Breaking StupidiNews Roundup

Wow, busy afternoon.

Loretta Lynch has been confirmed by the US Senate to succeed Eric Holder as Attorney General.

The highly politicized five-month battle to choose President Barack Obama's next attorney general came to a close Thursday when the Senate finally voted to confirm Loretta Lynch. The 56-43 vote makes Lynch the first African-American female attorney general in U.S. history. 

But the delay of her nomination neared record-breaking proportions. Republicans leading the Senate refused to bring her nomination up for a vote until Democrats cut a deal on abortion language in an unrelated bill. That legislation passed Wednesday, setting up Thursday's vote and ending the latest partisan Washington standoff. 

Ten Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined Democrats. Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz was the only senator not to vote.

The Comcast-Time Warner merger deal looks to be dead in the water.

Comcast Corp. is planning to walk away from its proposed takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc., people with knowledge of the matter said, after regulators decided that the deal wouldn’t help consumers, making approval unlikely. 

A formal annoucement on the deal’s fate may come as soon as Friday, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing private information. 

This week, U.S. Federal Communications Commission staff joined lawyers at the Justice Department in opposing the planned $45.2 billion transaction.

And finally, former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus has been sentenced to probation and a $100,000 fine for disclosing classified information to his mistress.

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced David H. Petraeus, the highest-profile general from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to probation for disclosing classified information. He was also fined $100,000, which was $60,000 more than the government had recommended. 

The sentencing was the end of a leak investigation that embarrassed Mr. Petraeus and created bitter disputes inside the Justice Department about whether he was receiving too much leniency from Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr..

I'll have more on these stories this weekend, I'm sure.

Last Call For The Fall Of David

And David Petraeus's military career and political ambitions end with a plea deal to keep him out of a lengthy prison sentence.

Mr. Petraeus will plead guilty to one count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material, which carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison. Mr. Petraeus has signed the agreement, said Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman.

The plea deal completes a spectacular fall for Mr. Petraeus, a retired four-star general who was once discussed as a possible candidate for vice president or even president. He led the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and was the architect of a counterinsurgency strategy that at one time seemed a model for future warfare.

The mistress, Paula Broadwell, is a former Army Reserve officer who had an affair with Mr. Petraeus in 2011, when she was interviewing him for a biography, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.”

Mr. Petraeus resigned as the director of the C.I.A. in 2012, three days after President Obama was re-elected. At the time, Mr. Petraeus acknowledged the affair. He has since denied any criminal wrongdoing.

The plea deal spares Mr. Petraeus a high-profile trial where embarrassing details about the affair would have been presented to the jury and made public. Mr. Petraeus is still married to Holly Petraeus.

And while his political ambitions are toast, don't feel bad for the guy.

Mr. Petraeus has also made a significant amount of money since leaving the C.I.A. He is a partner at one of the world’s largest private-equity firms, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and he has taught at some of the nation’s most prestigious universities, including Harvard.

Nice work if you can get it.

Last Call For General "Betrayed By His Little Soldier", You Mean

Remember Gen. David Petraeus and his career-ending affair with a mistress while CIA chief back in 2012?  The DoJ and FBI sure as hell remember, and he's about to get fried up like catfish.

The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors have recommended bringing felony charges against retired Gen. David H. Petraeus for providing classified information to his former mistress while he was director of theC.I.A., officials said, leaving Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to decide whether to seek an indictment that could send the pre-eminent military officer of his generation to prison.

The Justice Department investigation stems from an affair Mr. Petraeus had with Paula Broadwell, an Army Reserve officer who was writing his biography, and focuses on whether he gave her access to his C.I.A. email account and other highly classified information. F.B.I. agents discovered classified documents on her computer after Mr. Petraeus resigned from the C.I.A. in 2012 when the affair became public.

Mr. Petraeus, a retired four star-general who served as commander of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has said he never provided classified information to Ms. Broadwell, and has indicated to the Justice Department that he has no interest in a plea deal that would spare him an embarrassing trial. A lawyer for Mr. Petraeus, Robert B. Barnett, said Friday he had no comment.

Mr. Holder was expected to decide by the end of last year whether to bring charges against Mr. Petraeus, but he has not indicated how he plans to proceed. The delay has frustrated some Justice Department and F.B.I officials and investigators who have questioned whether Mr. Petraeus has received special treatment at a time Mr. Holder has led an unprecedented crackdown on government officials who reveal secrets to journalists.

Needless to say, Eric Holder's going to be under a lot of pressure to prosecute, but it may not be his decision at all as Loretta Lynch, his replacement, has her confirmation hearings staring as early as the end of the month.

Things just got real interesting.

The Hell Is Going On With This Petraeus Thing?

NY Times reporting this morning that yeah, Justice Department and the FBI knew about the Petraeus affair back in the summer, which means all of Washington knew.  So why the resignation now?

High-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department were notified in the late summer that F.B.I. agents had uncovered what appeared to be an extramarital affair involving the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, government officials said Sunday.

But law enforcement officials did not notify anyone outside the F.B.I. or the Justice Department until last week because the investigation was incomplete and initial concerns about possible security breaches, which would demand more immediate action, did not appear to be justified, the officials said. 

The new accounts of the events that led to Mr. Petraeus’s sudden resignation on Friday shed light on the competing pressures facing F.B.I. agents who recognized the high stakes of any investigation involving the C.I.A. director but who were wary of exposing a private affair with no criminal or security implications. For the first time Sunday, the woman whose report of harassing e-mails led to the exposure of the affair was identified as Jill Kelley, 37, of Tampa, Fla. 

So a whistleblower, an FBI/CIA turf war, and agents blabbing to everyone in DC, yet this stayed out of the papers until after the election.  For months.  As I said this morning, Eric Cantor knew in October and certainly could have fried up some Obama hate chips to serve for the last week of the campaign, but didn't.

Consider how much effort the GOP has put into trying to create a scandal out of Benghazi to try to embarrass President Obama when an actual scandal was sitting on Cantor's desk.  It has all the good stuff:  security clearances, potential blackmail, sex, a love triangle among the general, the biographer, and the whistleblower...c'mon, FOX News would have run with this for weeks.

So instead we get nothing.  There's a hell of a story here and I'd like to find out more.  Maybe Bon was right in Sunday's podcast when she said that clueless Republicans who were incompetent enough to lose this election are still just blindingly stupid and fumbled this too (as they liked Petraeus), certainly Occam's Razor bears that out, I mean we are dealing with absolute morons who think dinosaurs and man roamed the earth together like a Flintstones cartoon just a few thousands years ago, and that women secrete anti-rape shutdown hormones to prevent conception under duress.

We'll see.  New tags (since I don't have one) for DC scandals:  Someone Get Me Olivia Pope On The Line and in honor of our friends at the CIA and FBI, Intelligence Stupidity.

Podcast Versus The Stupid!

Episode 20 is up, Aftermath Of The Math, in which Bon and I cover the Republican freakout over the lost election, which pollsters were correct and which lost what little credibility they had left, as well as the surprise resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an affair with his biographer, SCOTUS versus Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s plea bargain deal.

Listen to internet radio with Zandar Versus The Stupid on Blog Talk Radio

As usual, you can download the episode here and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

What's The Play Here?

The who's who of wingnuttery is lining up against Pastor Terry Jones and his "Burn a Quran Day" in Florida on Saturday.  From Pam Geller to Erick Erickson to Sarah Palin, the right is coming out against Jones's vile stunt.

And while it's the right thing to do, the reasons behind it are anything but altruistic concern for our American Muslim brothers and sisters.  So why the change of heart?  A couple of theories:

1) The Petraeus Factor:  Since Gen. David Petraeus came out earlier this week against the Quran burning and voiced concern that it might harm US troops in the Middle East, the Wingers have fallen into line.  After years of "Listen to the generals, stupid Liberals!" they are suddenly neatly and completely trapped by their own logic.  Some have picked a fight with Petraeus but have gotten nothing but grief from the rest of the Right for it, and the rest have fallen into line.

2) The Park51 False Equivalency:  No doubt some of the overwhelming criticism of Pastor Jones is because the Wingers see burning Qurans to be "as controversial as the Park51 project in Manhattan".  Only extremists would want anything as crazy as burning Qurans or building a victory mosque on the atomized remains of Ground Zero, you know extremists like Liberals and Muslims.  This false equivalency is absolutely motivating much of the protests, especially for the real hard-core Muslim-haters like Pammy.

3)  A Winger Too Far:  In the end it's just impossible to really defend Jones here, even for Wingnut logic.  Certainly none of the Presidential hopefuls in 2012 are going to back Jones on this, so voila!  Everyone from Moose Lady to America's Favorite Wealthy Mormon are out against this.  Quran burning is not good optics.  Not even Wingers are this dumb.

4)  Mainstreaming Islamophobia:  The real reason, and the one reasons 1-3 relate to, is maintaining the illusion that Islamophobia is acceptable mainstream in America.  It's a lot easier to say "Well I don't think they should build there" when you can back it up with the absolving addition of "But hey I'm not burning books or anything, those guys are the real fruitcakes and we're not like that."  Move the Overton Window to the right and work the vast real estate between outright McCarthyism and "mild disapproval of that weird religion".  It's classic Winger stuff here.  Openly questioning the patriotism of Muslims is now "perfectly normal".

So yes, in the end don't be fooled:  The Right is still leveraging the crazy.

Betraying Petraeus

It seems the right is not too happy with our military commanders like General Petraeus saying that burning Qurans is bad news for our missions in the Middle East.  Apparently, this makes the good General as fascist.

 Still, is it not highly problematic when a senior military officer warns American citizens against exercising their undoubted First Amendment rights? This situation is different from the Koran-down-the-toilet story. We criticized news outlets at the time for endangering American troops, but that was mostly because the story was false. Presumably we can all agree that newspapers and magazines should not circulate false reports that endanger our troops. But what about accurate stories of Americans exercising their constitutional right to criticize Islam by burning Korans?

Oh, now the Right is worried about First Amendment rights to burn religious texts.  Now when General Petraeus says something might endanger the troops, he should be ignored.  Now we should question our generals.  None of that applied before over the last nine years, mind you.

Roy Edroso has some advice for the Right, too.

Clearly the real source of Hinderaker's disturbance is that someone he thought was on his team is throwing cold water on the Islamophobic hoopla Hinderaker and his comrades have been whooping up over the Almost Ground Zero Mosque. How can get they keep getting traction out of that when their own honkey heroes are putting on the kibosh? 

Gonna be interesting to see how this turns out.  Just like the Constitution apparently says you have the right to stop gay marriage because it offends you, the Constitution also says you have the right to persecute Islam and Muslims because they're not Christians.  Who knew?

The Great Hope In 2012

From Crooks & Liars:

Gen. David Petraeus may be registered as a Republican but he didn't vote for John McCain for president in 2008. When Petraeus became a two-star general in 2002 he stopped voting. "When I was promoted to major general, it seemed like a quiet thing at the time, but it's perhaps taken on bigger ramifications," Petraeus told Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.

But the general continues to speak to partisan organizations. "I've spoken to AEI before. I've spoken to the Heritage Foundation and I've spoken to elements on the other side of the spectrum," said Petraeus.

I honestly think the Draft Petraeus movement is going to end up dwarfing the Cheney and Palin movements as we get closer to 2012.  I'm honestly surprised Chris Wallace isn't crying here, pleading with him, on his knees, begging.

And they said Obama had a messianic cult?  Brother, you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Going ahead and adding the tag:  Gen. David Petraeus.