Vidal says.
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Add Hacking news:
Hacker Barnaby Jack dies in San Francisco aged 35
Barnaby Jack, who became famous after demonstrating an ATM hack, died on Thursday – but coroners did not give details. He was 36.A prominent professional hacker who discovered a way to have ATMs spit out cash, Mr. Jack died Thursday, authorities and his employer said. The cause of death is under investigation, San Francisco Deputy Coroner Kris Barbrich said.Craig Brophy, a spokesman for computer security firm IOActive, where Mr. Jack was director of embedded device security, confirmed his death and said the company would be issuing a statement.Mr. Jack was scheduled to speak Thursday at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. The title of his talk was “Implantable Medical Devices: Hacking Humans,” according to the Black Hat conference website.Mr. Jack planned to reveal software that uses a common transmitter to scan for and “interrogate” individual medical implants, the website said.
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Jackals circle Detroit
Department of first things first:
Even as the city of Detroit goes bankrupt, Michigan’s state legislature approved Wednesday a $450 million bond offering that would form the public backbone of a new stadium for the Detroit Red Wings. The bonds will be floated by the Michigan Strategic Fund, which handles all of the state’s private development funds. The public, $283 million portion of the bonds will come from the Downtown Development Authority, which earmarks a slice of downtown Detroit property taxes for reinvestment there.
In the US of A, billionaire sports owners are not to be held responsible for building their own stadiums, that is the public’s job. Their job is to rake in the profits. Meanwhile, the city itself will not be allowed to collect these earmarked downtown property taxes for such things as schools, police, infrastructure rebuilding and the like, or for retirement obligations to its workers, who might just have to find a cheaper grade of cat food.
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Add Detroit
No need for annotation here. An inspired rant from Firedoglake:
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that one option not on the table is a federal bailout. “I think it’s very difficult right now to ask directly for support,” he said.
Well yeah. It is difficult to ask directly for support. It’s not like you’re a financial institution, after all.
It’s not like you spent the past 15 years putting the entire national economy on red in Vegas.
It’s not like you bet against your own customers and then sold them out without telling them.
It’s not like you took your federal bailouts and then backed a greedy fuck in the next election whose campaign did nothing but bash the entire CONCEPT of federal government.
It’s not like you reacted to the slightest attempt to regulate your business like someone who just watched his puppy gunned down in the street, and then demanded the rest of the world treat your feelings like a national emergency.
If you were one of those guys, hey, no problem. The free money pile is that way. Here’s a wheelbarrow. May we push it for you? Wouldn’t want you to strain your back.
Now come vulturous fucks Kevyn Orr and Rick Snyder to tell other people it’s time to get “real,” because apparently losing your house and a retirement income YOU WERE PROMISED and facing the possibility of living in your car as a reward for working your whole life for the public isn’t “real.”
Now come Kevyn Orr and Rick Snyder, scraping their beaks on the bones of the wounded, to explain how they have no choice but to take everything away from people who have nothing, because sometime in the past somebody had the stupid idea that we should take responsibility for the people who take responsibility for us.
Kevyn Orr, by the way, is getting paid $275,000 to tell people who made $35,000 a year their whole lives to get real. Just in case your irony meter wasn’t already buried in the red zone. The public has no choice but to pay him, I assume, the same way it has no choice but to act like people who retired because they had every expectation of being able to retire because they had done literally everything in their lives right at this point are the anchor dragging Detroit down.
If only they’d crashed the entire trading floor, left the housing market in ruins, and bitched to the WSJ’s editorial board about how mean everybody was. Then they could belly up to the federal bar and order a double of whatever the banks are having.
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You’re Shitting Me, right?
Another installment of those stories that moved that you can’t even believe are true, as if writers for The Onion were generating headlines. We live in times that sorely test one’s capacity for satire, and herin is the proof:
Remember the geniuses that gave us this a couple of weeks ago?
KTVU, the Oakland Fox affiliate station that reported four fake, racially insensitive names for pilots of Asiana flight 214 on a July 12 broadcast, has responded to the embarrassing gaffe by firing three veteran producers after an in-house investigation.
Amid the fiasco, ousted producer Roland De Wolk attempted to defend his reputation to The Wrap when reached via email. Unfortunately for him, his defense was undermined by misspellings that TheWrap presumed “unintentional”:
“My hard-earned reputation is intack. There are lawyers, so eager as I am to anser all questions, I must refrain.”
More damaging for De Wolk, though, is a report from SF Weekly that challenged the supposed “intackness” of De Wolk’s reputation, instead calling it “somewhat checkered.”
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#NoNeedToSatirize: McCain promises strippers that $1 coins means bigger tips
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) says he’s got a stimulus package for the strippers of America.
The former Republican presidential nominee is one of several senators supporting the COINS Act to replace the dollar bill with a dollar coin. They argue that the the move would save billions in printing costs.
But Daniel Harris, the owner of Archibald’s Gentleman’s Club in Washington, D.C., told The Hill in 2011 that he couldn’t sign on to the plan because his dancers relied on paper dollars.
“You can’t put a coin in a garter belt,” Harris said. “I think it would be very awkward for everyone involved. How much more would a coin weigh than a dollar bill? It would be very hard.”
On Thursday, The Hill asked McCain to think of the strippers.
“Then I hope that they could obtain larger denominations,” the senator quipped. “Fives, tens, one hundreds!”
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Open Season on Minorities, post-Martin verdict
#NoNeedToSatirize: National Review: Stay Away from Black Men (Again)
The National Review has warned its readers to stay away from black men.
In a column titled “Facing Facts About Race,” National Review writer and military historian Victor Davis Hanson explained how racism is passed from generation to generation of men in his family.
He begins by sharing his father’s warnings about “black youths” before claiming, “the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.”
Next, he let readers in on his own racist child rearing. “It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping.”
Finally, Hanson laments, “I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.”
***
#NoNeedToSatirize: GOP chairman: I don’t really care for the word tolerance
Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus assured social conservatives on Monday that the GOP was not going to embrace “tolerance” as part of its rebranding efforts.
“I don’t know if I’ve used the word ‘tolerance,’ I don’t really care for that word myself,” he told theChristian Broadcasting Network. “I don’t have a problem with it, I just think it has another meaning politically that can go the other direction.”
Priebus said Republicans would continue to oppose same-sex marriage and seek to ban abortion in the United States. He described both as “foundational issues,” but said Republicans needed to adopted a more tolerant tone.
“If you’re looking at the evidence, what you will see is a party that embraces life, a party that embraces marriage and a chairman that understands that there’s only one sovereign God and that we ultimately aren’t dependent on what happens in politics,” Priebus explained. “What ultimately matters in our lives is that we’re salt and light in the world and that we’re honoring God in the things that we do every day. I get that. I think our party gets that and there’s never been a movement away from that.”
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Add Tolerance
#NoNeedToSatirize: Gohmert likens minorities to prairie chickens and ‘various lizards’
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Wednesday mocked an effort by Democrats to protect the rights of African-Americans by saying their amendment was actually meant for “the snail darter, various lizards, the lesser prairie chicken, the greater sage grouse and so many other insects.”
During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Sunshine for the Regulatory Decrees and Settlements Act, a Republican-sponsored bill that Democrats say is unnecessary and is written so broadly that it could block individual discrimination lawsuits brought forth by federal employees.
Think Progress obtained video of Gohmert objecting to an amendment offered by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) that would have stopped third parties from blocking regulatory actions that were intended to prevent discrimination based on sex, race or national origin.
The Texas Republican argued that the amendment was more about protecting wildlife than minorities and other groups.
“There is nobody in this chamber who is more appreciative than I am for the gentleman from Tennessee and my friend from Michigan standing up for the rights of race, religion, national religion of the Delta Smelt, the snail darter, various lizards, the lesser prairie chicken, the greater sage grouse and so many other insects who would want someone standing for their religion, their race, their national origin and I think that’s wonderful,” Gohmert quipped.
He added that the original Republican bill would actually “protect interests” of minorities because it provided for greater transparency.
“It will not allow for some conservative or radical right-wing administration or group in the fish and wildlife to cut a deal with some right-wing radical group and we never know about it so nobody can intervene and stop it,” Gohmert insisted. “So you don’t have some group that is directly aligned with somebody in the administration at that point coming together, cutting a sweetheart deal between themselves, to the determent of the race, religion and national religion of snail darters and other animals and fish and wildlife.”
“I’ve got to express umbrage at the idea that African-Americans and Jews are like snail darters,” Cohen replied.
“The gentlemen will take note what this bill is about!” Gohmert shouted. “It’s not about race, it’s about endangered species.”
“The amendment is about civil rights!” Cohen shot back.
“If the gentlemen can point to an endangered species in this country that is a human being, I am with him 100 percent!” Gohmert exclaimed
Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) told Think Progress that Gohmert’s claim that the amendment was about wildlife was ridiculous.
“This is not a snail darter’s amendment, it is not an environmental amendment, it is a civil rights amendment, and we’re talking about the civil rights of people — the civil rights of people that have been violated egregiously for generations in this country,” Nadler explained.
In the end, Cohen’s amendment was defeated along party lines in a 13 to 16 vote.
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California Cop Who Pepper-Sprayed Students Claims Psychiatric Damage
John Pike became, through his brutality and stupidity, an iconic image. Now he is playing the well practiced victim card often employed by the right.
A former University of California, Davis police officer who was fired after pepper spraying a group of students staging a protest in 2011, and whose actions went viral on the internet, is seeking workers’ compensation settlement, claiming the incident left him psychologically injured.
John Pike was fired in July 2012, following an internal affairs investigation regarding his actions at a November protest on the campus. In a video that spread across the Internet, Pike can be seen aiming pepper spray in the faces of students sitting passively protesting tuition increases and in solidarity with the Occupy movement.
Pike has a settlement hearing scheduled for Aug. 13, according to the Department of Industrial Relations website.
His claim pertains to a “nervous system – psychiatric” injury according to department documents published online.
UC Davis officials confirmed Pike had filed a claim. “The university is required to follow the worker’s compensation process. We are not in agreement with the benefits being claimed,” said Andy Fell, a university spokesman.
Also here: http://www.businessinsider.com#ixzz2aL7uCCfm
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And perhaps the piece-de-resistance for the week
Pennsylvania police chief: F*ck all you libtards out there, you take it in the a**
The mayor of Gilberton, Pennsylvania is standing by her city’s police chief despite a series of profanity-laced and threatening videos.
In a video that has received wide attention, police chief Mark Kessler repeatedly tells those upset by his use of profanity to “go f*ck yourself” as he fires various automatic weapons.
Mayor Mary Lou Hannon told The Morning Call that Kessler had the right to express himself. The city would “not take action to quash free speech, whether or not each member of council or any member of council agrees with it.”
Kessler has uploaded several profanity-laced videos to YouTube. In one video, Kessler berates “libtards” and warns of an armed rebellion against the government.
“F*ck all you libtards out there, as a matter of fact, read my shirt,” he says, turning around to show a message on his back which read, “Liberals take it in the a**.”
“You take it in the ass and I don’t give a f*ck what you say so you can all just go f*ck yourselves. Period. I wont be going to D.C. and I don’t give a f*ck. If you f*cking maniacs want to turn this into an armed revolt, knock yourselves out. I’m not about that, so see you on the other side.”
In a video on basic pistol defense, Kessler repeatedly shoots a picture of a scary clown, which he says is Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). He calls Secretary of State John Kerry a “c*cksucker” in another video before firing off an automatic weapon.
Tuesday on his Facebook page, Kessler called for a massive rally to “show these tyrants we will not stand for any more violations on our constitution or our freedoms.”
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That’s it for this week’s lesson in lack of faith in humanity. We’ll try it again next week!