Last Call For The Burden Of Proof

Over the weekend Seymour Hersh unloaded accusations of a massive cover-up by the Obama administration over the events of the death of Osama bin Laden. Fair warning: it's a hefty read. but let me save you a lot  of trouble: his conclusion is that Pakistani intelligence (ISI) knew exactly where bin Laden was, the US knew the ISI knew, and everyone lied about it.

And the story is complete bullcrap, too.  First, Hersh's side:

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’ 

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

Hersh lays out his theory, and cites a number of former intelligence sources for his work, nearly all of them anonymous sources.

That's where the problem comes in, as CNN's Peter Bergen dismantles Hersh pretty cleanly.

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense. 

Let's start with the claim that the only shots fired at the Abbottabad compound were the ones that killed bin Laden. That ignores the fact that two SEALs on the mission, Matt Bissonnette, author of "No Easy Day," and Robert O'Neill have publicly said that there were a number of other people killed that night, including bin Laden's two bodyguards, one of his sons and one of the bodyguard's wives. Their account is supplemented by many other U.S. officials who have spoken on the record to myself or to other journalists. 

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it. The compound was trashed, littered almost everywhere with broken glass and several areas of it were sprayed with bullet holes where the SEALS had fired at members of bin Laden's entourage and family, or in one case exchanged fire with one of his bodyguards. The evidence at the compound showed that many bullets were fired the night of bin Laden's death. 

Common sense would tell you that the idea that Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden's expenses while he was living in Abbottabad is simply risible. Bin Laden's principal goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family as a result of which his Saudi citizenship was revoked as far back as 1994. 

Why would the Saudis pay for the upkeep of their most mortal enemy? Indeed, why wouldn't they get their close allies, the Pakistanis, to look the other way as they sent their assassins into Pakistan to finish him off? 

Common sense would also tell you that if the Pakistanis were holding bin Laden and the U.S. government had found out this fact, the easiest path for both countries would not be to launch a U.S. military raid into Pakistan but would have been to hand bin Laden over quietly to the Americans. 

Indeed, the Pakistanis have done this on several occasions with a number of other al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9/11, who was handed over to U.S. custody after a raid in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 2003. So too was Abu Faraj al-Libi, another key al Qaeda leader who was similarly handed over by the Pakistanis to U.S. custody two years later.

Oh, and it gets much worse for Hersh's narrative.  Somebody fed Hersh the line he wanted, and he ran with it. Gergen makes much more sense.  This is a hit job on arguably President Obama's most powerful first-term foreign policy accomplishment, and it comes just as the 2016 campaign is picking up?

Max Fisher at Vox also has serious problems with Hersh's story.

Perhaps the most concerning problem with Hersh's story is not the sourcing but rather the internal contradictions in the narrative he constructs. 

Most blatant, Hersh's entire narrative turns on a secret deal, in which the US promised Pakistan increased military aid and a "freer hand in Afghanistan." In fact, the exact opposite of this occurred, with US military aid dropping and US-Pakistan cooperation in Afghanistan plummeting as both sides feuded bitterly for years after the raid. 

Hersh explains this seemingly fatal contradiction by suggesting the deal fell apart due to miscommunication between the Americans and Pakistanis. But it's strange to argue that the dozens of officials on both sides would be competent enough to secretly plan and execute a massive international ruse, and then to uphold their conspiracy for years after the fact, but would not be competent enough to get on the same page about aid delivery. 

And there are more contradictions. Why, for example, would the Pakistanis insist on a fake raid that would humiliate their country and the very military and intelligence leaders who supposedly instigated it? 

A simpler question: why would Pakistan bother with the ostentatious fake raid at all, when anyone can imagine a dozen simpler, lower-risk, lower-cost ways to do this?

Naah.  Sy Hersh can have a goddamn seat. Both Fisher and Bergen make mincemeat of him.

If You're Still Wondering Why I Left Home

Long-time readers will recall that I grew up in Hickory, NC, a nice little NASCAR factory town in the Appalachian foothills that made textiles and furniture, then transformers, then fiber-optic cable, now auto parts and abrasives.  It's also located in arguably the most conservative part of NC, a good hour or so from any of the Tarheel State's major cities, like Charlotte or the Triad area, and at least that far from more enlightened college towns like Asheville and Boone.

Catawba County is about as red as NC gets, and there's a reason why I no longer live there.  Hickory and the surrounding suburbs have been gerrymandered to be in 3 different districts, assuring NC-10 remains home to The Odious Patrick McHenry, NC-5 keeps electing Virginia Foxx, and NC-11, Mark Meadows.  The three are some of the worst Tea Party meatheads in Congress too.

Little wonder then that neighboring Lincoln County to the south brings us this national embarrassment.

Carrol Mitchem, chairman of the Lincoln County board of commissioners, said he does not want people from other faiths “changing rules on the way the United States was founded,”reported the Lincoln Times-News. 

“A Muslim? He comes in here to say a prayer, I’m going to tell him to leave,” Mitchem said. “I have no use for (those) people. They don’t need to be here praying to Allah or whoever the hell they pray to. I’m not going to listen to (a) Muslim pray.” 

A federal court judge ruled last week that nearby Rowan County had violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by leading county commission meetings with prayers to “Jesus, the Savior.” 

Another county commissioner said Lincoln County said officials had not purposefully excluded other faiths, but pointed out that all 102 houses or worship in the county were Christian. 

“We have never said that we would limit it to one denomination or one religion,” said Alex Patton, county commissioner. “I just don’t know that there’s any Jewish pastors or anything like that in Lincoln County.” 

Patton said he disagrees with the Rowan County ruling, saying the courts had “gone overboard in catering to the small vocal minority.” 

“Atheists are 1 or 2 percent or whatever, but because they cry the loudest, people cater to them,” Patton said. “Judges cater to the freedom of religion. That freedom is for me as a Christian as well.” 

The Republican Mitchem agreed, saying that Christians should enjoy privileged status as the dominant religious group. 

“Other religions, or whatever, are in the minority,” he told WBTV-TV. “The U.S. was founded on Christianity. I don’t believe we need to be bowing to the minorities. The U.S. and the Constitution were founded on Christianity. This is what the majority of people believe in, and it’s what I’m standing up for.”

So no, I don't live there anymore.  I don't expect many of you would be happy there either, and yes, the Cincinnati- Northern Kentucky area actually looks pretty damned liberal compared to where I'm from.

Governor Cuomo Nails It

Even I have to admit that last week's NY Times expose on the horrid working conditions for nail technicians in New York City is 100% responsible for this lightning-fast response from Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Effective immediately, he said in a statement, a new, multiagency task force will conduct salon-by-salon investigations, institute new rules that salons must follow to protect manicurists from the potentially dangerous chemicals found in nail products, and begin a six-language education campaign to inform them of their rights. 

Nail salons that do not comply with orders to pay workers back wages, or are unlicensed, will be shut down. The new rules come in response to a New York Times investigation of nail salons — first published online last week — that detailed thewidespread exploitation of manicurists, many of whom have illnesses that some scientists and health advocates say are caused by the chemicals with which they work. 

“New York State has a long history of confronting wage theft and unfair labor practices head on, and today, with the formation of this new Enforcement Task Force, we are aggressively following in that tradition,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. “We will not stand idly by as workers are deprived of their hard-earned wages and robbed of their most basic rights.”

It's a far more muscular response than I expected from Cuomo, that's for damn sure.  It throws into sharp contrast the whining about the need for government regulations in general over the weekend by Charles Murray, doesn't it?

Perhaps this would be a good time for Mr. Murray to publicly stand up for the rights of nail salons to treat employees as indentured servants, and to instruct owners to resist these "bad" regulations, hmm?

StupidiNews!

• Jeb Bush confirmed over the weekend that he would have made the exact same decision to invade Iraq that his older brother George W Bush made.
• Former UN Ambassador John Bolton vowed Sunday that Republicans were "never going to let" Hillary Clinton forget the events in Benghazi, Libya that killed four US State Department personnel.
• Four people have been charged in connection with the deaths of two Mississippi police officers at a traffic stop in Hattiesburg.
• The EU is considering taking action on stopping human trafficking amidst the growing refugee crisis coming out of Libya, but action could be blocked by Russia and the Baltic States.
• The FCC has denied requests from broadband internet industry groups to scrap net neutrality rules, setting up a possible court injunction that could block the rules for years.

Last Call For The Paranoid Style

Leonard Pitts has had enough of the modern Confederacy in our midst.

“Twenty years ago,” I wrote, “the idea of anti-government resistance seemed confined to a lunatic fringe operating in the shadows beyond the mainstream. Twenty years later, it is the mainstream, the beating heart of the Republican Party. And while certainly no responsible figure on the right advocates or condones what he did, it is just as certain that McVeigh’s violent antipathy toward Washington, his conviction that America’s government is America’s enemy, has bound itself to the very DNA of modern conservatism.” 

That’s the argument conservatives found “hateful” “sickening,” and “dishonest.” 

So it is, depending upon your religious outlook, a fortuitous coincidence or superfluous evidence of God’s puckish sense of humor that a few days later comes news of conservatives accusing the federal government of trying to take over the state of Texas. It seems the four branches of the U.S. military are gearing up for Operation Jade Helm 15, an eight-week training exercise across seven states. Right-wing conspiracy theorists online and on radio are claiming the exercise is actually a pretext for a federal takeover of the Lone Star State, with — get this — abandoned Wal-Marts to be used for the processing of prisoners! 

Nor is this being laughed off by conservatives in positions of authority. To the contrary, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered the state guard to monitor the exercise to safeguard Texan’s “civil liberties.” Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert has asked the military to change the exercise. Senator and presidential wannabe Ted Cruz said he checked with the Pentagon and while he accepts that it has no plans to conquer Texas — how magnanimous of him — “I understand the reason for concern and uncertainty” because the Obama administration “has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy.” 

Forgive me if I don’t spend a lot of space pointing out that this is stupid, though I can’t resist asking: If the Navy, Army, Marines and Air Force were, indeed, planning to take over Texas, just what does Gov. Abbott think the state guard would be able to do about it? 

There is, however, a more pressing observation to be made. After all, chances are good you’ve never heard about any of this — the story hasn’t garnered major headlines — and that, hearing of it now, you are not terribly surprised. That speaks pointedly of how inured we have become to the insane, paranoiac, anti-government prattle flowing like sewage from the political right. Duly elected leaders, putatively responsible people, give credence to the crazy idea that the federal government is about to attack its second most populous state and we shrug because it’s just another Tuesday in the lunatic asylum of American politics.

And yet, we tolerate the GOP doing this.  Most of us roll our eyes and look the other way, you can't stop people from being ignorant by choice.  And attacking them for that purposeful ignorance has only made them more stubborn.

If they can't have "Their" America back, then they will burn it all down.  That was always the plan, and has been since at least 1992, frankly.

The Evidence Mounts Against Comer

A second woman has come forward to say that Kentucky Republican and gubernatorial hopeful James Comer was abusive in college in the 90's.

In a letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal on Friday, Jennifer Osborne, a former roommate of Thomas, said an argument between Comer and Thomas once got so bad that Osborne threatened to call the police.

"On one occasion, there was a heated argument between Marilyn Thomas and Jamie Comer and I had to threaten to call the police in order to get him to leave our apartment," Osborne wrote in the letter.

Osborne and Thomas lived in an off-campus apartment in 1993, according to the Courier-Journal.

Thomas' allegations against Comer appeared Monday in the Courier-Journal, which published parts of the four-page letter where Thomas claimed Comer had been abusive and helped her to get an abortion when they were dating in the early 1990s. In that story, the Courier-Journal quoted another former roommate, Wendy Curley, who backed Thomas' account.

Comer's still running about ten points behind Hal Heiner for the GOP nomination for governor, the primary is in less than two weeks, and if Comer was expecting a come from behind win, well...

In all seriousness, these allegations are pretty brutal, and Comer has questions he needs to answer.  Of course, none of the Republican candidates for governor here are exactly "woman-friendly".

Sunday Long Read: Black And White, Ones And Zeroes

Your Sunday long read is the NY Times Magazine profile of activists DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta "Netta" Elzie, two of the leading lights behind the Black Lives Matter movement that has sprung up in the wake of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last year.  Since then they have harnessed the power of black anger and channeled it into social media, making millions around the world aware often for the first time.

Mckesson and Elzie focused much of their attention on criticizing the mainstream media, who devoted too much airtime, they felt, to violence and discord among the protest community. As a corrective, in mid-September, they teamed up with Brittany Packnett, the executive director of St. Louis’s Teach for America program, and Justin Hansford, a law professor at St. Louis University, to publish the This Is the Movement newsletter, which scrutinized and curated the daily news out of Ferguson. A wide range of readers, from reporters to protesters to officials within the Department of Justice, subscribed. Pretty soon, Mckesson and Elzie were appearing regularly on TV and radio. The two cultivated appealing personas, becoming easily recognizable to their many followers. Mckesson had begun wearing red shoes and a red shirt to protests. Later, he replaced this outfit with a bright blue Patagonia vest, which he now wears everywhere he goes. (Someone created a DeRay’s vest Twitter account.) Elzie often wore dark lipstick, a pair of oversize sunglasses and a leather jacket: the beautician’s daughter channeling a Black Panther. 

Mckesson and Elzie have always insisted that the movement is leaderless, that it is a communal expression of pent-up anguish spilling onto the streets, but over the fall, they were frequently called upon to serve as its spokespeople. Elzie was invited to conferences and panels, and talked with established social-justice activists around the country about the actions in Ferguson. Mckesson, who was dutifully putting out the newsletter during this time while still working at his job in Minneapolis, began using Twitter to announce actions throughout St. Louis. He and Elzie would tweet a time and location and then wait for the people to show up. By October, they were also being followed by the police, who would sometimes arrive at the scene of the action before the protesters themselves. 

Together, Mckesson and Elzie were developing a model of the modern protester: part organizer, part citizen journalist who marches through American cities while texting, as charging cords and battery packs fall out of his pockets. By Nov. 24, when Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, announced that Darren Wilson would not be indicted on murder charges, a network of hundreds of organizers was already in place, ready to bring thousands of people into the streets with a tweet.

This is the power of social media and what it can really do in the real world, folks.  These two are putting these pictures and words out there for the whole world to see, not just a tiny corner of a broken city to morn for a day and then see it swept under by police that treat them as vermin to be controlled by any means necessary.

They are the new war correspondents in the occupation of black America.

Last Call For Anarchy

The "We're taking our country back from you, using whatever means necessary" contingent of the country is quite upset, and now we have Charles Murray of the WSJ cal;ling for open lawlessness.

The broadest problem created by intricately wrought regulatory mazes is that, in an effort to spell out all the contingencies, they lose sight of the overall goal and thereby make matters worse. A particularly chilling example is offered by the 1979 Kemeny Commission’s postmortem on the Three Mile Island partial meltdown, which concluded that when “regulations become as voluminous and complex as those regulations now in place, they can serve as a negative factor in nuclear safety.”

I’ve been focusing on regulation in the workplace, but it isn’t just freedom to practice our vocations that is being gutted. Whether we are trying to raise our children, be good stewards of our property, cooperate with our neighbors to solve local problems or practice our religious faith, the bureaucrats think they know better. And when the targets of the regulatory state say they’ve had enough, that they will fight it in court, the bureaucrats can—and do—say to them, “Try that, and we’ll ruin you.”

That’s the regulatory state as seen from ground level by the individual citizens who run afoul of it. It looks completely different when we back off and look at it from a distance. For example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has authority over more than eight million workplaces. But it can call upon only one inspector for about every 3,700 of those workplaces. The Environmental Protection Agency has authority not just over workplaces but over every piece of property in the nation. It conducted about 18,000 inspections in 2013—a tiny number in proportion to its mandate.

Seen in this perspective, the regulatory state is the Wizard of Oz: fearsome when its booming voice is directed against any single target but, when the curtain is pulled aside, revealed as impotent to enforce its thousands of rules against widespread refusal to comply.

And so my modest proposal: Let’s withhold that compliance through systematic civil disobedience. Not for all regulations, but for the pointless, stupid and tyrannical ones.

Identifying precisely which regulations are pointless, stupid or tyrannical will be a lengthy process, but categories that should come under strict scrutiny include regulations that prescribe best practice for a craft or profession; restrict access to an occupation; prohibit owners of property from using it as they wish; prescribe hiring, firing and working conditions; and prevent people from taking voluntary risks.

So goodbye civil rights protections, laws fighting discrimination in the workplace, and allowing employers to do whatever they want to employees.  Let's take the country back to when white America ruled unchalleged and unbothered by equality and fairness.

The fact that Murray is allowed to do this is actually a pretty clear hint that everything he's spouting is wrong: if we really lived in the regulatory fascist hellhole he describes, Mr. Murray would no longer be employed, no longer a free man, possibly no longer with us on this Earth.

Funny how that works.

Bangers And Mashed

Paul Krugman takes the British voters to task for ushering in the Age of Austerity with this week's massive Conservative Party majority win, which most likely the end of a number of English social institutions and programs.

Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.

Now, every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong. Pre-crisis Britain wasn’t fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose as a result of the crisis. The crisis, which was a global phenomenon, was driven by runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency. And Britain, which returned to growth only after a pause in the austerity drive, has made up none of the ground it lost during the coalition’s first two years.

Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win. But why?

Mr. Wren-Lewis suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. If U.S. experience is any guide, my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)

Still, it’s quite amazing. The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.

Democrats on this side of the pond at least did that. Labour did not make its case, especially to the Scots, and frankly they want out after Labour screwed them over.  I don't blame them.  The result?  A broken Labour Party and Conservative domination.

The Brits are going to find out the hard way what this will mean.  And I don't feel sorry for them.

We need to pay attention here, or we'll make the same mistake next year.

Jebby Goes Buy Buy

If you want to know why Jeb Bush is putting off his official candidacy until next month, well, he has about a hundred million reasons for that.

Jeb Bush is putting in motion an ambitious plan to develop a super PAC that would be unprecedented in its size and scope — a blueprint growing in scale and intensity as he nears the formal launch of his presidential campaign. 

The group, called Right to Rise, is said to be on track for raising an historic $100 million by the end of May, and its budget is expected to dwarf that of Bush’s official campaign many times over. In interviews, more than half a dozen sources familiar with the Right to Rise plans described a juggernaut that was rapidly taking shape — from its likely headquarters in Los Angeles, 2,700 miles from the Miami office where Bush was basing his campaign, to a new fundraising push aimed at expanding its ballooning coffers.

Bush is even setting the timing of his official campaign announcement — which is increasingly likely to come in mid-June, following a trip to Europe — around a cross-country fundraising tour. In the final weeks leading up to the launch, his strategists have been devising a plan to allow both arms of the campaign — the official one and the super PAC — to work seamlessly, even as they will be legally barred from coordinating once he officially becomes a candidate. 

There is little question that Right to Rise, with its deep cash reserve, will give Bush a leg up in the Republican nomination contest, especially if it becomes a protracted and costly affair. 

“It’s an advantage. No question,” said Fred Malek, a prominent GOP donor who chairs the Republican Governors Association’s finance committee. “I think Bush will be able to raise three or four times as much as anyone else.”

So yeah, Jeb may be in the back of the pack right now in Iowa.  Just give it a while, when he's able to pour tens of millions into ads every month for the next several months.

We're about to get the best Republican presidential candidate money can buy.

Last Call For Punishing The Poor

The Richest Man In Congress(tm) wants you to know that there's no real poverty in America, because our poors are just lazy, not actually, you know, poor or anything.

Darrell Issa, the richest man in Congress, said America has made "our poor somewhat the envy of the world." 

Asked by CNNMoney whether he feels personally responsible to address income inequality in the United States, the Republican Congressman from California said "absolutely." But he noted that America is the richest country on earth and implied that those in poverty here are better off than the poor in other nations. 

"If you go to India or you go to any number of other Third World countries, you have two problems: You have greater inequality of income and wealth. You also have less opportunity for people to rise from the have not to the have," said Issa. In the U.S., he noted there is better availability and access to quality public education.

So shut up you awful poor people.  If you really were moral, you'd have $450 million like Darrell Issa. Since you don't, he's obviously correct about us.

We should probably cut taxes on the 1%, just to be sure.

Watching The Watchmen

A three-judge federal appeals court panel has found that the USA PATRIOT Act does not in fact authorize widespread metadata surveillance programs and that these programs are illegal, but the panel stopped short of issuing an injunction stopping the surveillance.

In a 97-page ruling, a three-judge panel for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that a provision of the USA Patriot Act known as Section 215 cannot be legitimately interpreted to allow the bulk collection of domestic calling records. 

The ruling was certain to increase the tension that has been building in Congress as the provision of the act that has been cited to justify the bulk data collection program nears expiration. It will expire in June unless lawmakers pass a bill to extend it. 

Thursday’s ruling did not come with any injunction ordering the program to cease, and it is not clear that anything else will happen in the judicial system before Congress has to make a decision about the expiring law. 

It is the first time a higher-level court in the regular judicial system has reviewed the program.

The conventional wisdom is that this puts significant pressure on Congress to reform or stop altogether these metadata surveillance programs.

I'm here to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.

Congress will do nothing.

The case will probably be appealed to the Supreme Court, and it will find in favor of the US government.

The programs will continue.

President Obama will be blamed, of course, but it's the legislative and judicial branches that will refuse to stop bulk collection of metadata.  Please keep that in mind.

Nailed In A New York Minute

This amazing piece from Sarah Maslin Nir in the NY Times covers the nail salon industry in the Big Apple, where a massive concentration of places to get your nails done has driven prices to half the national average. The true cost however is how workers there, often women of color, are treated as chattel.

Once an indulgence reserved for special occasions, manicures have become a grooming staple for women across the economic spectrum. There are now more than 17,000 nail salons in the United States, according to census data. The number of salons in New York City alone has more than tripled over a decade and a half to nearly 2,000 in 2012. 

But largely overlooked is the rampant exploitation of those who toil in the industry. The New York Times interviewed more than 150 nail salon workers and owners, in four languages, and found that a vast majority of workers are paid below minimum wage; sometimes they are not even paid. Workers endure all manner of humiliation, including having their tips docked as punishment for minor transgressions, constant video monitoring by owners, even physical abuse. Employers are rarely punished for labor and other violations. 

Asian-language newspapers are rife with classified ads listing manicurist jobs paying so little the daily wage can at first glance appear to be a typo. Ads in Chinese in both Sing Tao Daily and World Journal for NYC Nail Spa, a second-story salon on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, advertised a starting wage of $10 a day. The rate was confirmed by several workers. 

Lawsuits filed in New York courts allege a long list of abuses: the salon in East Northport, N.Y., where workers said they were paid just $1.50 an hour during a 66-hour workweek; the Harlem salon that manicurists said charged them for drinking the water, yet on slow days paid them nothing at all; the minichain of Long Island salons whose workers said they were not only underpaid but also kicked as they sat on pedicure stools, and verbally abused. 

Last year, the New York State Labor Department, in conjunction with several other agencies, conducted its first nail salon sweep ever — about a month after The Times sent officials there an inquiry regarding their enforcement record with the industry. Investigators inspected 29 salons and found 116 wage violations. 

Among the more than 100 workers interviewed by The Times, only about a quarter said they were paid an amount that was the equivalent of New York State’s minimum hourly wage. All but three workers, however, had wages withheld in other ways that would be considered illegal, such as never getting overtime.

Outright wage theft, company store schemes, physical and verbal abuse, and that's just for starters. The rampant racism and living conditions verging on human trafficking can be much worse. It's a brutal situation, happening in hundreds of salons just in New York City.

Worker protection laws are there, but when those basic laws of human decency can't be enforced because of a lack of government resources, lives get destroyed, period.

And again I can't help thinking that the near complete invisibility of this problem stems in part from the victims being women of color.

StupidiNews!

• A massive rout of the left in Scotland by the Scottish National Party and Tory gains in Wales appear to give UK PM David Cameron and the Tories a majority in yesterday's UK elections.
• US Attorney General Loretta Lynch is expected to announce as early as today that the Justice Department will be making a full patterns and practices investigation into the Baltimore PD.
• President Obama will visit Nike's headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon today to push the Trans-Pacific Partnership as the shoemaker pledges to create 10,000 new US jobs.
• Mobile phone giant Ericsson is suing Apple in Europe over patent royalties as Apple's current arrangement for paying Ericsson expired in January.
• Swiss watchmaker Swatch says they will be releasing "revolutionary" battery technology in 2016 for smartwatches and automobiles.

Last Call For Literal Gay Bashing

Gosh, when are white urban community leaders going to do something about white on white violence in New York City?

The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating allegations that men at a Dallas BBQ restaurant in Manhattan were called anti-gay slurs and then beaten. 

Jonathan Snipes, 32, told DNA Info that he was having dinner at the Chelsea neighborhood restaurant with his 25-year-old boyfriend, Ethan York-Adams, on Tuesday night when the attack occurred. 

“A table near us audibly started making pretty gross comments about the two of us like, ‘White f—-ts, spilling drinks,'” Snipes recalled. 

“I don’t let anyone talk to me like that,” he explained. “I went over there and asked, ‘What did you say about us?'” 

Snipes said that he weighed 140 pounds, and did not expect the two large men to turn the verbal disagreement into a physical confrontation. 

“I may be a mouthy broad, but I wasn’t going to take it to that level,” he noted, adding that one of the men “turned it into a physical altercation very quickly.” 

According to DNA Info, the man knocked Snipes off of his feet, and then began kicking him while he was on the ground. During the beating, one of Snipe’s teeth was left loose, cartilage in his ear was snapped and his head was bruised. 

“Take that, f—-t,” the attacker allegedly told Snipes. 

“At some point, the guy stops kicking me in the face. He’s won,” Snipes said. “But as [my boyfriend] tried to get me away, that’s when the other dude hits him with the chair.”

Maudlin humor aside, it's at the very least assault here and may even fit federal hate crime legislation if this ends up a civil rights case.  Even in a large, fairly liberal place like Manhattan there are still bigots and assholes and America still has a long, long way to go.