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The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right

You are here: Home / Archives for The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right

Hell Of A Christmas News Dump, Fellas

by Zandar|  December 25, 20148:20 pm| 88 Comments

This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®, Decline and Fall, Security Theatre, Serenity Now!, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right, Very Serious People

Merry Christmas from the NSA.  It seems the Puzzle Palace has 12 years’ worth of presents to give to Americans.

The NSA, responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, released a series of required quarterly and annual reportsto the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board that cover the period from the fourth quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2013.

The heavily-redacted reports include examples of data on Americans being e-mailed to unauthorized recipients, stored in unsecured computers and retained after it was supposed to be destroyed, according to the documents. They were posted on the NSA’s website at around 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve.

In a 2012 case, for example, an NSA analyst “searched her spouse’s personal telephone directory without his knowledge to obtain names and telephone numbers for targeting,” according to one report. The analyst “has been advised to cease her activities,” it said.

Other unauthorized cases were a matter of human error, not intentional misconduct.

Last year, an analyst “mistakenly requested” surveillance “of his own personal identifier instead of the selector associated with a foreign intelligence target,” according to another report.

In 2012, an analyst conducted surveillance “on a U.S. organization in a raw traffic database without formal authorization because the analyst incorrectly believed that he was authorized to query due to a potential threat,” according to the fourth-quarter report from 2012. The surveillance yielded nothing.

Two thoughts:  One, as I’ve said numerous times, it’s entirely possible to hold the position that both the NSA needs massive reform to prevent civil liberties abuses, and that Edward Snowden went about exposing these abuses in a way that damaged national security.  The ACLU on the other hand requested this information through FOIA, and got it.  No espionage or skulduggery was required, and the information clearly shows the NSA isn’t following its own procedures.  This was the right way to get evidence of these massive abuses and does so in a manner that’s both responsible and powerful.

And that brings me to Thought Two: please remember that Senate Republicans, including Rand Paul, killed legislation that would have increased oversight and civil liberties protections involving the NSA just last month, so the opportunity to do something about this was killed by the GOP.  They’re not interested in reforming the NSA, they’re interested in allowing these abuses to continue, and the next Congress will do precisely nothing to rein this garbage in.

It’s pretty rancid for a Christmas Day news dump, but there you have it.

Hell Of A Christmas News Dump, FellasPost + Comments (88)

We’ll Have A Meeting About It

by Zandar|  December 1, 20149:20 am| 123 Comments

This post is in: Don't Mourn, Organize, Readership Capture, Shitty Cops, Rare Sincerity, Stuff About Black People Written By a Black Person, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right

President Obama will be meeting today with AG Eric Holder and community and civil rights leaders about Ferguson and the state of policing in black communities.

President Barack Obama will discuss the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, Monday with his Cabinet, civil rights leaders, law enforcement officials and others.

The White House says Obama’s Cabinet meeting will focus on his administration’s review of federal programs that provide military-style equipment to law enforcement agencies.

The White House says the president will also meet with young civil rights leaders to discuss the challenges posed by “mistrust between law enforcement and communities of color.” He’ll then meet with government and law enforcement officials, as well as other community leaders, to discuss how to strengthen neighborhoods.

The question for the assembled is “Will this actually accomplish anything?”  This is definitely an Obama-style response to the issue, but will a community organizer approach actually accomplish any of the stated goals?

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no Ta-Nehisi Coates or Jamelle Bouie or Jelani Cobb when it comes to eloquently defining the struggle over the last 400 years and how Ferguson is yet another chapter in our story, and I’m certainly far from somebody like Goldie Taylor  (who is crowdfunding a documentary on her hometown of East St. Louis called #89BLOCKS) when it comes to community activism.  I’m an IT guy who gets to grouse on the internets and occasionally somebody pays attention.

But it seems to me that the first thing we need to do is get the mindset out of our police departments that they are conducting counterterror operations in hostile, foreign territory.  Ferguson, Missouri is not Fallujah, The whole thing, the training, the surplus military gear given to police departments, the us vs them mentality where cops think the people they are sworn to protect and serve are The Enemy, that needs to be ripped out from these departments.

That brings us back to the President and today’s meetings.  It’s a good start and any solution to the completely valid mistrust of police by the black community must involve police and the black community, but what else can and must be done to stop the bad cops (and not all cops are the problem, mind you, but the ones that are constitute a deadly lethal issue)?

Where are we going on this?

We’ll Have A Meeting About ItPost + Comments (123)

Chucked Out The Door

by Zandar|  November 24, 20149:19 am| 71 Comments

This post is in: Military, War on Terror aka GSAVE®, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right

The first post-midterm Obama cabinet head to roll is apparently going to be that of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.  NY Times:

The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said.

The officials described Mr. Obama’s decision to remove Mr. Hagel, 68, as a recognition that the threat from the Islamic State would require a different kind of skills than those that Mr. Hagel was brought on to employ. A Republican with military experience who was skeptical about the Iraq war, Mr. Hagel came in to manage the Afghanistan combat withdrawal and the shrinking Pentagon budget in the era of budget sequestration.

But now “the next couple of years will demand a different kind of focus,” one administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. He insisted that Mr. Hagel was not fired, saying that he initiated discussions about his future two weeks ago with the president, and that the two men mutually agreed that it was time for him to leave.

But Mr. Hagel’s aides had maintained in recent weeks that he expected to serve the full four years term as defense secretary. His removal appears to be an effort by the White House to show that it is sensitive to critics who have pointed to stumbles in the government’s early response to several national security issues, including the Ebola crisis to the threat posed by the Islamic State militant group.

Take that as you will.  Holder resigning, now Hagel out.  Looks like the GOP Senate is going to be able to cause a lot of damage blocking cabinet appointees with the President no longer able to make recess appointments except for a narrow window after the midterm lame duck session.

Chucked Out The DoorPost + Comments (71)

Fables of the Restoration

by Betty Cracker|  October 27, 20142:44 pm| 123 Comments

This post is in: Election 2008, Election 2010, Election 2014, Election 2016, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Torture, Assholes, General Stupidity, Our Failed Media Experiment, Our Failed Political Establishment, Shitheads, Sociopaths, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right, The Wingularity

As Election Day nears, the battle for King Shit of Turd Mountain, i.e., the contest between Charlie Crist and Rick Scott for governor of Florida, has produced a shit-storm of negative advertising. Commercial after commercial projects images of the combatants in sinister poses and evil lighting, accompanied by strained voiceover accounts of their misdeeds in office.

Obviously, the Crist Photoshop team has the cushier job: I don’t think there’s a photo in existence of Rick Scott where he doesn’t look like an alien creature from a reptile off-world come to foreclose an orphanage and grind the inhabitants into feed-paste.

scott_negative_ad

But yesterday, there was an ad I hadn’t seen before featuring former Governor Jeb Bush excoriating former ally Charlie Crist as a career politician only interested in personal aggrandizement. The stones. The fucking stones on those Bushes.

Bush 2016: The Restoration is apparently a thing. Here’s a puke-inducing paragraph from a NYT article published yesterday about the alleged upswing in Jeb Bush’s political prospects:

Just six years ago, at the end of the last tumultuous Bush presidency, this would have been all but unthinkable. But President Obama’s troubles, the internal divisions of the Republican Party, a newfound nostalgia for the first Bush presidency and a modest softening of views about the second have changed the dynamics enough to make plausible another Bush candidacy. And while Jeb Bush wants to run as his own man, invariably this is a family with something to prove.

Unpacking that paragraph is like opening a rancid diaper pail, but let’s brace ourselves and give it a go: “President Obama’s troubles?” Yes, he has them, mostly traceable to Stately Bush Manor and exacerbated by the Bush-aligned vandals in Congress.

“Internal divisions of the Republican Party?” Oh, you mean that GOP rebranding campaign gone awry in which the Republican Party nominated scads of pekoe-huffing troglodytes who lost winnable races and turned the GOP presidential primary into a crackpot bake-off?

“Newfound nostalgia for the first Bush presidency and a modest softening of views about the second?” Bush I is a doddering old fart who occasionally weeps with shame in public over his fuck-up namesake. He will be forever overshadowed by the half-wit he served as VP, and his son empowered a cabal of sociopaths to complete the cycle of destruction Poppy’s boss set into motion.

And now we’re seriously being asked to countenance another Bush run at 1600 Pennsylvania? Just shoot me now. (You can get away with it here in Florida — thanks to Jeb’s partnership with the NRA.) I can’t be objective because I utterly despise them all. But is there really a Bush restoration movement afoot outside of the Bushies, their minions and political columnists? Y’all help me out here: I haven’t seen any evidence of it.

God, that article. “This is a family with something to prove?” Fuck them. “The Bushes, Led by W., Rally to Make Jeb ’45’?” From the current generation until the sun goes supernova and vaporizes this planet, fuck the Bushes, and fuck the putrid media hacks who enable them by framing the ambitions of that clan of psychotic leeches as if writing a human interest piece on a sports dynasty.

When the Obama administration decided not to pursue its vile predecessors for their ghastly war crimes and corruption, I understood the rationale, even if I didn’t agree with it entirely. It would have paralyzed the government in the midst of a cascading global crisis.

But the question of justice denied aside, this spectacle of the Bush family rehab alone is evidence that the dirty fucking hippies were right: We should have driven a stake through the fat black heart of that bunch when we had the chance.

Fables of the RestorationPost + Comments (123)

Why I live at the P.O. and Other Random Crap

by Betty Cracker|  October 23, 201411:03 am| 139 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Energy Policy, Free Markets Solve Everything, Open Threads, Politics, Religious Nuts 2, War, Assholes, Flash Mob of Hate, General Stupidity, Get off my grass you damned kids, Our Failed Media Experiment, Sociopaths, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right

Some of y’all give me crap about living in a backward hellhole like Florida. Well, were you able to pluck a Cherokee Purple tomato off your vine last night and have it for dinner with a little salt, pepper and mayo on multigrain bread?

006

I thought not.

show full post on front page

Why I live at the P.O. and Other Random CrapPost + Comments (139)

Convergence

by David Anderson|  September 25, 20148:03 am| 13 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, World's Best Healthcare (If You Can Afford It), Nobody could have predicted, Schadenfreude, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks), The Math Demands It

Via @McKinsey: Low-price exchange plans ↑ premiums, high-price ↓. What you’d expect in a newly competitive market. pic.twitter.com/ThHgjFJsPf

— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) September 24, 2014

The important thing to remember is that 2014 was a beta test year for Obamacare.  Some insurers went into the market with loss leader membership build strategies, others went in with a reasonable price sustainability model, others went in with a hyper cautious approach.  Some insurers had optimistic pricing models, others projected a much sicker enrolled population than they actually got. 

2015 is the first significant readjustment and the market is acting pretty much as we should expect markets for minimally differentiated products.  Plans that were underpriced are seeing their pricing go up, plans that are overpriced are seeing cost reductions.  It is almost like the market structure could work.

ConvergencePost + Comments (13)

Good news everybody

by David Anderson|  September 10, 20143:24 pm| 11 Comments

This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Tax Policy, The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right, The Failed Obama Administration (Only Took Two Weeks)

From the Kaiser Family Foundation on employer sponsored health insurance:

 

The key findings from the survey, conducted from January through May 2014, include a modest increase in the average premiums for family coverage (3%). Single coverage premiums are 2% higher than in 2013, but the difference is not statistically significant. Covered workers generally face similar premium contributions and cost-sharing requirements in 2014 as they did in 2013. …

This is the private, off-Exchange market.  The big news here is that there is minimal change.  That is massive news after the disruption of 2014 coming into play with new community underwriting guidelines, and new requirements for benefits.  Not much of a change is a massive change.  Not much of that lack of change is directly attributable to PPACA in my mind unless you want to make an argument that there are some very nice positive spillover benefits from Medicare starting to pay for quality instead of quantity. 

More importantly, most of the total premium cost growth minimization is not coming through increasing cost-sharing.  Deductibles barely went up at the rate of nominal economic growth, and cost sharing is not too much more prevalent.  Instead, networks are getting narrower and very high cost providers are starting to be excluded. 

I know that Mayhew Insurance has been getting bombarded in the past 18 months from large self-insured employers for us to design and build custom networks for their employees.  We’ve always done that (our best selling commercial plan is a custom narrow network), but the amount of interets has perked up beyond that of just hospitals who wanted to build their own home host networks.  Big employers who sponsor bowl games and have hockey arenas named after them are in on narrower networks (these networks are 90% of the broad network) where the goal is to mainly dodge two and three standard deviations above regional pricing providers. 

IF these types of trends keep up for a couple of years, this is very good long term news.

Good news everybodyPost + Comments (11)

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