StupidiNews!

• North Korean army chief Ri Yong Ho has been dismissed from his post due to "illness" according to state TV, stirring speculation a military power struggle may be underway.
• Angry Egyptian protesters greeted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's motorcade with thrown vegetables and chants of "Monica!" in Alexandria.
• Republicans have blocked legislation to give small businesses at 10% tax break as the Senate GOP was unable to force a permanent extension of all Bush tax cuts onto the measure.
• With Ohio pension funds losing $27.5 million as part of JP Morgan Chase's $5.8 billion in losses in May, Ohio AG Mike DeWine is filing the first state class-action lawsuit against the bank.
• A California judge has rung up flailing Blackberry maker RIM for $147 million in patent infringement fines for violating a patent with its enterprise server software.

Last Call

The Justice Department is apparently moving on a criminal investigation into the Libor rate fixing scandal by the world's top banks, and since all of them do business in the US, it could get ugly, fast.

As regulators ramp up their global investigation into the manipulation of interest rates, the Justice Department has identified potential criminal wrongdoing by big banks and individuals at the center of the scandal.

The department’s criminal division is building cases against several financial institutions and their employees, including traders at Barclays, the British bank, according to government officials close to the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. The authorities expect to file charges against at least one bank later this year, one of the officials said.

The prospect of criminal cases is expected to rattle the banking world and provide a new impetus for financial institutions to settle with the authorities. The Justice Department investigation comes on top of private investor lawsuits and a sweeping regulatory inquiry led by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Collectively, the civil and criminal actions could cost the banking industry tens of billions of dollars.

Hope those charges come before November.  Would be really nice to see some bankster heads roll before the election.  Sadly, if it does happen it will come after November 7.  Obama needs the money too much.  I like the President, but the fact that Jamie Dimon isn't in jail yet doesn't make me think these criminal investigations will go anywhere fast.

We'll see.

Glenn Kessler's Really Done For Now

John Cole catches Glenn Kessler not only digging the hole he lives in deeper on Mitt Romney's taxes, but then Cole finds Kessler stabbed himself through the heart with the shovel.

First, Kessler's frantic digging:

In 2011, Romney, as a presidential candidate, filed a public financial disclosure form, under pain of perjury, that stated: “Mr. Romney retired from Bain Capital on February 11, 1999 to head the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way.”

You can see Romney’s signature, on the first page. If Romney lied on this form, that would be a felony.

Oops.  You see, Cole points out the problem with this admission:

Well, yes, Glenn. That would be a felony, and it’s exactly what the Obama campaign said when they stated that he either lied on his disclosure forms and filings to the SEC then, or he is lying to the American public now. If I remember correctly, when the Obama campaign said the exact same thing, you awarded them… wait for it… wait for it…

THREE PINNOCHIOS. When will we see the column where he awards himself three pinnochios for using the same exact rhetoric as Stephanie Cutter?

How does this clown have a job?

I have no clue, but that needs to change.  Not only has Kessler abandoned any pretense of impartiality and objectivity, he's now admitting that it's all arbitrary, and that Glenn Kessler gets to award the Obama campaign whatever he feels like awarding then that day.  He's also stupid enough to think that nobody checks his own column for possible factual errors.

If he had any reputation left, it just died.

A Special Place In Hell: The Trade

A Laurel County couple faced a judge Friday morning, a day after sheriff's deputies arrested the two for human trafficking. Jeremy and Jamie Brown both entered a not guilty plea for the charge.

The arrest citation released Friday indicates the Browns, along with the child's mother, Heather Kaminskey, not only made the trade, but even obtained legal documents to change the child's name in hopes of hiding his identity. Investigators say Kaminskey later sold the truck for $800 and meth.

Court documents say the baby was four days old when Kaminskey traded him for a 1999 Dodge truck in January of 2012. The sheriff's office says it was alerted about the human trafficking of the newborn through a confidential source.

Eight hundred bucks and meth was what they netted after trading a four day old infant.  The good news is, the baby is safe.  The bad news is, how many of these have slipped through the cracks?

Dentist Drilled Over Practice

DENVER -- A suspended Colorado dentist reused syringes and needles in his now-shuttered practice, potentially exposing thousands of patients to HIV and hepatitis infection, health officials warned on Friday.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment sent letters to 8,000 patients of dentist Stephen Stein, urging them to seek tests for the diseases after learning of "unsafe injection practices" at two Denver-area clinics he owned between September 1999 and June 2011.

Investigators found that Stein reused needles and syringes in several patients' intravenous lines at his oral surgery and dental implant clinics, in violation of standard medical protocol, the department said in a statement.

The kicker is patients won't have any recourse if they find they have contracted HIV or hepatitis.  They have no way to prove that their condition resulted from this and not other contact.  It's not fair, but any lawyer could cast enough doubt to reduce claims to nothing.

A high tech clinic that impressed patients because it was so modern, put thousands of lives at risk over equipment valued at less than a dollar.  What a waste.

There have always been businesses and professionals who cut corners,  Consumers and patients must be more vigilant to protect themselves.  I dare say this type of stuff will only get worse.

Saying It So About Joe

ESPN's Rick Reilly pens a devastating piece on Joe Paterno, the Freeh report on Jerry Sandusky and Penn State, and how sports journalism worship of "heroes" like JoePa enabled the story of Sandusky's vile pedophilia to remain silent for years.  To his credit, Reilly is hardest of all on himself.

What a stooge I was.


I talked about Paterno's "true legacy" in all of this. Here's his true legacy: Paterno let a child molester go when he could've stopped him. He let him go and then lied to cover his sinister tracks. He let a rapist go to save his own recruiting successes and fundraising pitches and big-fish-small-pond hide.


Here's a legacy for you. Paterno's cowardice and ego and fears allowed Sandusky to molest at least eight more boys in the years after that 1998 incident -- Victims 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10. Just to recap: By not acting, a grown man failed to protect eight boys from years of molestation, abuse and self-loathing, all to save his program the embarrassment. The mother of Victim 1 is "filled with hatred toward Joe Paterno," the victim's lawyer says. "She just hates him, and reviles him." Can you blame her?


What a sap I was.


I hope Penn State loses civil suits until the walls of the accounting office cave in. I hope that Spanier, Schultz and Curley go to prison for perjury. I hope the NCAA gives Penn State the death penalty it most richly deserves. The worst scandal in college football history deserves the worst penalty the NCAA can give. They gave it to SMU for winning without regard for morals. They should give it to Penn State for the same thing. The only difference is, at Penn State they didn't pay for it with Corvettes. They paid for it with lives.


What a chump I was.

A lot of us were.  Certainly I never suspected Paterno was sitting on this volcano, trapped in a hell of his own making, and deciding that the only option, the noble option, was to support the "greater good" of Penn State while these victims were abused sexually by his monster of an assistant.  Nobody did.  And the worship of JoePa continued because the sports journalism world never thought to give any credence to the claims that Sandusky was a blight on humanity itself.  It went on for years because all the people involved didn't want to be trapped under the rubble when the pyramid of lies holding up Joe Paterno's program finally collapsed.

Collapse it did.  We have to seriously re-evaluate college sports in America, and even more so, journalism in America.  And the football team?  Scrap it, take the millions in money the program is worth, and build a center dedicated to the prevention of sexual abuse in America.  Hold fundraisers and booster dinners and gladhandle to raise eight figures for that each year.

There's your legacy.

Last Call

Erick Erickson and Rick Moran now give us the one two punch in Stupid Wingnut Denial, and knock themselves out.  First, Dipstick Dipstickson over at Red State decides that the people who want to see Mitt's tax returns aren't like the people who want to see President Obama's "real" birth certificate at all.  They are infinitely worse!

The Bainers will not take any answer that does not show Romney to be a liar or felon in the same way Birthers will take no answer other than one that shows Barack Obama is not an American citizen. In fact, pointing this out on twitter today I was barraged from both sides that Obama has still never shown his real birth certificate and Mitt Romney has still not shown his tax returns.

That, in fact, is what this is all about. It’s just another attempt to get Mitt Romney to release his tax returns. Guy Benson has a pretty exhaustive look at this nonsense.

The Bainers will become as insufferable as the Birthers. The only difference is that the Bainers’ insufferable stupidity is at the heart of the Obama campaign while the Romney campaign has worked hard to not be tied to Birthers.

If you can stop laughing for a while...okay, I'll give you a bit.

Calm down already.

Okay, yeah, the notion that demands to see Mitt Romney's tax returns (not released) and the demands to see President's birth certificate (released) are equivalent in any way is brutally hysterical.  One is something that presidential candidates in both parties have done for decades now, as well as politicians including Mitt Romney's own father, George.  The other is a cover for racism and denial so pervasive and complete that it's bordering on mental illness, and I don't use the term lightly.

But then Rick Moran over at PJ Tatler decides that the "Bainers" are now fact, and that the story proves liberals are even more ridiculous than the Birthers on the right.

One of the remaining questions about the Bainers is, will they prove to be as resilient as the Birthers? A year from now will they be insisting that President Romney should be indicted for filing false papers with the SEC? Will they be demanding that Romney “come clean” on his foreign holdings?

The nuts are always the most entertaining part of politics. The Bainers are proving to be no exception.

You're "nuts" if you do something Reagan, Bush Senior and Junior, Bob Dole, and John McCain all did, along with Carter, Dukakis, Mondale, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama as well as George Romney.   Amazing.

And remember, these are are the same gorram people complaining that Barack Obama was the "least vetted" Presidential candidate in history, whom we "know virtually nothing about" still.  But Mitt's tax returns, something that even the "unknown cypher" Barack Obama released to the public and did again this year and every year prior for the last twelve years, Mitt says you can only see the last two years and that's all you need to see, gosh darnit.

Oh, and as for the claim that the Romney campaign doesn't associate with Birthers?  Two words.

Donald.  Trump.

The funny part is Erickson and Moran now firmly believe that the notion that calling for Mitt's tax returns will be treated by the voters as even worse than Birtherism, because they're simply used to having the wingers define all aspects of our news cycle.  They expect this to take root and that by repeating "Bainers" enough, it will simply become the conventional wisdom.  It's certainly what they've come to expect.

And I'm sure they have a raft of excuses and strwmen to burn when it turns out the voters think this "Bainers" nonsense is complete horseshit too.

Night, fellas.

None Dare Call It Treason...

I'm trying to figure out what "leaving your race for State Senator in order to join an alternate government of the United States" is called if that's not treason, but I'm having a hell of a time finding any definition of the said practice apparently performed this week by Iowa Republican Randi Johnson that doesn't boil down to the T word there.

A Republican state Senate candidate in Iowa has decided to bow out of the race and become a U.S. senator of an alternative form of government.

In a letter released Friday, Randi Shannon informs supporters of her new position as “U.S. Senator in the Republic of the United States of America.” You see, according to Shannon, the U.S. government has been acting unlawfully as the “‘official government,’ which clearly it is not!”

The libertarian-leaning group she joined claims it “re-inhabited” the government on March 30, 2010. The group claims the “United States Corporation” unlawfully formed in 1871 without the American people’s consent. “Since 1871, the abuses of this corporation upon both the international community as well as the American people are inestimable and unconscionable,” the group’s website claims.

In her announcement letter, Shannon outlined her political plans. As someone who home schooled her own children, Shannon supports abolishing the Department of Education. She opposes unnecessary foreign wars. She believes life begins at conception. And she blames government abuse, invasive TSA screenings, “Obamacare,” and the 14th amendment on the corrupt “United States Corporation.” 

In other words, this woman is a few loop-de-loops short of an air show.   Yikes.  This is outright scary, actually.  She's basically arguing that the US government itself has been illegitimate since the end of the Civil War (which should be your first really big clue what the real agenda is here) and that these guys are now it.

Well good luck to ya.  And enjoy the knocks on the door by the actual government.

Nutjob,

Pro Tip, People

A very nice local story from down the road in Lexington, and if you haven't seen the video, first let's take a look:




And the story:

Aaron Collins was only in his 20s. But something, his family and friends say, made him outline three things he wanted when he died: to repay his parents any debt he may have owed, to give a homeless person some money and to leave "an awesome tip" for a waiter or waitress.

"I'm not talking about 25%. I mean $500 for a ... pizza," Collins wrote in his will, according to his brother.

Collins died on July 7, just three weeks after his 30th birthday, in a Lexington, Kentucky, hospital, leaving behind family and friends who took up his final request -- to leave a big tip.

Family and friends fulfilled Aaron's request, tipping one waitress in Lexington the $500, a moment that Aaron's brother, Seth Collins, videotaped and posted online Wednesday to YouTube. It is linked to the family's memorial page, AaronCollins.org.

And they did just that, and this thing blew up.  Do drop by the page and help make more EPIC WIN for folks out there.

Jackassapalooza

This was an epic win for jackasses all around the country.


One jackass poisons bees:

A police investigation is underway in Xiazhuang Village of Pingshan County in China for the fatal poisoning of 15 million bees.

Beekeeper Yang Jinfang believes rival keepers are to blame for the incident, which occurred when Yang and his partners transported 600 hives from their farms in southern China to feed on blossoms that flowered later in the season, as they've done for several generations.

Another jackass is fired for calling his students morons and being as inappropriate as any one man could be:

The board voted unanimously, 5-0, to accept the recommendation of an Ohio Department of Education referee who held 13 days of hearings on the issue between December and May.

That recommendation was received by the board and Togliatti’s lawyer Monday. The grounds for termination cited were “unprofessional and disrespectful conduct toward students ” and “highly inappropriate conduct towards administrators and other teachers.”

The next jackass killed himself at trial rather than pay for his crimes:

Authorities had suspected that arson defendant Michael Marin committed suicide by ingesting poison after he collapsed in court June 28, moments after a jury found him guilty of burning down his Biltmore Estates mansion in 2009. That theory was bolstered this week when Maricopa County investigators discovered a canister of cyanide in Marin's car.

Television video from Marin's court hearing appeared to show him put something in his mouth immediately after the verdict was read. Seven minutes later, he went into convulsions and fell to the floor. Paramedics were unable to revive him.

We covered that when it first happened, but finding a neatly labeled bottle of poison is one heck of an indicator.  If toxicology reports throw any surprises I may update, but I'm going to call this case closed.


And last but certainly not least:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Thirty-seven homes that were evacuated during Colorado's Waldo Canyon Fire were burglarized, and authorities are offering up to $50,000 for information on the culprits. 

Colorado Springs police spokeswoman Barbara Miller on Wednesday said 28 vehicles, many packed with evacuee's belongings, also were broken into after residents fled the fire reported June 23.An anonymous donor provided the reward money. 

Epic Fail: Robbery Style

"This is a robbery!"

"Get your ass to the back of the line."

Yeah, it pretty much happened like that.

YPSILANTI (CBS Detroit) The intended victim of a gas station robbery refused to cooperate, telling the wanna-be thief to “get back in line” when she demanded money from the cash register.

The clerk said there were other people waiting.

The attempted thief, who had a shirt pulled over her head, said she had a gun, per the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Office. But she ran from the gas station on foot after the clerk politely refused to be robbed — and said she was calling police.

That is some steaming awesome sauce just for you.  Enjoy!

Mittens Is Losing It

An increasingly trapped Mitt Romney made the rounds on cable news last evening to double down on his Bain Capital denials and told the world to go screw itself over his tax returns.

In an interview with ABC News on Friday, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney insisted that he had played “no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999″ and demanded that President Obama apologize for remarks by his campaign staff implying that Romney might have committed a felony by misrepresenting his status with the firm.

“The president needs to take control of these people,” Romney stated. “It’s Chicago-style politics at its worst and the president promised something better than this when he ran the last time. And he ought to disavow it and reign in these people who are running out of control. … He sure as heck ought to say that he’s sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team. … This is simply beneath the dignity of the presidency of the United States.”

In other words, Mitt is demanding an apology from the President for not immediately throwing the race.   Mitt's whining is borderline panic now.  He's getting killed in the polls over this and he knows it.  His internal polls must be awful.  His defense at this point is "Someone get this blackity black black gangsta thug off me, will ya?"

Oh, but it gets worse.

In another hastily arranged interview on Friday, Romney told CNN that he has no intention of releasing more than two years of his income tax returns.

“We’ve complied with the law,” Romney stated. “The law requires us to put out a full financial disclosure. That I’ve done. I know there will always be calls for more, people always want to get more, and, you know, we’re putting out what is required plus more that is not required, and those are the two years that people are going to have. … That’s all that’s necessary for people to understand something about my finances.”

So he's now crying as hard as he can to work the Village refs to make this Bain story vanish.  Now.  And the sad, awful part is more than likely he'll get his wish:  the Village wants those hundreds of millions in ad money, and they have to have a "close horse race" to get it.  If Mitt's tax returns are this awful, awful enough that he will not release them, then he knows and the media moguls know that the race would be over once they come out.

No race, no advertising dollars.  No ratings.  No chance to decide who runs the country for our Sensible Village Centrist types.  And no power brokering.  On Sunday, we'll be told that the Bain/tax return story needs to go away.  On Monday, it will be gone, replaced with whatever outrage Drudge can crap out next.

Two, three months from now we'll be asking "Hey, whatever happened to that Bain story?"

I guarantee it.  And I hope I am wrong, dead wrong, laughably wrong. But judging from the interviews today, Mitt Romney will never release those returns.  I am more convinced than ever that the full story behind Mitt's tax dealings would end this race.  But the Village will not allow it.  This story will be spiked.

I expect a full court Village press scolding President Obama agreeing with everything Mitt said above.  That's coming Sunday.  It's going to be awful.

Me, I'll keep asking and pushing.  I hope you will too.  But don't expect our media to do it.

Another Texas-Sized Problem

If Ryan J. Reilly's report from the oral arguments in the federal case involving Texas's voter ID law is any indication, the three-judge federal panel is about to smack the Lone Star State down, big time.

The panel of federal judges — Bush nominee Rosemary M. Collyer, Clinton nominee David S. Tatel and Obama nominee Robert L. Wilkins — hopes to issue a ruling on the case in “short order,” according to Collyer, who expressed doubts about the findings of Texas’ experts in the case.

John Hughes, a lawyer for Texas, argued in his closing arguments that people who want to vote already have an ID or can easily get it. Hughes argued that if the state’s voter ID law really disenfranchised anyone the D.C. “courtroom would be filled” with Texans who couldn’t obtain voter ID.

In one of the more awkward exchanges, Hughes offered a semi-defense of literacy tests after one judge said that the reason literacy tests were racist years ago was because of inequalities in the education system. The judge asked if it was Texas’ theory that there would be a problem with literacy tests today. Setting aside other laws banning literacy tests and poll taxes, Hughes said he did not believe a literacy test would violate Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

When a judge noted that some voters would have to travel 120 miles to the nearest DMV to obtain a voter ID, Hughes argued that people in those areas had to travel “long distances to do any number of things.” The judge pointed out that people who live more than 100 miles from a courtroom aren’t even allowed to be subpoenaed because it is “unduly burdensome,” but Hughes argued that traveling far distances was a “reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas.”

The panel of judges were also highly critical of how Texas handled discovery during the case, pointing out that they did not request federal records about what Texas residents had forms of federal identification, such as passports. (Texas was making the case that many individuals who did not have a Texas drivers license might have a federal form of ID.)

Oops.  Looks like the judges aren't buying the argument, absolutely none of it in fact.  Considering the timeframe of this case (the state has argued it has to have a decision on this case by August 31), Texas will almost certainly invoke the Supremes should they lose here...but SCOTUS is between terms right now. Not sure how that would work, even.  An emergency appeal?

We'll see.  Either way in fact I would argue SCOTUS will get involved in what could be a huge ruling before November.

StupidiNews!

• Mississippi's lone abortion clinic will remain open due to a federal judge's ruling, but Republicans still plan to find some way of making it impossible to remain open.
• Nearly a quarter of a million on the Japanese island of Kyushu have been ordered to evacuate due to a third straight day of torrential rain, flooding, and landslides.
• A veteran's jobs bill reduced to making it easier for veterans to get federal licensing requirements through military experience will go to President Obama's desk to become signed into law.
• JP Morgan Chase's $2 billion trading loss earlier this year is now costing the company $5.8 billion, and could cost as much as $7.5 billion.
• With heavy public outcry forcing their hand, Apple has quickly rejoined a key green products registry it left earlier this week over battery accessibility disputes.

Republican Psychopaths

Florida's Rick Scott, Michigan's Dan Snyder, Ohio's John Kasich, Arizona's Jan Brewer...America's GOP governors are a crackpot lot of soulless disasters.  But one of the batch has emerged as the new king of the psychopaths:  Maine's Paul LePage.  Steve Benen at Maddowblog:

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) raised eyebrows last week when he called the IRS "the new Gestapo." Soon after, he issued a statement saying "the use of the word Gestapo has clouded my message," but in person, the governor didn't sound especially apologetic.

And on Thursday, LePage went right back to the same comfortable insanity in an campaign appearance for Vermont GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Brock.

Standing by Brock's side at the Sheraton in South Burlington, the Maine governor said, "What I am trying to say is the Holocaust was a horrific crime against humanity and, frankly, I would never want to see that repeated. Maybe the IRS is not quite as bad -- yet."

LePage then said, "They're headed in that direction."

Asked if he had a sense of what the Gestapo did during the second world war, LePage said, "Yeah, they killed a lot of people." Asked whether the IRS "was headed in the direction of killing a lot of people," LePage answered: "Yeah."

But both sides do it because somebody said Bush was like Hitler once, so LePage is not as bad.  IRS will kill everyone you know because a Democrat is in charge.  When a Republican is in charge, how dare you question us.