Spy-King The Ball

James Bond has M running the show for him, and if Daily Beast's Shane Harris is right, the US equivalent of M, Frank Archibald, is retiring after the latest CIA/torture turf fight.

The director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the storied home of the agency’s most secretive intelligence operations, has announced that he plans to retire, The Daily Beast has learned.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed that the director announced his retirement “after a long and distinguished career at CIA. We thank him for this profound and lasting contributions to both CIA and to our nation’s security.”

As a practice, the CIA doesn’t identify the head of the clandestine service by name. But Frank Archibald was outed in a Twitter post in 2013, and details of his biography were known to some journalists. Archibald, who was 57 when he took the job that year, reportedly served tours in Pakistan and Africa and also headed the CIA’s Latin America division. The Associated Press reported that Archibald "once ran the covert action that helped remove Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power."

Archibald’s retirement comes at a transitional moment for the CIA. The agency’s director, John Brennan, is considering major changes to the agency’s structure, including the possible creation of new intelligence centers and doing away with the traditional division of CIA into its analysis group and the clandestine service.

Needless to say, the career spooks aren't too happy with this new plan.

Critics of the reorganization, which hasn’t been formally proposed and, officials have stressed, isn’t a done deal, see it as potentially undermining some of the CIA’s core capabilities in favor of organizing the agency around regions of the world. Some in the National Clandestine Service in particular view a reorganization as a threat to the high-degree of independence it has traditionally enjoyed within the intelligence bureaucracy.

“This would be to their mind the greatest threat to their independence since they were created as the Directorate of Plans back in 1951,” one former official said.

Brennan is slated to make public remarks on Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he’ll be interviewed by journalist Charlie Rose. The CIA hasn’t announced what, if any, news Brennan plans to make. But former officials said they’d been anticipating that he might soon unveil more of his thinking about any reorganization.

It's clear that Republicans and the American people are more than happy to keep playing "24" and torturing everyone swarthy in sight in order to stop invisible bomb countdown clocks.  But it looks like Obama has given Brennan his orders to change the agency as a result of that Senate torture report, and Brennan's going to have to deliver.

We'll see how far he gets.  If the nation's top super spy is hanging it up, the changes have to be pretty big.

On The Next Epidose Of NCIS

A dead sailor found off the coast of Cuba.  An affair with a base commander. A naval captain in disgrace.  Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, folks.

On January 11, the body of Christopher Tur, was found in the waters off of Cuba. A subsequent investigation uncovered an alleged affair between Tur’s wife and Capt John R. Nettleton, the commander of the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay.

On January 21, the Navy publicly announced that Nettleton has been relieved of command.

The decision to relieve Nettleton was made by his boss “Commander, Navy Region Southeast, Rear Adm. Mary M. Jackson due to loss of confidence in Nettleton’s ability to command,” according to a statement from Navy Region Southeast Public Affairs.

Following his dismissal from Guantanamo, Nettleton was moved to Florida, where he is assigned to Jackson’s staff.

Sounds like this should be a movie (and probably will be.)

Base spokesperson Kelly Wirfel said that Tur moved to Guantanamo with his family in 2011 and worked at the base commissary. Tur’s obituary lists his job as a loss prevention officer, a title that typically means someone who prevents theft and shoplifting.. Tur’s widow, Lara, who is alleged to have carried on an affair with Capt. Nettleton, works as the director of the base’s Fleet and Family Services. That position would have her overseeing a variety of support programs for military families ranging from counseling services to financial assistance.

Lara reported her husband missing on January 10, a day before the Coast Guard discovered his body.

The adultery alone is enough to seriously ruin Nettleton's career under UCMJ, but with the other man in the picture dead, well...now things get really interesting.  Trust me when I say there are screenplays being written right now about this.

She's Always A Woman To Me

Just a reminder that while rampant, obvious racism is usually frowned upon by Republicans, rampant, obvious sexism is still widely acceptable and in fact is part and parcel of the GOP's anti-Hillary push. WaPo's Aaron Blake:

One WaPo-ABC poll question I didn't get into in this morning's post is this: Does the fact that Hillary Clinton would be the first female president make you more likely or less likely to vote for her in 2016? 

Twenty four percent of people -- including 40 percent of Democrats and 29 percent of women -- say that breaking the last, highest glass ceiling makes them more likely to back her. Two-thirds say it doesn't matter one bit to their vote. 

But if you look a little closer, you'll find something interesting: While most Republicans say Clinton's gender doesn't matter, about one-quarter of them (24 percent) say the fact that she would be the first female president makes them less likely to vote for her. Just 8 percent say it makes them more likely to back her.

Nobody should really be surprised by this, other than I think the number of Republicans admitting this is probably lower than it really is.  And yes, Republicans have a huge issue with women of their own creation.  This week's abortion bill nonsense proved that.

A symbolic messaging bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy threw the party into disarray and was abruptly pulled at the last minute after a group of GOP women and swing-district lawmakers raised hackles over a rape-exception provision that required victims of sexual assault to report the crime to authorities before they could get an abortion. 

"None of us saw it coming," Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) told reporters on Thursday.

Yes, because a woman was saying it.  Good luck in 2016, jagoffs.

Last Call For The Whole Ball Of Wax

GOP is playing with fire here, but it seems like they're confident they will keep control of the Senate in 2016.  If they get the White House too, then the game is over for the Dems if they pull this off.

Top Senate Republicans are considering gutting the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees — a move that could yield big rewards for whichever party controls the White House and Senate after 2016.

The move, still in its early stages, reflects growing GOP confidence in its electoral prospects next year. But it could also have a major immediate impact if a justice such as 81-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg steps down, making it far easier for President Barack Obama to get a replacement confirmed.

The proposed change would expand on the dramatic move Democrats made in 2013, when they killed the 60-vote hurdle for executive branch nominations and almost all judicial nominees. Republicans have complained bitterly about the Democrats’ action ever since, saying it violated the Senate’s tradition of being a deliberative body where the minority holds big sway. But now, GOP supporters contend, it may be time to bring majority rule to votes on Supreme Court nominations, too.

The 60-vote filibuster threshold would remain for legislation.

The GOP understands that there's a very good change the next President will be able to appoint 2, maybe 3 justices.  They seem to be willing to leverage blocking any further SCOTUS appointments for Obama into assuring that they have precedent for packing the court in 2016 if there's a GOP president.  And let's face it, if a Democrat wins and they still control the Senate, well Hillary or whoever isn't going to be able to appoint anyone anyway.

There is massive upside and very little downside right now for the GOP doing this.  They are counting on cover from the Village, and a short memory of the public, two extremely safe bets.

We'll see what happens, but if I were the GOP, I'd throw the dice on this.

The Mask Slips Again...

...and Republicans accidentally reveal how they really feel about the "working poor".

California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock said on Thursday that the minimum wage should not be raised because low pay was necessary for minorities and other unskilled workers who were not worth more than $7 an hour.

During an appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, host Greta Brawner asked McClintock if he could get behind a presidential candidate like Mitt Romney, who is one of an increasing number of Republicans saying that the minimum wage should be at least $10.10 an hour.

But McClintock argued that raising the minimum wage would “rip the first rung in the ladder of opportunity for teenagers, for minorities, for people who are trying to get into the job market for their first job.”

The California Republican explained that the minimum wage was not supposed to be a living wage that could support families.

“It’s not supposed to support a family. The minimum wage is that first job when you have no skills, no experience, no working history. That’s how you get into the job market, that’s how you develop that experience, develop that work record, get your first raise, then your next raise, then your promotion.”

McClintock continued: “If your labor is an unskilled person just entering the workforce is worth say $7 an hour at a job and the minimum wage is $10, you have just been made permanently unemployable. That first rung of the economic ladder has been ripped out and you can’t get on it. That is a tragedy.”

We saw GOP Rep. Aaron Schock attack the minimum wage with a similar argument after the State of the Union address.  If those people were supposed to be earning more than $7.25 an hour, then God and the Free Market would pay them more then that.  The notion to pay people $10.10 anyway just hasn't accurred to Republicans, because they think the millions of families trying to live on that minimum wage aren't worth it, and don't matter.

Since the majority of them vote Democrat, no, they don't matter to Tom McClintock, nor do they matter to the GOP.  They are the enemy, and must be "dealt with".

This is how the GOP treats poor people: you're poor for a reason, and you don't count.  They're too busy sucking up to the billionaires that increasingly own more and more of America's wealth.

Weasels And Measles

Dear anti-vaxxer nut jobs:  This is why you suck and are awful people.



In all seriousness, the anti-vaccination crusade has now brought measles back to the US, a disease that was effectively eradicated here 20 years ago.

We have quadrupled the number of measles cases in the US in one year because of this idiocy, from 150 to more than 600.

Vaccinate your goddamn kids, people.

StupidiNews!

• Saudi King Abdullah has passed at age 90 according to Saudi state television, he will be succeeded by his 79-year-old half-brother Crown Prince Salman.
• An outbreak of measles in California has expanded to 59 new cases as at least two dozen of the cases are of unvaccinated people.
• The US is pulling more staff out of the embassy in Yemen's capital of Sanaa as the collapse of the government of President Hadi to anti-American rebels continues.
• The European Central Bank's $1.14 trillion bond-buying program far exceeds the expectations of most of the eurozone, taking the financial world by surprise.
• Internet security officials say as many as 5,300 gas stations could be vulnerable to internet-based attacks on fuel monitoring systems.

Last Call For A Silver, Out-Foxed

It looks like the hammer has fallen on long-time New York Assembly Speaker and Democrat Sheldon Silver, as he's surrendered himself to the FBI on federal corruption charges.

In a five-count criminal complaint outlining the charges, Mr. Silver is accused of “using the power and influence of his official position to obtain for himself millions of dollars of bribes and kickbacks masked as legitimate income.” 

He is charged with mail fraud, wire fraud and extortion. 

The complaint maintains that for more than a decade, Mr. Silver devised a scheme “to induce real estate developers with business before the state” to use a real estate law firm controlled by a lawyer who had once worked as Mr. Silver’s counsel who orchestrated payments to the speaker for referrals to the firm. 

The complaint said that “there is probable cause to believe that Silver received approximately $4 million in payments characterized as attorney referral fees solely through the corrupt use of his official position.” 

Prosecutors, according to the complaint, said that Mr. Silver did essentially no work for the payments. 

Prosecutors seized approximately $3.8 million of Mr. Silver’s money on Thursday morning.

And let's not forget the Feds were tipped off after Gov. Cuomo disbanded in last March the state's anti-corruption commission that he created to fight exactly this type of thing.  Silver needs to resign, just as much as Michael Grimm did after his tax evasion nonsense.  I'd say Silver's alleged crimes are a lot worse.

We'll see.

None Dare Call It Treason, Con't

If you can name another time in American history where a sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives invited a foreign leader to speak to Congress as a rebuke of a sitting US president's foreign policy with the intent of undermining that policy, I'll give you a pony.

House Speaker John Boehner's invitation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress on Iran is an unprecedented rebuke of President Barack Obama as he and Congress are preparing for a battle over Iran sanctions, experts told TPM. 

The move came the day after Obama threatened in his State of the Union address to veto legislation putting new sanctions on Iran. He warned that new sanctions by Congress would disrupt the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)acknowledged the week before that ending negotiations "is very much an intended consequence" of a new sanctions bill that has been put forward with some Democratic support. 

Although the US and Israel maintain a "special relationship," the discord between the Obama administration and Netanyahu's government has been well documented. Netanyahu welcomed 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a visit Israel in the midst of the campaign. And anonymous Obama administration officials have been quoted calling the Israeli prime minster "a chickenshit."

But even with that context, experts on American-Israeli relations expressed shock that Boehner had invited Netanyahu to address Congress on Iran next month. One described it as an effort to "humiliate" and "embarrass" Obama as the two sides dig in over Iran. The invitation from the Ohio Republican positions Congress, rather than the White House, as Israel's ally. 

"It's unprecedented. It's hitting below the belt. It's taking partisanship to a whole new level," Guy Ziv, a professor at American University who has studied U.S.-Israeli relations, told TPM. "It is a way for them to embarrass and humiliate the Obama administration."

Bonus points if you can name any other country whose head of state would be allowed to speak to Congress to expressly chastise a sitting president's foreign policy.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

PS, the reason this is an unprecedented show of disrespect is the obvious difference between Obama and the previous 43 presidents.

Another Snowden Job

Happy New Year from Mother Russia, guys!

Is Apple’s wildly popular iPhone series hiding spyware that can collect information about users without their knowledge? As thoroughly as developers have dug through Apple’s iOS code over the past seven and a half years, one would think functionality like that would have been unearthed by now. According to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, however, iPhones are capable of activating “special software” behind the scenes that collects information about users, who are completely oblivious to the fact that their phones are gathering this sensitive data. 

Edward Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena recently spoke with Russian news agency RIA Novosti, and their conversation spanned several topics. As Russian news site Sputnik noted, however, the iPhone was among the topics that were discussed, and Kucherena’s comments were quite interesting, to say the least. 

“Edward never uses an iPhone; he’s got a simple phone,”Kucherena said. “The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him; that’s why on security grounds he refused to have this phone.”

So, it's not even Snowden saying this, but his Russian lawyer, to the Russian press, because "special software."  What proof?  Well, Snowden says so.  It must be true.

It's about ethics in tech journalism or something.

Surely this isn't Putin causing trouble again, going after what has become the symbol of US consumer technical innovation and success, right?

Be like Ed, guys.  Ed would never use an iPhone.  You want to be like Ed, don't you, American?

StupidiNews!

• A major apartment complex fire in New Jersey has displaced some 400 residents as the Avalon Apartments in Edgewater caught fire around 4:30 PM.
• House Republican women revolted against the party and have successfully stopped a nationwide abortion bill that made exceptions for rape and incest only if reported to police.
• President Obama's post State of the Union address tour took him to Boise and Topeka yesterday pushing for his plans for free community college and paid sick leave.
• The European Central Bank is officially expected to announce a major bond-buying program today to shore up the eurozone economy.
• Microsoft has previewed Windows 10 for PCs, tablets and phones and will launch beta builds to Windows Insiders on Feb 1.

Last Call For The Boomers

The Millennials are set to overtake the Boomers in population numbers this year in the US, which is going to be a big demographic key to 2016.

75 is the approximate number, in millions, of millennials that the United States will have this year. The total of millennials — those born from 1981 to 1997 — will reach 75.3 million, overtaking baby boomers (1946 to 1964) as the United States’ largest living generation. 

How does a generation that has stopped enrolling members manage to keep growing? An influx of immigrants, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. And, of course, members of the boomer generation, currently at 74.9 million, are beginning to die in greater numbers.

The way the NY Times defines them, Millennials are today's 18-34 year olds.  They're all old enough to register to vote, and those number will only go up next year.  Meanwhile, in 2016 even the youngest Boomers will be 52, and the oldest, 70.  As long as they are the group of Americans most likely to vote, we'll continue to be ruled by Boomer politicians (and yes, this includes Barack Obama, a young Boomer born in 1961.)

So there's a chance at least that our politics will begin to change.  The question is at what rate?

Of course, that rate will be zero if Millennials sit home like they did in 2014.

The State Of That Union, Con't

Yemen and drones aside, President Obama's speech was amazingly notable for what it wasn't, it was in no way capitulation to the GOP for winning the Senate.it wasn't a mealy-mouthed crawl into irrelevance, and it sure wasn't as hell surrender.  Ed Kilgore sums it up nicely:

In conservative-land, you see, Obama’s first election was a fluke and his second a calamitous accident, both canceled by the ensuring midterms and both destined to be remembered as incidental interruptions of the Long March of Movement Conservatism towards total power. The idea that 2008 and 2012 are just as significant as 2010 and 2014 (maybe a bit more significant insofar as far more Americans participated) is outrageous to the Right, and so Obama mentioning them was the defiant act of a political nonentity. 

Beyond that, the basic framing of Obama’s remarks on the economy left Republicans even deeper in the trap they’ve been in ever since conditions began improving. The main criticism available to them for the performance of the economy is the one Democrats (and Obama himself) have been articulated: sluggish wage growth and growing inequality. But Republicans have little or no agenda to deal with that beyond the usual engorge-the-job-creators stuff dressed up with attacks on the few corporate welfare accounts they’ve agreed to oppose, and then the Keystone XL Pipeline. On this last point, Obama was very clever in dismissing Keystone as one controversial infrastructure project we’re spending too much time fighting over as hundreds of others languish. It made Joni Ernst’s plodding Official Response sound all the more foolish for spending so much time on that one project.

Making the GOP look foolish is easy.  Getting voters to show up and punish the fools in the GOP is the hard part.

The State Of That Union

President Obama's State of the Union speech, in full, did contain some very illuminating passages.

At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious; that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years.

So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works. And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don’t get in the way. We can’t slow down businesses or put our economy at risk with government shutdowns or fiscal showdowns. We can’t put the security of families at risk by taking away their health insurance, or unraveling the new rules on Wall Street, or refighting past battles on immigration when we’ve got a system to fix. And if a bill comes to my desk that tries to do any of these things, it will earn my veto.

Today, thanks to a growing economy, the recovery is touching more and more lives. Wages are finally starting to rise again. We know that more small business owners plan to raise their employees’ pay than at any time since 2007. But here’s the thing — those of us here tonight, we need to set our sights higher than just making sure government doesn’t halt the progress we’re making. We need to do more than just do no harm. Tonight, together, let’s do more to restore the link between hard work and growing opportunity for every American.

This is the point where Democrats need to build on heading into 2016 to create a populist message that will get voters to the polls.  This is the Obama message that Dems cannot "run away" from, but run towards, at full speed.

On the other hand...then there was this.

I believe in a smarter kind of American leadership. We lead best when we combine military power with strong diplomacy; when we leverage our power with coalition building; when we don’t let our fears blind us to the opportunities that this new century presents. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now — and around the globe, it is making a difference.

First, we stand united with people around the world who’ve been targeted by terrorists — from a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris. We will continue to hunt down terrorists and dismantle their networks, and we reserve the right to act unilaterally, as we’ve done relentlessly since I took office to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to us and our allies.

 Six years into his presidency and the President just quoted the goddamn Bush Doctrine.

I know I give the "Obama isn't good enough!" people a deservedly hard time, but I 100% disagree with the President here.  Having said that, I'm not naive enough to think that any Republican or Democrat running in 2017 would stop using drones.  It beats a ground invasion.

Meanwhile, get your crap together, Democrats.

StupidiNews!

• Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo says she intends to sue FOX News over a false report from the network about supposed "no-go zones" in the city. 
•  The US Supreme Court has ruled in a unanimous, 9-0 vote that the state of Alabama cannot force a Muslim inmate to shave his beard against his religious beliefs.
• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says his country will do the "utmost" to free two Japanese citizens held by ISIS with a ransom of $200 million.
• Shiite rebels have seized Yemen's presidential complex in what appears to be a military coup unfolding in the capital of Sanaa.
• Nintendo of America abruptly announced the end of its Club Nintendo rewards program on June 30, saying that the program will be replaced by something else at some point.