Last Call For An NBC Nightly News Dump

Nope, Brian Williams's career did not survive the weekend.

In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions.

As Managing Editor of NBC Nightly News, I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days, and Lester Holt has kindly agreed to sit in for me to allow us to adequately deal with this issue. Upon my return, I will continue my career-long effort to be worthy of the trust of those who place their trust in us.

That "next several days" will most likely be "permanent".

Meanwhile, the entirety of FOX News is still employed.  Go figure.

A Taxing Ordeal Online

Well, I hope you weren't planning to do your 2014 taxes this weekend using TurboTax.  You know, like I was.

Up to 18 states are reporting significant upticks in fraudulent activity and there may be a common thread: tax preparation software. 

Individual State Departments of Revenue are loathe to name names but have been quick to point the finger away from their own systems.

Alabama, Minnesota, and Utah state tax offices have already released statements, and tax software company Intuit has now put all state e-filing on hold.

Following up on taxpayer concerns, Intuit announced that it is working with state agencies to address the problem. Intuit reached out to Palantir, a third party security expert, to make a preliminary investigation of the most recent fraud activities. The initial findings have led Intuit to believe that these instances of fraud did not result from a security breach of its systems. Instead, the company believes that the information used to file fraudulent returns was obtained from other sources outside the tax preparation process. 

Intuit stressed that they are continuing to investigate. “We understand the role we play in this important industry issue and continuously monitor our systems in search of suspicious activity,” said Brad Smith, Intuit president and chief executive officer. “We’ve identified specific patterns of behavior where fraud is more likely to occur. We’re working with the states to share that information and remedy the situation quickly. We will continue to engage them on an ongoing basis in an effort to stop fraud before it gets started.” 

So what’s next? As of yesterday, Thursday, February 5, Intuit is temporarily pausing transmission of state e-filing tax returns. This is effective for all states. Intuit will be working with the states today to begin turning transmissions back on. 

If you have already filed your state tax return using Intuit software during this temporary pause, you’ll just have to wait it out: taxpayers will have their returns transmitted as soon as possible. There’s nothing that you can do just yet. Trying to file again will just cause you more delays down the road.

In other words, Intuit believes that fraudsters who have obtained SSNs and addresses from sources other than TurboTax are filing bogus tax returns in order to get bogus tax refunds.  All that is fine and great until the actual person tries to file their income tax information, and they discover that there's already an income tax return filed for them that year.

It gets ugly, fast.  While this isn't so much of a problem with federal returns (as they started cracking down on that a couple years ago) states are behind the curve, hence this year's state e-file return fraud alerts.

Hopefully Intuit will get this looked at soon.

More Problems For Christie

New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie may have been able to slough off Bridgegate, but now he has a whole new batch of problems to deal with as Christie and his administration are now under federal investigation for stopping grand jury investigations of his supporters.

Two criminal investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday interviewed the man who leveled those charges, Bennett Barlyn. He was fired from the Hunterdon County prosecutor's office in August 2010, and subsequently brought a whistleblower lawsuit against the Christie administration, claiming he had been punished for objecting to the dismissal of the indictments of the governor's supporters for a range of corrupt activities. 

Barlyn told IBTimes that he met with the federal investigators at his Pennsylvania home for more than an hour on Wednesday afternoon. He said they specifically focused on why Christie’s then-attorney general, Paula Dow, had moved to expunge the indictments. The investigators are examining what state and federal laws may have been broken in the process. Barlyn said the investigators appeared to be at an exploratory stage, with no certainty that criminal charges would ultimately be filed. The meeting followed a June letter to Barlyn from New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney, Paul Fishman, instructing Barlyn to be in touch with his office’s investigative team about the case. 

The New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s office declined to comment. Christie has denied any involvement in Barlyn's termination, while maintaining that he does not even know the men and women he has been accused of aiding. The governor's office did not respond to a request for comment. 

So what happened?  Looks like the last straight arrow New Jersey prosecutor got his legs cut out from under him.

The case centers on exurban/rural Hunterdon County, in western New Jersey along the Delaware River. There, Barlyn claims, then-county Sheriff Deborah Trout ran her office like a private fiefdom, hiring her friends without respect to their experience, and without initiating proper background checks as mandated by state law. 

Barlyn’s office began probing Trout in 2008, eventually convening a grand jury that returned 43 indictments against her, Undersheriff Michael Russo and investigator John Falat Jr. The Christie administration then intervened, took over the prosecution and -- in an extraordinary step -- moved to have the grand jury indictments overturned, saying they were legally and factually deficient. When Barlyn raised objections, he was fired.

Now it's entirely possible that Barlyn really was on a witch hunt and looking to collect Sheriff Trout's head for whatever reason, but the Christie team both taking over the investigation and then killing all 43 counts seems at best highly unethical and at worst blatantly illegal.

It's yet another strike against a guy with way too much baggage to ever win a GOP primary for the 2016 nomination, let alone win the White House.  With all the accusations of "Chicago Way cronyism" against Obama shouted into the ether by tea party knuckleheads, this is what that particular crime actually looks like, Jersey style.

Last Call For A Wing And A Prayer Breakfast

So to recap, on Thursday President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event that Washington DC uses to feel like America is a religiously tolerant country, and for the most part, it is.

Unless you talk about the historical fact that people did a lot of nasty things in the name of Christianity in the past.  Then, well...this happens.

“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts religion can inspire. “And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Now, this historical fact has caused Republicans to go completely nuts in the last 36 hours, as historical facts often do whenever President Obama points them out.  The Catholic League is demanding an apology and the spittle-flecked goons are screaming that this proves once and for all that Obama is a Muslim Sharia imam terrorist who hates America or something.

Ta-Nehisi Coates puts this idiocy to bed.

That this relatively mild, and correct, point cannot be made without the comments being dubbed, "the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my lifetime,” by a former Virginia governor gives you some sense of the limited tolerance for any honest conversation around racism in our politics. And it gives you something much more. My colleague Jim Fallows recently wrote about the need to, at once, infantilize and deify our military. Perhaps related to that is the need to infantilize and deify our history. Pointing out that Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now, does not make ISIS any less barbaric, or any more correct. That is unless you view the entire discussion as a kind of religious one-up-man-ship, in which the goal is to prove that Christianity is "the awesomest."

Obama seemed to be going for something more—faith leavened by “some doubt.” If you are truly appalled by the brutality of ISIS, then a wise and essential step is understanding the lure of brutality, and recalling how easily your own society can be, and how often it has been, pulled over the brink.

It's ugly history, and we teach it precisely so that A) we know what can become of religious demagoguery and B) so that we try not to repeat those mistakes.

Brutality in the name of religion did not magically start existing only after September 10, 2001, folks.

Penalty For Early Celebration

To recap, less than a month after the Paris Charlie Hebdo attacks and the US has zapped another AQAP terrorist leader in Yemen. Tom Joscelyn over at Long War Journal:

A US drone strike in southern Yemen on Jan. 31 killed Harith bin Ghazi al Nadhari, a senior al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) sharia official. Nadhari's death was confirmed in a "martyrdom" statement issued by the group via Twitter and other web sites earlier today. 

Nadhari praised the attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices just days after the massacre on Jan. 9. He did not claim responsibility for the operation, but another senior AQAP official subsequently did. 

The AQAP statement announcing Nadhari's death was translated by the SITE Intelligence Group. AQAP confirms that Nadhari worked for its sharia committee, and says that three other fighters were killed in the drone strike. 

AQAP portrays the bombing that killed Nadhari as being part of a working agreement between the US and the Shia Houthis rebels who overran Yemeni government positions in recent weeks. The drone strike "came a few hours after the completion of the deal for the Houthis to take control of the administration of the country with an American and regional collusion," the statement reads, according to SITE's translation. "The Houthis have become a loyal partner to America in preserving its interests and executing its plans in the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula." 

The Houthis receive at least some support from Iran. And AQAP frequently claims that they are part of an alleged US-Iranian axis that is opposing Sunni Muslims throughout the region.

So again, this is the guy who was basically taking credit for the Paris attacks, and Obama just erased the guy in less than 30 days.  But of course, nobody seems to care here in the states, and the ones that do think he's a war criminal (or in the case of our loyal opposition party, a "tyrant" who is somehow "weak on terrorism" and is "a Muslim agent".)

Optics, I guess.

The Big Kitz Off

Back in October I talked about how Oregon's Democratic Gov. Jon Kitzhaber was in serious trouble of losing to Tea Party Republican Dennis Richardson after revelations that Kitzhaber's fiancee Cylvia Hayes had at one time owned and ran a pot farm near the Canadian border.  Kitzhaber survived re-election, winning by 5 points.

But now more serious allegations of Hayes using the power of the office of "First Lady" have surfaced, and the state's largest paper, the Oregonian, is now calling on Kitzhaber to resign.

Consider, instead, what Oregonians have learned during only the last couple of weeks. First, Hayes received a combined $118,000 in 2011 and 2012 through the Washington, D.C.-based Clean Economy Development Center even as she served as an unpaid energy adviser to Kitzhaber. This income is not fully accounted for on tax forms Hayes provided to The Oregonian/OregonLive. Neither has the governor fully accounted for the money in ethics filings.

A big chunk of Hayes' fellowship money, $75,000, came from the San Francisco-based Energy Foundation, a nonprofit that funds clean-energy initiatives such as the low carbon fuel standard. Implementing a low carbon fuel standard is a priority for both Kitzhaber and Democratic leaders in the Legislature. The session's first public hearing on a bill to that end happened on Monday.

How did Hayes end up with a fellowship funded by an organization with an interest in clean-energy policy in Oregon? A Kitzhaber campaign adviser, Dan Carol, helped arrange the funding following Kitzhaber's election in 2010, Budnick and Gunderson reported. Carol subsequently landed a position within the Kitzhaber administration. That position, Willamette Week has reported, pays more than $165,000, making Carol Kitzhaber's highest-paid aide.

Who knew following the trail of "clean energy" money could make you feel so dirty?

Another campaign adviser, Greg Wolf, helped land Hayes a position with the Rural Development Initiatives. The nonprofit, Budnick and Gunderson reported, wanted Hayes to help raise money for a clean economy project - including tens of thousands for which Kitzhaber's support was needed. Wolf, like Carol, later secured a position in Kitzhaber's administration.

Rampant and direct cronyism?  Check. Tens of thousands in kickback to Hayes? Check.  Kitzhaber not even bothering to disclose the money on ethics filings?  Big, huge check.   The editorial board does not mince words, ending with this:

The questions about Kitzhaber's judgment and competence ask themselves. Is he so oblivious that he had no idea that campaign advisers were helping his girlfriend line up employment marked by ethical red flags? Is he really so clueless that he had no idea how much money Hayes collected through her fellowship, which would explain his apparently incomplete ethics filings? Or, alternatively, did he know and fail to act? Both possibilities are damning, and it's difficult to imagine alternatives that are not.

Whether through gross inattention or complicity, Kitzhaber has broken faith with Oregonians. His career in Oregon politics is one of great accomplishment, but his past success does not excuse the mess he has made of the office with which Oregonians entrusted him. He is now less a governor than a source of unending distraction. He can no longer lead Oregon effectively and should resign. His constituents deserve better.

Ouch. We'll see what happens, but while Kitzhaber survived his third term and was re-elected to a fourth, he may not finish it out if this keeps up.

StupidiNews!

• A new UN report on ISIS militants in Iraq finds evidence of the terrorist group using child soldiers and child suicide bombers.
• Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal will step down in the aftermath of the studio's disaster with The Interview and hackers revealing embarrassing internal emails.
• Australian PM Tony Abbott is fighting to keep his job after internal revolt by members of his own Liberal Party looking to change leadership.
• After revealing that hackers may have gotten a hold of as many as 80 million personal records, health insurance giant Anthem is already being sued for negligence in a California court.
• It's official: Google Glass is going back to the drawing board as project head Tony Fadell says he will "redesign the product from scratch".

Last Call For One Dares Call It Treason

Ho hum, another week, another open carry advocate caught threatening lawmakers who disagree with him, hoping to intimidate people with his big, shiny overcompensation tool.

The outspoken leader of an open carry gun group denied Wednesday that he was threatening Texas lawmakers when he called the restriction of citizens' gun rights "treason" that is "punishable by death" under the Constitution.

In a video that was removed from Facebook but uploaded to YouTube by a user named "CoCo Mars," Open Carry Tarrant County leader Kory Watkins ranted about the need to implement "Constitutional Carry," or the legal carrying of a handgun without a government permit. 

"I don’t know if they forgot what their duty is, but it’s to protect the Constitution. And let me remind you, going against the Constitution is treason," Watkins said on the video. "And, my friend, that is punishable by death. That’s how serious this is." 

“They better start giving us our rights or this peaceful non-cooperation stuff is going to be gamed up. We’re going to step it up a notch,” he added. “We should be demanding these people give us our rights back, or it’s punishable by death.” 

Watkins said later Wednesday in a Facebook post that he took down the video because he thought people would misinterpret his message: that he "simply wished to point out the seriousness of the constitution."

There's very little room for misinterpretation of "it's punishable by death" and "this peaceful non-cooperation stuff is going to be gamed up" when your goal is to literally wave armed weapons around in public and the subjects of your ire are lawmakers who disagree.  This is intimidation and threatening behavior by an armed group of thugs, period.

And as I keep saying, there's a federal law enforcement term for people who use the threat of violence to affect legislative changes by duly elected lawmakers and executives: Terrorist.

These guys are far more dangerous than the notion that "ISIS bad guys" will infiltrate the country and cause mayhem.  Assholes like Watkins are already here, armed, and clearly ready to "step it up a notch" to get what they want.

Start The Shutdown Countdown Clock (Again)

It's looking more and more like House Republicans are more than happy to shut down the Department of Homeland Security in order to stop President Obama's immigration executive orders, and it's especially dangerous to see the House GOP leadership make these threats.

The Republicans, including Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), are vowing to hold the line on tying funding for the Homeland Security Department to language reversing Obama’s executive actions on immigration — even after Senate Democrats blocked their bill from being considered in the upper chamber.“There’s not a Plan B, because this is the plan," Scalise said minutes after the Senate vote, according to Fox News's Chad Pergram.

Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) echoed that message, saying “many of us agree that we should stand behind the one bill that we sent over there.”

“Most of us feel that way,” he said just before the Senate vote. “Anything less than that, we're not going to get any better result anyway. So why not just go for what's really right?”

Tuesday's Senate vote was 51-48 to end debate on the House-passed Homeland Security bill — far shy of the 60 supporters GOP leaders needed to move to a vote on final passage.

Every Senate Democrat voted against proceeding to the package, as did Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.).

It’s unclear how GOP leaders intend to proceed. Republican leaders in both chambers are under pressure to stand firm in opposition to Obama’s actions.

If Republicans are bluffing, they're playing right into the hands of Democrats.

Democrats, who are calling for a clean bill to fund the Homeland Security Department, have used every opportunity to hammer the Republicans for risking the nation's security to score political points with their conservative base.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday accused GOP leaders of “baying at the moon instead of honoring their responsibilities to protect [Americans].” And Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the Democratic whip, said there's zero chance the Republicans succeed in rolling back executive orders that Obama has vowed to defend with a veto.

“They knew that in December,” Hoyer said of GOP leaders. “Nobody doubts ... that this is all about the politics of dealing with their right wing. Period. Nothing else.”

And this time there's no dodging.  Republicans control Congress, period, as they keep reminding us.  If they shut down the DHS, they will pay the price.

Fifteen An Hour In The Five Boroughs

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio continues his populist campaign to help the Big Apple's working class, and he's openly calling for a $15 minimum wage for the city.

While de Blasio took office promising to push for a change in state law that would allow the city to set its own minimum wage, he laid out concrete steps for how he would like to see the wage raised. In his address, he called to raise it to $13 an hour in 2016 and then increase automatically with inflation after that, eventually bringing the minimum wage to the $15 level. He said such indexing is important because “it means that hardworking New Yorkers won’t have to wait on new action from Albany just to keep pace with inflation.”

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) has proposed a different plan. In January, he put forth a proposal that would raise the city’s minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by the end of 2016 and the rest of the state to $10.50. De Blasio pushed back at that plan in his speech, saying, “The current wage proposal simply doesn’t do enough to help New York City.” State lawmakers increased the minimum wage last year so that it will rise to $9 an hour by 2016.

De Blasio’s call for a $15 wage comes after city lawmakers introduced legislation last yearthat would increase the minimum wage at chain stores with sales of $50 million or more to that level. It also comes after the city has been home a number of strikes by fast food workers demanding at least $15 an hour, including the original one-day strike two years ago. Those workers and their Fight for 15 campaign have put that wage level on the agenda, and since then Seattle has adopted a $15 wage and it’s been proposed in other cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago.

A $15 minimum wage is so far the highest proposal being considered by a city or state, but plenty of places have raised their wages to other levels. After increases on January 1 either due to changes in law or automatic adjustments, a majority of states have higher minimums than the federal floor of $7.25 an hour. Action to raise the national wage has stalled multiple times, however.

Right now NY state law prohibits any local government from raising the minimum wage, but de Blasio wants to change that.  Considering Gov. Cuomo is at least open to raising the minimum wage, the issue then become Republicans that control the NY state Senate and what they will do.  We'll see how far this proposal gets.

The larger issue is that Republicans in Congress have blocked raising the minimum wage several times, and they say they have no plans to bring it up now that they are in charge.  In fact, if anything Republicans want to abolish a minimum wage completely and "leave it to the states".

I'm sure that will improve the lives of people.

StupidiNews!

• US Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to meet with Ukranian leaders amid evidence of what one State Department official calls "a grave acceleration" of Russian-backed rebel ground fighting.
• As many as 80 million Americans may have had their personal information compromised after hackers broke into a database of health insurance giant Anthem.
• Greece's new government says it won't be "blackmailed" by the European Central Bank after the ECB stopped accepting Greek government debt as collateral for Greek banks.
• After nearly 95 years, Radio Shack will file for bankruptcy today, in a deal that is expected to give mobile giant Sprint 2,000 store locations and to close the remaining 4,000 stores.
• Twitter CEO Dick Costolo reportedly admitted that "we suck at dealing with abuse and trolls" and that he takes "full responsibility" for the problem of online abuse directed especially at women.

Last Call For Damn Kids

And this is what the constant dumbing down of science education for the last 15 years has wrought among the Millennials.



For Christ's sake, guys.  This is the generation that sees global climate change wrecking your planet, but vaccinations are "meh, whatever, they probably cause autism"?  Seriously?

C'mon.  Be better than this.

In The Lie Of The Beholder

Gallup CEO and Chairman Jim Clifton puts the venerable polling organization's objectivity at risk, calling the Obama administration's 5.6% unemployment rate "The Big Lie".

Right now, we're hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is "down" to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market. 

None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job -- if you are so hopelessly out of work that you've stopped looking over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn't count you as unemployed. That's right. While you are as unemployed as one can possibly be, and tragically may never find work again, you are not counted in the figure we see relentlessly in the news -- currently 5.6%. Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren't throwing parties to toast "falling" unemployment. 

There's another reason why the official rate is misleading. Say you're an out-of-work engineer or healthcare worker or construction worker or retail manager: If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you're not officially counted as unemployed in the much-reported 5.6%. Few Americans know this. 

Yet another figure of importance that doesn't get much press: those working part time but wanting full-time work. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find -- in other words, you are severely underemployed -- the government doesn't count you in the 5.6%. Few Americans know this. 

There's no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.

The funny part is that the unemployment rate has been calculated the same since Clinton was president, which means that we've been in this "Big Lie" now for twenty years or so.  Mr. Clifton has been CEO of Gallup since 1988.

He waits until now to speak up that he has a problem with the way the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment.  It wasn't a problem until 2015.

Yeah, that's objective.

Tyranny Of The Toilet

Newly minted North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis will see your anti-vaxxer nonsense and raise you the freedom from having to wash your hands.

During a Q&A at the Bipartisan Policy Center on Monday, Tillis related a story from his time in the state legislature in 2010, complaining that the U.S. is “one of the most regulated nations in the history of the planet,”video via C-SPAN shows. 

“I was having a discussion with someone, and we were at a Starbucks in my district, and we were talking about certain regulations where I felt like ‘maybe you should allow businesses to opt out,'” the senator said. 

Tillis said his interlocutor was in disbelief, and asked whether he thought businesses should be allowed to “opt out” of requiring employees to wash their hands after using the restroom. 

The senator said he’d be fine with it, so long as businesses made this clear in “advertising” and “employment literature.” 

“I said: ‘I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says “We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom,” Tillis said. 

“The market will take care of that,” he added, to laughter from the audience.

Troll factor/Poe’s law quotient here approaching a kazillion.

It’s amazing stuff. We’ve gone from “Ebola is going to kill us all because our public health system is a nightmare!” during campaign season to “We’re the most regulated country ever, why do we even need to make people wash their hands?” three months later.

Beginning to think Tillis is the GOP response to SCOTUS possibly wrecking Obamacare subsidies. “Sick? You need the Free Market to decide.”

StupidiNews!

• At least seven people are dead after a NYC commuter train struck a stuck SUV at a rail crossing in Valhalla in Westchester County.
• A Minnesota jury has ordered Toyota to pay $11 million for a stuck accelerator in a 1996 Camry for negligence that was involved in a fatal car crash in 2006.
• Jordan has hanged two Iraqi jihadists in response to an Islamic State video release showing a captured Jordanian pilot being burned alive.
• Credit ratings agency Standard & Poors has cut the ratings of six major European banks on analysis that the EU is now less likely to bail financial institutions out.
• A newly-discovered vulnerability in Internet Explorer 11 could put passwords and server information at risk by visiting malicious websites designed to take advantage of the bug.