Last Call For The System Is Working As Intended

Your Sunday long read is Albert Samaha's piece on Christopher Epps, Mississippi's state corrections commissioner, and prison reform advocate.  Long hailed as a miracle worker and "savior" he was as close to a rock star as a prison administrator could get, lauded by both parties in a deeply red Southern state, who improved Mississippi's prisons dramatically.  He was an African-American who had achieved immense national professional respect.

And then he was caught.

By the time he turned 53, Epps was America’s longest-serving prison commissioner, the first in Mississippi’s history to be appointed by both Democratic and Republican governors. His peers thought so highly of him that he was elected president of two prison administrator professional associations: the American Corrections Association and the Association of State Correctional Administrators.

In short, Chris Epps knew prisons. He’d spent four decades working in the system. Starting as a guard in Mississippi’s oldest prison in 1982, he worked his way to the top of Mississippi’s Department of Corrections in just two decades. Over the next 12 years he became a star.

Prisoner’s rights advocates liked him. Correctional officers liked him. Defense lawyers liked him. Prosecutors liked him. Reporters liked him. Politicians liked him. There might not have been a more universally respected and admired public official in all of Mississippi than Chris Epps.

Then on Nov. 5, he quit his job abruptly, without saying why.

The next day the news broke: allegations of kickbacks for nearly $1 billion worth of private prison contracts. More than $1 million in bribes. A federal investigation, a federal indictment, “a major blow to the systemic and evasive corruption in our state government,” U.S. Attorney Harold Britain said on the steps of the federal courthouse.

Chris Epps knew prisons. Now he faces up to 368 years in one.

Read his story, and never forget that you can't have corrupt cops without corrupt prisons.

Watching The Watchmen

If you want to know what cops really think about the Eric Garner case, New York Magazine took a look at PoliceOne.com, an internet community web site for law enforcement officers, and Thee Rant, a site for NYPD officers.  Both require registration as a law enforcement officer to post, and the comments are...well...

Anytime a person says "I'm tired of it. It stops today." That will almost always end with the use of force. He made that decision, not the Police. The Police must effect the arrest and rise above any resistance. That resistance or lack of resistance is determined by the suspect. This was a huge man and it appears to me they used minimal force. Sometimes people with pre-existing conditions die when they exert themselves. There are Police Officers that have heart attacks and die every year during physical altercations with subjects. You will not see main stream media featuring those in their headlines. This is nothing more than petty blame shifting and fuel for extremist with an agenda.

 And this:

You may say "f&ck the police" but you may not f&ck with the police. It's sad that he died, but that blame goes to he and he alone. The police generally don't show up ten deep at your door just to say hey. This pervasive mentality that these assholes seem to have about not listening to the lawful orders of the police is what leads to these deaths and injuries. All he had to do was comply and he would not be dead. Tough shit and too damn bad.

And this:

As they go down, one can clearly see the cop (Green Jersey) holding-on to his neck with his left arm ONLY while trying to grab perp's right hand with his. Within 1 second he lets go completely and twists to a seated position next to the perp. There was no continuous "Chokehold" of any kind. Though not surprised, I like how these rags try to portray/describe something that never happened.

 And this.

Yes, they'll pay off the "family"...
It's a lot cheaper than a riot...
And therein lies the problem...
The cities of America are held hostage by the strong-arm tactics of the savages

We're the enemy to these guys, not the people to protect and to serve.  Never forget that.

Help, Someone Called The Police

It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are major racial and political party differences in the way Americans view the events of the last two weeks with grand jurors refusing to indict police in Ferguson and NYC.

In the wake of the deaths of unarmed black men in police confrontations in New York and Ferguson, Missouri, 47 percent of Americans say that law enforcement applies different standards to blacks and whites, while 44 percent disagree.

But 82 percent of African Americans say that police have different standards based on race, while half of whites say the opposite.

And while 72 percent of the public and 79 percent of whites say that they have "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of confidence that police in their community will not use excessive force on suspects, just 43 percent of black Americans say the same.

A broad majority of Americans - 93 percent - say they have heard about the recent grand jury decisions in Staten Island and Ferguson, in which police were not indicted for their role in the deaths of unarmed black men. Forty-three percent said that the decisions decreased their confidence in the legal system, versus just 17 percent who said the opposite. Among African Americans, seven in ten said the verdicts decreased their faith in the legal system; among whites, one in five said their confidence has increased.

Confidence in law enforcement is also divided on partisan lines. Just 35 percent of Democrats say they have "a great deal" of confidence in police in their community to do a good job enforcing the law, compared to 73 percent of Republicans. And 64 percent of Democrats say that police apply different standards based on race, while the same percentage of Republicans disagree.

Not shocking in the least, frankly.  But there is one thing all sides agree on: nobody likes President Obama's response.

Just a third of the public - 30 percent - said they approve of President Barack Obama's handling of the grand jury decisions, versus 46 percent who disapprove. More white, black and Latino respondents disapprove of how he has dealt with the situation than those who approve. (Whites disapprove by 49 percent to 27 percent, black disapprove 46 to 35 percent, and Latinos disapprove 38 to 36 percent.)

Drilling down I'm betting that people of color think President Obama hasn't done anywhere near enough to address the problem, and that white America thinks he's already said and done far too much.

Last Call For The "Taxes Killed Eric Garner" Argument

Over at Outside The Beltway, Steven Taylor makes this observation on the notion that New York's laws against selling loose cigarettes untaxed is what really killed chockhold victim Eric Garner, and not police brutality.

While I need to formulate (and am working on it, in fact) more well developed response to the discussion of the role played by the law on cigarettes in the death of Eric Garner, I do have a simple response I want to note (it is a thought that has occurred to me more than once as I have read and heard assertions about the situation)

Jonah Goldberg serves as most proximate inspiration:

But only unreasonable people can deny that those laws are partly to blame. Without laws making cigarettes more expensive, Eric Garner would be alive today, period.

In reading this (and similar assertions–i.e., that more laws equal more chances for law enforcement to go array, ergo, have so many laws is part of the problem) I have to wonder if the libertarian/anti-government types are willing to recognize that this is exactly the argument that many make about guns after a mass shooting (i.e., if guns weren’t so easy to access that event X would not have happened–both are vested in a basic assertion about probability). And, further, that libertarian/anti-government types always reject those probability arguments in that context.

It's an important point.  Glibertarian types are always stressing "personal responsibility" over law (the most obvious example of this being the infamous "Guns don't kill people, people do" riff) but in the Garner case it wasn't the police officer's fault, it was cigarette taxes.  I've pointed out the idiocy of this when Sen. Rand Paul said it, but the point is that you can't say taxes were part of why Eric Garner died without also admitting that availability of guns is why so many thousands of Americans die each year in firearm homicides and accidents.

That admission won't be coming soon from these guys, either.

The Last Days Of Southern Democrats

Mary Landrieu is fighting for her political career in Louisiana today in the state's Senate runoff, but the reality is Senate Democrats are done in the South for quite some time, and unlike House races, you can't blame Senate losses on gerrymandering. FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten sums up Landrieu's coming demise:

William Thompson of Kansas and Wesley Jones of Washington are former U.S. senators — you get a pass for not recognizing them, they’ve been dead for more than 80 years. But if you’ll be watching Saturday’s Senate runoff between Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and Republican Bill Cassidy in Louisiana, remember their names.

These senators sustained the greatest margin of defeat for an elected incumbent (not running on a third-party ticket after a primary defeat) since the direct election of senators began in the early 1900s. Thompson lost by 30 percentage points in 1918, and Jones by 28 points in 1932.

Landrieu probably won’t overtake Thompson and Jones, but she could be headed toward a top 10 historic defeat.

The FiveThirtyEight model projects her losing the runoff 99.8 percent of the time, and by a 57.8 percent to 42.2 percent margin. That’s mostly based on polling, which can be unreliable in a low-turnout runoff.

What else do we know? The early voters in the Louisiana runoff have been vastly more Republican-leaning than early voters in last month’s election. And while whites were only 65 percent of early voters in November, they have been 70 percent for the runoff. Registered Republicans were only 34 percent of early voters in November, but they’ve been 39 percent of early voters for the runoff.

If this change in voter makeup holds on Saturday, it’s obviously very bad news for Landrieu. Assuming she wins the same percentage of white voters as Democratic candidates did in November, she’ll lose the runoff by roughly 60 percent to 40 percent, or about what the model forecasts.

Landrieu's loss will leave Florida's Bill Nelson as the last remaining Democratic Senator from a Southern state, and Mark Warner if you count purple state Virginia.  Both these senators are conservative as well.

Warner survived, and Bill Nelson is good until 2018, but outside of that in 2016 it's going to be a lot harder than liberals are willing to believe to gain seats in the South.

And yes, Landrieu is toast.  Let's be honest here.  She sold the party out for Keystone XL and will lose by an even larger margin as a result.  No sympathy for her, but definite sadness for the Democrats.  We've got a lot of work to do if we ever want to win either chamber of Congress back.

Start That Shutdown Clock

The right smells surrender on immigration policy and it's panic time for the Tea Party.  The Daily Caller is howling:

House Speaker John Boehner’s top committee chairman says he wants an immigration bill that would allow millions of foreign migrants to stay and work jobs sought by Americans. 

“I’m going to use my assets and resources in the new year to work with this Congress… to have a well-understood agreement about what the law should be, and how we as communities, and farm communities, and tech communities, create circumstances where we can have people be in this country and work, and where not one person is quote ‘thrown out’ or ‘deported,’” Rep. Pete Sessions,the chairman of the powerful House rules committee, told a group of Democratic legislators. 

The committee has the power to kill or boost members’ bills because it decides how each bill will be considered in floor votes. 

Sessions’ promise of de-facto amnesty to Democrats was welcomed by Chicago Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who frequently describes unauthorized migrants as members of his community. 

“My heart was filled with a lot of joy when you said that people who are working here, who don’t present a danger, basically should be set aside, that those aren’t the people we should be going after,” said Gutierrez, four hours and 16 minutes into the hearing. 

The Dec. 3 hearing took place the evening before Boehner announced he would not even try to defund Obama’s Nov. 21 amnesty.

And so is Angry Angryson at Red State.

It is more and more obvious the only way the GOP will stop Obama is if House conservatives hold the line and oppose both the rule on the continuing resolution and the continuing resolution itself.

Start the shutdown clock for Friday the 12th, kids.  It's about to get ugly.  I've been predicting a GOP civil war now for 4 years, and it looks like it's finally about to arrive.

Last Call For A Three-Time Loser

Republicans are continuing to arrange and rearrange the starting blocks for their clown car race for 2016, and at least one group of donors is convinced the secret weapon for the GOP is going to be the biggest non-secret, non-weapon ever.

Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney held meetings with donors in New York this week that left one attendee convinced he is running for president again in 2016.

A member of Romney's inner circle who spoke to Business Insider said the former governor of Massachusetts traveled to New York City on Monday where he met with key financial backers of his past campaigns to lay the groundwork for a 2016 White House bid.

The source, who was at one of the meetings, said other attendees included developer Stephen Ross, New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, and hedge funders Julian Robertson and Paul Singer.

A representative for Romney did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the meetings from Business Insider. 

Oh please, please let Mr. 47 Percent run again.  This is a guy who lost by six points to Barack Obama, supposedly "the worst President America has ever had".  Republicans despise him, and his presence in the 2016 contest will only help the Democrats.

Please remind everyone once again why the GOP platform is terrible and that Republicans only care about millionaires.  That's a great idea.

He's Still Smarter Than Louie Gohmert

House Democrats have decided that the best way to remind Republicans (and America) that the GOP used to be someone less insane is to use their own hero against them.  Introducing the most moderate Republican left in 2014:

Cardboard Ronnie Reagan!

Two House Democrats have stood proudly this week in front of a cardboard cut-out of the late Republican President Ronald Reagan during floor speeches, using his paper likeness as a prop to urge the GOP to join their cause on issues like immigration and increasing gasoline taxes. 

On Wednesday, Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer set up the life-sized Reagan behind him to urge the GOP to support his bill to raise federal gasoline by 15 cents. (Gas taxes were increased under Reagan in 1982.) The next day, Reagan showed up again on the House floor next to Illinois Rep. Luis Gutiérrez, a staunch advocate for overhauling the nation's immigration laws. (Reagan passed a sweeping immigration reform bill in 1986.) 

How did all these Democrats get their hands on a cardboard Reagan? 

It all began when Patrick Malone, a Blumenauer communications aide, bought the thing online for $30, and started putting Reagan at his colleagues' desks while they were out. He's been popping up around the office ever since. 

"It's a little freaky," Malone told CNN. 

On Wednesday, Blumenauer carried it to a press conference and onto the House floor. 

"Reagan's held in such high esteem by conservatives and they need to be reminded of things he did when they turn away from him," Malone said.

 Now, Reagan did some truly awful things:  Iran-Contra, union-busting, wrecking the environment, nearly tripled the national debt and his record on AIDS alone earns him a place in history's dustbin. But the guy did pass immigration reform and raised the federal gas tax, two things that could never, ever, happen today.

It's amusing to remind the GOP where all of this trouble really started.

Jobapalooza

This morning's November jobs report? Jobzilla. Jobopotamus. Jobocerous. Brontojobus. Jobasaurus Rex. Deoxyjobonucleaic acid.

The US labor market is on fire. 

According to the latest report from the BLS, the nonfarm payrolls grew by 321,000 in November, crushing expectations for 230,000. 

This is the biggest single-month gain in payrolls since January 2012.

The unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.8%.

This marks the 10th-straight month that the US economy saw payrolls grow by more than 200,000, the longest streak since 1995. 

October's report was also revised higher, from an initial reading of 214,000 job gains to 243,000. 

According to the BLS' release, "In November, job growth was widespread, led by gains in professional and business services, retail trade, health care, and manufacturing." 

Payrolls grew by 50,000 in the retail sector in November, with health care adding 29,000 jobs, manufacturing adding 28,000 jobs, and professional and business services jobs growing by 86,000.

The "U-6" unemployment rate, which also includes those who are working part time for economic reasons and those marginally attached to the labor force, fell to 11.4% from 11.5%.

The labor force participation rate also held steady at 62.8%.

These are some of the best jobs numbers since the heart of the Clinton boom years, and yet Obama is a terrible President, right?  And America decided to turn everything over to the damn GOP instead. That was a good call, huh?

StupidiNews!

• Protests over the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner continued across America last night, with protesters blocking traffic in cities ranging from NYC to Dallas to Chicago to Boston.
• A new study by Canadian doctors finds extreme obesity can cost people up to 19 years in life expectancy, particularly among those under the age of 40.
• President Obama is expected to name former deputy defense secretary Ashton Carter to the post of Secretary of Defense this morning, replacing the outgoing Chuck Hagel.
• Billionaire investor Warren Buffet gave the maximum donation to Hillary Clinton's PAC last quarter as Ready For Hillary reported $11 million in fundraising so far this year.
• New UT-Austin estimates of US shale gas production finds that output could peak as early as 2020, drastically sooner than the 2040 estimates by the government.

In A New York State Of Mindlessness

Rep. Peter King of New York doesn't see what the big deal is in the Eric Garner case.

As protesters hit the streets in New York City and around the country Wednesday night, Congressman Peter King (R-NY) appeared on CNN and delivered an extended defense of the police killing of Eric Garner. King said that the officer, who employed an illegal chokehold to bring Garner down, was just doing his job. Ultimately, King pins says Garner was actually responsible for his own death: “If he had not had asthma, and a heart condition, and was so obese, he would not have died from this.”

It was okay to chokehold the guy to death while on video (and the man who recorded this monstrous abuse was in fact indicted by a grand jury) because he was fat.  Sure.

If it's possible for black lives to matter less than the zero they do now to some people, it's because they are overweight and black, or sick and black (or female and black too).

And remember, this guy is a sitting member of Congress.

Silly People, Laws Don't Apply To Rand Paul

Bonus point for Sen. Rand Paul to accuse President Obama of "lawlessness" while declaring that Kentucky's law that he can't run for two offices at the same time simply doesn't apply to him.

The junior senator from Kentucky has repeatedly said he plans to run for re-election in 2016, including while visiting Iowa, where the presidential nomination process will start in early 2016 with that state's caucuses. “In all likelihood, I will be on the ballot for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, though, and we haven’t really looked beyond that," he told reporters in Cedar Rapids in May 2013.

What complicates the situation for Paul is a Kentucky law states that "no candidate's name shall appear on any voting machine or absentee ballot more than once."

One possibility for bypassing the law is to convince state party leaders to shift Kentucky's presidential primary in May 2016 to a caucus in March. That would offer the added benefit of helping him potentially win some home-state delegates during an early phase of a potential nomination race.

Another would be to challenge the law in court and argue the statute is unconstitutional when applied to federal races. "We believe that it cannot apply to federal offices," Stafford said.

Paul's camp has also previously encouraged state lawmakers to change the multiple-office limitation, although that effort has hit a roadblock in the Democratic-controlled House.

So Rand Paul is just going to ignore state law to run for Senator and President at the same time.  He'll find a way to do it, too.  Laws don't apply to Rand Paul, you see.  He's special.

And speaking of how awful Rand Paul is...

StupidiNews!

• The failure of a Staten Island grand jury to indict a police officer for the choking death of Eric Garner with the incident recorded on smartphone prompted multiple protests across NYC last night.
• A federal appeals court has overturned Florida's law testing welfare applicants for drug use, calling the law unconstitutional and upholding a lower court decision from last year.
• A coalition of 17 states led by Texas will sue the federal government over President Obama's immigration executive order, claiming the President has no authority.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning ruble speculators of "harsh" measures and is vowing to resist any international efforts to remove troops from the Crimea region of Ukraine.
• The Alameda County Sheriff's Office may be the first California cops to take to the skies with drones to monitor domestic criminal activity.

Last Call For A Picture Perfect Heist

Doing some digging, I've found that it's looking more and more like that Sony Pictures hack I referenced in today's StupidiNews wasn't a North Korean attack after all and is actually far worse than anyone thought, to the point where this may be an inside job that could put Sony Pictures down for the count.

On November 24 the world found out that Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked and had disabled its entire corporate network, including locations that spanned Culver City, New York, and overseas. 

This breach has very few analogues in history, outside of the Snowden documents, to any other type of breach on record. The combined corporate intellectual property,financial and legal information, contact databases and health records, passwords and encryption keys for Sony Pictures Entertainment can’t be compared to a breach of a retailer’s email or credit card database. 

Home Depot said that 53 million email addresses were swiped in its recent data breach, where 56 million credit card accounts were also compromised. 

But in the case of Sony’s compromise, individual files can be spreadsheets with multiple records each. Some of the 38 million (known) files exfiltrated in this carefully planned attack are entire databases. 

This is comparative to source code being leaked. Unpublished scripts for movies, contract negotiations, NDA’s (thousands are listed), secret terms for payment schemes, the very information Sony uses to keep its entire company relevant, are in the stolen files. 

The benefits to Sony Pictures Entertainment competitors — Universal, Warner, Disney — in terms of competitive intel, is priceless.

The group behind this is calling itself the "Guardians of Peace".  What they want is simple: Sony changes its corporate culture (it's not like Sony's super nice or anything) or they keep drip-drip-dripping out secrets.  And when your entire company is built on intellectual property, well...you can see where this is going.  They've already distributed a partial release to let everyone know just how serious this is:

Salted Hash reported, “GOP says they’ve accessed private key files; source code files (CPP), password files (including passwords for Oracle and SQL databases), inventory lists for hardware and other assets, production outlines and templates, as well as production schedules and notes.” 

The file hit Reddit, and commenters noted they’d found over 9,000 passport scans listed in the file (including Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig and Cameron Diaz). There are over 3,800 files named ‘password.’ 

If you’ve ever worked with, or even tangentially for, Sony Pictures Entertainment, this crew and anyone who gets ahold of these files have all of your personal information, your private information, and anything else Sony touched. 

There are filenames listing over 8,000 non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s), and over 6,000 files named MPAA. There are files with Pirate Bay in the title, as well as MEGA (Megaupload). Some file names are specific, like the ‘MPAA piracy project lunch receipt’ filename. Financials on pirated media losses dating back as far as 2006. One Redditor found the file for his Imageworks letter of resignation, dating back to 2005.
Basically, if you’ve ever had a tangle with Sony Pictures, or Sony Entertainment ever thought about putting you in its legal crosshairs you’re in there, too. 

GOP left an interesting clue in its communication with media outlets after this release; this hacking crew appears to welcome press inquiries, though we can only hope the journos emailing GOP have half a clue about operational security. 

The attackers said they had physical access. Communicating with Salted Hash Tuesday morning, GOP’s ‘Lena’ said, “I’ve already contacted the UK register with details.” 

“However I’ll tell you this. We don’t want money. We want equality. Sony left their doors unlocked, and it bit them. They don’t do physical security anymore.”

So yeah, these guys are quite serious about wrecking Sony Pictures and they don't give a damn about how many lives get destroyed in the process.  You can call them what you want to, but if you were a Sony employee and your personal info was just leaked to every hacker on the net, the next several years of having to fight identity theft would probably not make you want to consider these guys heroes or anything.

Bibi Cleans House

Some people just don't respond to criticism well at all.  You know, people like Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who responded to criticism of his policies last week from Justice Minister Tzipi Livni by firing her and scrapping the entire government.

In a decisive move after days of intense political bickering, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel fired his centrist finance and justice ministers on Tuesday and called for the dissolution of Parliament and early elections. 

Mr. Netanyahu excoriated Yair Lapid, the finance minister, and Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, for attacking his government and its policies from within in recent weeks, declaring in a statement, “I will no longer tolerate opposition from within the government.” 

Israel’s march toward early elections set out last week with a political row over a nationality bill. This week it morphed into a clash over proposed housing changes and the state budget. 

But Israeli political analysts said the move toward new elections, 20 months after the current coalition was sworn in, was not about nationality or reduced-cost housing or any other issue of ideology or principle. 

Instead, they said, Mr. Netanyahu had simply had enough of his fractious coalition partners and wanted a more manageable government made up of rightist allies and the ultra-Orthodox parties he has long considered his natural partners.

I mean it's a parliamentary system, so Bibi can do this, but the catch is he then faces elections and could be deposed if he doesn't win enough seats.  Of course, the prevailing mood is that Bibi's far-right Likud Party and its even more right-wing allies will gain seats at the expense of Livni and Lapid's more moderate factions, and that's a bad thing.

Lapid was canned because, now get this, he thinks the US is okay and that Netanyahu has been "condescending" to President Obama.  Speaks worlds of Bibi to fire the guy for doing that.

We'll see where things end up after elections in March.