StupidiNews!

• Tuesday's memorial for the victims of last year's Boston Marathon bombing was marred by a bomb hoax, a suspect has been arrested by police.
• A Spanish federal judge has refused to dismiss a torture probe into Guantanamo Bay under former US President George W. Bush, despite pressure from Spain's parliament.
• At least two are dead in a ferry accident in South Korea as hundreds were rescued from the waters off the port city of Inchon.
• In signs that the American job market is improving, several large US cities now have jobless rates well below the national average, creating spot worker shortages and higher pay.
• Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey says flat panel monitors have at most 20 years left before they are replaced by VR displays.

Also, Bon will be posting her recollection of her conversation with KC Jewish Center shooting suspect Frazier Glenn Miller this afternoon, so stay tuned.  It's a hell of a story.

Last Call For Heartbleeding Liberals

If anonymous sources are enough to convict the NSA in the court of public opinion over the Heartbleed bug, what does that mean for news that Google knew about it and didn't tell users or the government?

On purpose, mind you.

Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government.

Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7.

The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going public. The security firm CloudFlare, for example, said it fixed the flaw on March 31.

This is not an anonymous source, but a named Google employee admitting to this.

Asked whether Google discussed Heartbleed with the government, a company spokeswoman said only that the "security of our users' information is a top priority" and that Google users do not need to change their passwords.

Companies often wait to publicize a security flaw so they can have time to patch their own services. But keeping the bug secret from the U.S. government may have left federal systems vulnerable to hackers. The IRS said it's not aware of any vulnerabilities in its system, but other agencies that use OpenSSL could have been leaking private information to hackers.

The government encourages companies to report cybersecurity issues to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, which is housed in the Homeland Security Department. US-CERT has a 24-hour operations center that responds to security threats and vulnerabilities.

Why would Google tell the government or competitors and not keep this to themselves, so they could fix the bug on their servers while other internet giants were vulnerable?  Then they could say "Hey, we fixed the problem, these other guys were the ones that exposed your password info."

Of course that only works if people don't find out Google is a bunch of bastards.

But let's blame the NSA and Obama some more.  They're the real bad guys, right?  I mean hey, if the Electronic Frontier Foundation has finally decided to back the Tea Party since the unsourced NSA accusations made last week, this isn't a mass effort to depress Democratic voter turnout, right?

Right?

Things Just Got Bad In Ukraine

Monday's deadline from acting Ukrainian President Oleksandr Turchynov for Russian militants holding Ukrainian government building in eastern Ukraine to leave has passed without incident.  Unfortunately, all that meant was that the promised military operation was postponed until today and the shooting has now begun in earnest.  Bloomberg News:

Ukraine unleashed an offensive to dislodge militants from towns in its eastern Donetsk region as Russia’s prime minister said the country risks civil war.

Ukrainian units backed by armored personnel carriers blocked all approaches to the town of Slovyansk, Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti news service reported, citing an unidentified pro-Russian activist. Two militants were wounded when an airport in Kramatorsk was stormed, forcing the protesters to retreat, according to RIA.

The government in Kiev started the operation after fighting between its forces and pro-Russian separatists turned deadly this week. The U.S. and the European Union also deliberated deepening sanctions against Russia, which they blame for stoking the unrest, as Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin remained at odds over who was at fault.

“The aim of these actions is to protect people,” acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said in a statement on his website. “Apart from Russian special forces and terrorists, there’s hundreds of thousands of innocent Ukrainian people deceived by Russian propaganda, and that is why we will take any needed anti-terrorist actions prudently and responsibly.”

Reuters too is reporting that the Ukrainian operation is underway.

Turchinov said the offensive, which he first announced on Sunday, was finally underway. "The anti-terrorist operation began during the night in the north of Donetsk region. But it will take place in stages, responsibly, in a considered way. I once again stress: the aim of these operations is to defend the citizens of Ukraine," he told parliament.

At least 15 armored personnel carriers displaying Ukrainian flags were parked by the side of a road around 50 km (30 miles) north of Slaviansk, witnesses said.

Ukrainian troops wearing camouflage gear and armed with automatic weapons and grenade launchers were stationed nearby, with a helicopter and several buses containing interior ministry personnel near the road.

Things just got bad.  Really bad.  The Russians are already using the excuse that this is a "civil war" in the Ukraine and that Russian forces have nothing to do with what's going on, and that the "illegitimate" government of Kiev is fighting the people of Ukraine who are resisting tyranny or something, because everyone really wants to be part of Russia, so of course we'll have to assist these rebels...

You can imagine where this is going next. 

Cheaper Than Advertised, Better Than Expected

The latest Congressional Budget Office projections find that Obamacare will cost far less than last year's estimates, to the tune of over $100 billion less over ten years.

More than 12 million people will gain health insurance under the Affordable Care Act this year, according to new projections released by the Congressional Budget Office on Monday. And millions more stand to benefit from the law over the next decade.

At the same time, the law's costs to the federal government are shrinking. According to the new projections, the federal government will spend more than $100 billion less on Obamacare's coverage provisions through 2024. That includes a downward estimate of about $5 billion this year. Overall, spending on the federal and state insurance exchanges are projected to cost 14 percent less than originally forecast.

The CBO said plans offered through the exchanges are narrower, allowing companies to keep premiums low and the federal government to pay less in subsidies. The lower spending projections on the Affordable Care Act will help shrink deficits overall. The CBO said the federal government will now run a deficit of $492 billion in fiscal year 2014, which is almost a 33 percent decrease from 2013.

But, but, but...death spirals!  Unsustainable!  Failure!




Watch the FOX News headline be "Seven MILLION Americans will lose employer health insurance by 2024 thanks to Obamacare!"

Of course, Republicans want to repeal Obamacare and take insurance coverage away from millions.  Good luck with that.

StupidiNews, Tax Day Edition!

• Police say a Utah woman has confessed to killing six babies immediately after giving birth to them over a period of several years.
• The suspect arrested Sunday for the murder of three in a shooting spree at Jewish centers in Kansas City will be charged under the federal hate crimes statute.
• This year's Pulitzer prizes in journalism went to the Guardian US and the Washington Post for their coverage of the NSA, and Reuters for coverage of the persecution of Myanmar's Muslims, among others.
• Chinese hackers have wasted little time in going after "Heartbleed" secure website vulnerabilities, attacking a University of Michigan server less than 12 hours after the bug was announced.
• A mural purported to be by British street artist Banksy has popped up near the UK's Government Communications HQ, depicting men tapping and recording an abandoned phone booth.

Last Call For Cheesed Off GOP In Wisconsin

Republicans can be such petulant clowns sometimes.  Why should anyone take them seriously?

Wisconsin Republicans will vote at their convention next month on a proposal affirming the state's right to go it alone, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Daniel Bice reported Monday.

The state party's Resolutions Committee has voted in favor of a so-called "state sovereignty" measure stating the party "supports legislation that upholds Wisconsin's right, under extreme circumstances, to secede," according to the Journal-Sentinel. The resolution came out of one of the state party's regional caucuses and was edited and adopted by the committee despite top GOP officials' efforts to quash it.

Why would you vote on this unless you wanted people to think you hated America and no longer wanted to be a part of it?   What "extreme circumstances" constitute the necessity for secession?  Another Democrat in the White House? 

Gov. Scott Walker (R) dismissed the unconventional proposal last week.

"I don't think that one aligns with where most Republican officials are in the state of Wisconsin — certainly not with me," Walker said Friday at a press event, as quoted by the Journal-Sentinel.

Gosh, what a bold statement.  He doesn't think secession "aligns" with GOP officials in the state.

Why do Republicans hate America so much that they want to leave it?  That kind of was the problem 150 years ago, yes?  So do Republicans want a second Civil War?

Why else would you want to affirm the right to secede?

Grimes: Fight To Raise Minimum Wage

In a Sunday op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes went after Sen. Mitch McConnell over the GOP's refusal to even consider raising the minimum wage.

Times may be tough, but I am running for the U.S. Senate because I believe Kentucky's best days are still ahead of us. It starts with leaders who will start working for Kentucky again. That begins with raising the minimum wage.

President Clinton once said that raising the minimum wage is "pro-work, pro-business and pro-family." I share his view and have made clear since entering the race, we must raise the minimum wage for all Kentuckians to strengthen the middle class and help our people — including over 250,000 Kentucky women — provide for their families and put food on the table.

Those against raising Kentuckians' wages, including my opponent Mitch McConnell, defend the status quo by falsely claiming that it would cost the economy jobs. But taking a step back and looking at the facts — a very different picture is presented. Historically, raising the minimum wage has created jobs and boosted the economy. This time, economists who have studied this issue at length have found that increasing the minimum wage now will cut unemployment again and once more create jobs.

Kentucky includes some of the poorest counties in America, with median incomes well below the national average.

Indeed, the nonpartisan Kentucky Center for Economic Policy (KCEP) released a report just last year detailing the economic benefit that raising the minimum wage would have. The KCEP found that a minimum wage increase to $10.10 an hour would create 2,200 jobs right here in Kentucky, boost earnings for hundreds of thousands of hardworking Kentuckians, and grow the commonwealth's GDP by over $500 million.

Critics also claim that the minimum wage is an issue that solely affects teenagers. In reality, nearly 90 percent of Kentuckians who would see their earnings go up from a minimum wage increase are 20 years of age or older.

Furthermore, nearly 30 percent of those who would benefit from increased wages have children. As the UK Center for Poverty Research notes, minimum wage workers head an increasing number of households today.

Raising the minimum wage is also wildly popular here in the state, with 61% of Kentuckians wanting to raise the minimum wage.  This is a good issue for Grimes to attack on, and hopefully it will continue to help her campaign.

Why She Left, In Her Own Words

Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius appeared on Meet the Press Sunday to explain why she resigned her cabinet position.

"Well, actually, I made a decision at the election that I couldn't leave along with a lot of my colleagues who left at the end of the first term. That did not seem to be even a topic to consider since there was still one more chapter in this Affordable Care Act that needed to roll out," she said. "There is never a good time."

But she said that at the beginning of January, she began to discuss her departure with President Obama.

"And I went back to him in early March and said, 'You know, I'm really optimistic we're gonna meet the targets and the enrollment is good. While the site is working well, I think once we finish this first chapter you really should begin to look for the next secretary who can be here through the end of your term.' And that really wasn't a commitment I was willing to make," she said.

"I made it pretty clear that that really wasn't an option, to stay on. I mean, it was fair to either commit till January of 2017 or leave with enough time that he would get a strong competent leader."

So yes, Ezra Klein was right.  She quit while she was ahead.

StupidiNews!

• A 78-year old man connected with white supremacist groups is being held as a suspect in the shooting deaths of three people at two Kansas City area Jewish centers.
• Syrian President Bashar al-Assad says the country's three-year old civil war is turning in the government's favor.
• In Nigeria, suspected Islamist Boko Haram militants have killed at least 68 in a rampage across two villages near the Cameroon border.
• Swiss voters will go to the polls in May to vote on a referendum setting the country's minimum wage at 22 Swiss francs per hour, or about $25, the world's highest.
• Glow in the dark road markings have made their debut in the Netherlands on a 500 meter test stretch, which could save millions on streetlights.

Last Call For Deadlines In Ukraine

Meanwhile in Ukraine, things aren't going really well and we've reached the point where things may actually take a major turn into open conflict in a matter of hours.

Ukraine has given pro-Russian separatists a Monday morning deadline to disarm or face a "full-scale anti-terrorist operation" by its armed forces, raising the risk of a military confrontation with Moscow.

Angered by the death of a state security officer and the wounding of two comrades near the flashpoint eastern city of Slaviansk, acting president Oleksander Turchinov gave rebels occupying state buildings until 0600 GMT to lay down their weapons.

"The National Security and Defense Council has decided to launch a full-scale anti-terrorist operation involving the armed forces of Ukraine," Turchinov said in an address to the nation.

He blamed Russia, which annexed Ukraine's Crimea region when Moscow-backed former president Viktor Yanukovich fled after months of pro-Western protests, for being behind the rash of rebellions across Russian-speaking towns in eastern Ukraine.

"We will not allow Russia to repeat the Crimean scenario in the eastern regions of Ukraine," Turchinov said.

Of course the only ones left at this point who believe that Russia will somehow not be able to repeat the Crimean scenario in eastern Ukraine is the government in Kiev.  Turchinov seems to think Putin is bluffing with those tens of thousands of massed troops on the border.  If this turns into a shooting war and that bluff is called, a whole lot of people are going to die.

Meanwhile, the "spontaneous" pro-Russian protests in half a dozen eastern Ukrainian cities continue.  And of course, Russia will have to step in and "secure the interests of the Russian minority in the region".

A NATO source told the BBC the organisation believed that "Russian forces have been involved in the seizure of some of the buildings".

And the US ambassador to the UN said the attacks on police and other buildings in eastern Ukraine had "telltale signs of Moscow's involvement".

"It's professional, co-ordinated. Nothing grass-roots about it," ambassador Samantha Power told ABC News.

"The forces are doing in each of the six or seven cities they have been active in exactly the same thing."

A senior Ukrainian intelligence official said his country's special services had evidence proving Russia's direct involvement in the events in eastern Ukraine.

"We have not only evidence, we have 18 detainees, we have career officers of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces, we have arrested agents complete with instructions, arms and explosives," Security Service head Valentyn Nalyvaychenko said in a live TV discussion programme.

Our UN ambassador is saying that of course this is all Russia's doing in order to create a pretext for Russian invasion.  The problem is, Turchinov is playing directly into that.

Monday is going to be a bad day in Ukraine.

America's Conversation On Race Is Apparently Now Over

So declares Brit Hume and George F. Will of FOX, who are tired of black people being black and just want them to be American, because as white men they're sick of hearing about racism.  And by "black people", they mean liberals.

Fox News Senior Political Analyst Brit Hume asserted on Sunday that both Obama and Holder had “benefited politically enormously from the fact that they are African-American, and the first to hold the jobs that they hold.”

“To those two men, race has been both a shield and a sword that they have used effectively to defend themselves, and to attack others,” Hume said, adding that he found the behavior “depressing.”

A Fox News viewer on Twitter complained to the panel that the president and attorney general “race bait,” and wanted to know why it was acceptable to call white people “racists.”

“Look, liberalism has a kind of Tourette’s syndrome these days,” Will opined. “Just constantly saying the word ‘racism’ and ‘racist.’”

“Liberalism hasn’t had a new idea since the 1960s — except Obamacare — and the country doesn’t like it,” he continued. “Foreign policy is a shambles, from Russia to Iran to Syria to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the recovery is unprecedentedly bad.”

“So, what do you do? You say, ‘Anyone who criticizes us is a racist.’”

And thus the conversation about race in America is now over because if you're black, Hume and Will don't want to hear about it.  You need to be American instead and just get over it.  Besides, being black is a huge advantage, because look at all the black US Presidents and US Attorneys General we've had in America's history.

Should you still have a problem with this or the way President Obama or AG Holder have been treated, well, the statute of limitations is up and now "racist" and "racism" are meaningless terms because they don't exist.  How can they with a black president and black AG?

And with that, FOX has resolved the national conversation on race.  The rest of us who might feel the need to continue it (or apparently start it) need to shut the hell up apparently and are simply being dismissed because hey, a couple of white guys are sick of talking about it.

And on we go.

Bundy Ranch, Privilege, And Cattle

If you want to know what I mean by privilege, take a look at the Bundy Ranch incident in Nevada this weekend.

A Nevada cattle rancher appears to have won his week-long battle with the federal government over a controversial cattle roundup that had led to the arrest of several protesters.

Cliven Bundy went head to head with the Bureau of Land Management over the removal of hundreds of his cattle from federal land, where the government said they were grazing illegally.

Bundy claims his herd of roughly 900 cattle have grazed on the land along the riverbed near Bunkerville, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, since 1870 and threatened a "range war" against the BLM on the Bundy Ranch website after one of his sons was arrested while protesting the removal of the cattle.

"I have no contract with the United States government," Bundy said. "I was paying grazing fees for management and that's what BLM was supposed to be, land managers and they were managing my ranch out of business, so I refused to pay."

The federal government had countered that Bundy "owes the American people in excess of $1 million " in unpaid grazing fees and "refuses to abide by the law of land, despite many opportunities over the last 20 years to do so."

However, today the BLM said it would not enforce a court order to remove the cattle and was pulling out of the area.

"Based on information about conditions on the ground, and in consultation with law enforcement, we have made a decision to conclude the cattle gather because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public," BLM Director Neil Kornze said.

"We ask that all parties in the area remain peaceful and law-abiding as the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service work to end the operation in an orderly manner," he said.

Guy grazes his herd on federal land for 20 years, doesn't pay a dime.  Feds show up to actually do something about the guy squatting on federal land for two decades, it triggers a showdown with dozens of armed militia types ready to put a few holes in some feds and start another Ruby Ridge.  Feds wisely figure this is exactly what these assholes want and leave for now.

Here's where the privilege comes in. 

Can you imagine what the reaction of America would be to a black cattle rancher grazing cattle on federal land, without paying the feds, for 20 years? Think about how that would be reported.  Cliven Bundy is considered a patriot and hero for resisting the awful mean ol' federal government, despite breaking the law for two decades plus.  If he was black, the calls from the same exact people now hailing him as a hero would be far, far different.

Furthermore,look who showed up to help Bundy.  What do you think FOX News's reaction of an armed group of black men showing up to defend that cattle rancher from the feds?  You'd be hearing about race wars and all kinds of crazy shit.  Worse, the white militia guys showing up now to defend Bundy would absolutely be on the scene hunting down the black ranchers.

It would be chaos.  And it sure wouldn't have ended peacefully, that's for damn sure.

ABC News calls Bundy a "defiant cattleman".  If he was black, he would be a "militant thug."

And then he'd be dead.

Rehabilitating An Awful President From Texas

A President from Texas who fumbled one of the bloodiest wars in US history, who got tens of thousands of US troops killed and hundreds of thousands of civilians slaughtered is now being furiously rehabilitated in order to help his party in 2016.

And no, I'm not talking about Dubya.  I'm talking about LBJ.  WaPo's Harold Meyerson:

Come August, we’ll have another semi-centennial moment, but it probably won’t be celebrated. Aug. 7 will mark the 50th anniversary of Congress passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which Johnson had requested to give him the authority to respond with military force to North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. ships (some of which, the U.S. government later concluded, hadn’t actually taken place). By 1965, Johnson was interpreting the resolution as carte blanche to send hundreds of thousands of American soldiers to Vietnam, 58,000 of whom died there. 

By Bushian standards, Johnson was pretty awful across the board.  Yes, he signed into law civil rights legislation, but the civil rights movement made him do it, kicking and screaming.  TNR's Michael Kazin has an even lower opinion of LBJ.

In 1965, as Johnson was pushing Congress to enact the Voting Rights Act and Medicare, he was also initiating the bombing of North Vietnam and signing the orders which eventually sent over 500,000 U.S. troops to occupy and fight to “pacify” the Southern half of that country. At the time, liberal Democrats who opposed the war condemned the hypocrisy of a President who could help millions of Americans win their rights and a degree of medical security while he oversaw the destruction of what he called “a raggedy ass little third rate country.” Fifty years later, powerful Democrats in search of a usable past would just prefer to ignore the contradiction.

They would also, it seems, like to forget the profound damage which Johnson’s conduct of the war did to the fortunes of liberalism back home. As every politician and journalist once knew, mass discontent about the debacle in Vietnam split the Democratic Party in two and convinced LBJ not to run for re-election in 1968. The party’s nominee, that flaming liberal Hubert Humphrey, then won less than 43 percent of the popular vote. It would be another 40 years before another unabashed liberal (uh, “progressive”) was elected president.

Johnson's Medicare and civil rights laws were a great contribution to America.  But  the damage he did contributed directly to Nixon and Reagan, and then Bushes Senior and Junior, and he had more blood on his hands than Dubya ever did.

Just a history lesson.  You can't talk about Johnson's accomplishments without mentioning his bloody, awful, immoral failures as both a President and human being.

Listen To My Heartbleed

A lot has been in the news about the Heartbleed secure website vulnerability problem, which has affected tens of thousands of websites and possibly compromised millions of passwords (Mashable has a good list of what passwords you should change now) but the story has taken a much darker turn as Bloomberg News is reporting that the NSA supposedly knew about the vulnerability two years ago, didn't tell anyone, and exploited the bug to gain information from websites.

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

Now, if this is true the NSA has a lot to answer for, but "two people familiar with the matter"?  No names?  Pretty big bombshell for anonymous sources, yes?  And as far as I can tell, nobody has independently verified this story yet.

Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

Again, this represents a huge ethical problem if true, but that's a huge if right now.  It's not stopping people I read and respect from assuming this is now gospel truth because of course any story these days claiming the NSA has done X has to be true because the NSA is evil and you can'[t trust them.

And once again, if this story is true and if the NSA did know about this (or as some people have also speculated created the bug in the first place in order to open a nearly universal back door to secure websites) then heads need to roll.

Ironically, if this story is true, shouldn't Edward Snowden's vast treasure trove of stolen documents have contained this information?  This is a pretty damning accusation. Something like this would be at the top of the list for his stated goal of exposing unethical, damaging, and illegal practices by the NSA, yes?

This is a bug that affected millions of ordinary people. Right now, there's as much "proof" that Snowden knew about Heartbleed and said nothing as there is that the NSA knew the same and did nothing, i.e. total speculation.

Might want to keep that in mind.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• The Department of Justice issued a scathing report on the Albuquerque Police Department, finding multiple incidents of police brutality against unarmed suspects and citizens.
• UNICEF officials are warning that the continued conflict between Sudan and South Sudan could kill as many as 50,000 children from malnutrition unless action is taken swiftly.
• The G20 finace ministers are warning the United States that failure to ratify overhaul measures for the International Monetary Fund by year's end will lead to "additional steps".
• President Obama and Michelle Obama paid 20.4% in taxes last year, according to released returns by the White House.
• New models by scientists postulate that the massive 23-mile wide asteroid that hit the Earth over 3 billion years ago most likely set off seismic events that moved entire continents.