Dinesh D'Felon D'Nied

No Convicted Felon Dinesh D'Souza, you can't just take summer break from your community service, you're a convicted federal criminal.

Federal Judge Richard Berman shot down conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s request that he be allowed a “summer break” from his community service because the Catholic high school at which he had been serving is on its summer recess, the New York Post’s Josh Saul reports.

D’Souza pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws by using other people’s identities to donate $20,000 to Republican Wendy Long’s failed New York senatorial bid. He was sentenced to eight months in a halfway house and community service, which he had been serving at the Mater Dei School in San Diego. 

But when the school let out for the summer, instead of finding an alternative means of performing community service, D’Souza had his parole officer petition the court for a “summer break.” Berman wouldn’t hear of it, writing that “with respect to [the] request that Mr. D’Souza’s community service hours be ‘waived’ from June 1, 2015 until July 13, 2015, the request is respectfully denied.”

“The short explanation is,” Berman continued, “as all criminal defendants are aware, that we don’t provide ‘summer breaks’ in these circumstances.” He noted that there are other “appropriate venue[s] for community service in San Diego” and strongly encouraged D’Souza to locate one of them and fulfill the terms of his parole immediately.

If Convicted Felon D'Souza didn't exist, he would have to be written into Arrested Development as a Bluth.  He's that much of a clueless, privileged bag of fermented stupid.

Frankly, the judge should have had a five minute laughing session, and then immediately thrown Convicted Felon D'Souza in prison.  But hey, this is why I'm not a federal judge.

That's probably a good thing.

An Air Apparent Situation

It's no longer a question of will man-made global warming cause damage, but how awful, widespread, deadly, and costly that damage will be.  We've hit a new milestone in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, one that foretells brutal results in the near future.

Record carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere were recorded worldwide in March, in what scientists said marked a significant milestone for global warming. 

Figures released by the US science agency Noaa on Wednesday show that for the first time since records began, the parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere were over 400 globally for a month. 

The measure is the key indicator of the amount of planet-warming gases man is putting into the atmosphere at record rates, and the current concentrations are unprecedented in millions of years. 

The new global record follows the breaking of the 400ppm CO2 threshold in some local areas in 2012 and 2013, and comes nearly three decades after what is considered the ‘safe’ level of 350ppm was passed. 

“Reaching 400ppm as a global average is a significant milestone,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist on Noaa’s greenhouse gas network. 

“This marks the fact that humans burning fossil fuels have caused global carbon dioxide concentrations to rise more than 120ppm since pre-industrial times,” added Tans. “Half of that rise has occurred since 1980."

World leaders are due to meet in Paris for a UN climate summit later this year in a bid to agree a deal to cut countries’ carbon emissions and avoid dangerous global warming.

Dr Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading told the Guardian: “This event is a milestone on a road to unprecedented climate change for the human race. The last time the Earth had this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was more than a million years ago, when modern humans hadn’t even evolved yet."

Oh, well we should probably do nothing then.  I'm sure it'll pass soon.

Our kids and grandkids, well, they won't be so lucky.  I'm sure they'll forgive us someday.

Maybe.

StupidiNews!

• A series of powerful tornadoes rocked Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska last night with Oklahoma City being hardest hit by several storms and nearly 8 inches of rain in 24 hours.
• LAPD officials are reviewing the evidence in the deadly police shooting of an unarmed homeless man Tuesday night in Venice Beach.
• British voters go to the polls today to decide a new government with polls showing the closest contest between the ruling Conservative Party and rival Labour Party in decades.
• A new global study of countries with minimum wage laws find that in 21 countries including the US, a 40 hour minimum wage work week will not get workers out of poverty.
• Tesla Motors say it will unveil the Model X electric SUV this summer and the cheaper Model 3 sedan next March, with mass production of the model in 2017.

Last Call For Doctor Feelbad

Dr. Ben Carson should really stick with the doctor part (the man is a neurosurgeon after all) and leave the politics to the slightly less bonkers people.

Republican presidential candidate and tea party favorite Ben Carson said in an interview with Newsmax that the President of the United States doesn't have to follow the Supreme Court if the high court were to rule in favor of same-sex marriage.

"First of all, we have to understand how the Constitution works. The president is required to carry out the laws of the land, the laws of the land come from the legislative branch," Carson said on Tuesday. "So if the legislative branch creates a law or changes a law, the executive branch has a responsibly to carry it out. It doesn’t say they have the responsibility to carry out a judicial law. And that's something we need to talk about." 

Carson's comments follow the Supreme Court in April beginning to hear arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, which concerns bans on same-sex marriage in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee. The nine justices seemed to split along party lines in the early arguments. If the high court were to rule with the plaintiffs, gay marriage bans across the country could be wiped out in one single wave.

Carson, as Right Wing Watch which flagged the Newsmax interview noted, has signaled support for impeaching judges who favor same-sex marriage.

Which is weird, because when President Obama actually exercised his actual Constitutional executive order plans, the right went nuts and said it was illegal.  Now Carson is saying that as President, he will set up a Constitutional crisis in order to preserve wherever it is in the Constitution where straight people get to hate LGBTQ people.

Sure, this guy seems sane and all.  Let's elect him President.

White Out On The Blue Line

The Center for Public Integrity has a new study out this month that finds in 49 of the 50 largest cities in the US, police departments have a smaller percentage of African-American as police officers on the force than the share of African-Americans in the cities those officers serve.  The lone exception? Atlanta.

In Baltimore, white people make up 28 percent of the population but 50 percent of the city's police officers. In Philadelphia, where police and protesters clashed last Thursday during a #FreddieGray rally, whites are 37 percent of the population but 58 percent of the police force. In Sacramento, whites comprise just 36 percent of residents but 72 percent of police. 

Those are just a few of the departments whose ethnic makeup is dramatically out of sync with the demographics of the cities they serve. Using census data, Chris Zubak-Skees of the Center for Public Integrity crunched the numbers for the nation's 50 most populous cities. In 49 of them—Atlanta being the lone exception—the cops are whiter than the community. 

Zubak-Skees notes that police departments in many cities have worked hard to make themselves more diverse. Acting on recommendations by the 1968 Kerner Commission—which was appointed to investigate the causes of riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit—many departments began reviewing fair promotion policies and recruiting African Americans. The numbers have improved somewhat over the years, but most big-city forces are still far from representative. The Kerner report warned that an "abrasive relationship between police and the minority communities has been a major—and explosive—source of grievance, tension, and disorder." 

"For many, those words still ring depressingly true today," CPI notes.

Is there any wonder still why there's a trust issue (not to mention the "us vs them" occupation mentality) when nearly all major police departments look nothing like the cities they are supposed to protect?

Besides Atlanta, the only other cities that are within even 5% of having the correct number of white officers on the force are Albuquerque and Seattle.

The city with the largest disparity?  Milwaukee.  The city is only 38% white, but white cops make up a whopping 70% of the Milwaukee PD. No surprise here that the worst thing to happen when a white cop shot and killed an unarmed black man in that city was that the cop was fired.

Lyin' Ryan Strikes Again

As Vox's Dylan Matthews reminds us, Rep. Paul Ryan's major problem with social programs and poverty begins with the realization that Ryan (and the GOP and much of the Village) gets the basic fact wrong on poverty.

It doesn't help that the first policy statement he makes is an out-and-out lie:

After a 50-year war on poverty and trillions of dollars spent, we still have the same poverty rates. 

This sentence suggests that either Paul Ryan has absolutely no clue how poverty rates work, or he does know and is actively deceiving viewers. First of all, the specific claim in question isn't even technically accurate. The poverty rate was 19 percent in 1964, when the War on Poverty was announced. In 2013, it was 14.5 percent. We do not have the same poverty rates we did then. Ryan is just wrong. 

But even that dramatically understates the progress that has been made. The official poverty rate is a travesty of a statistic, and using it at all in this context is irresponsible. It's literally based on food prices in 1955. But more relevantly for these purposes, it excludes the very anti-poverty programs Ryan is talking about. It excludes in-kind transfers like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers, as well as tax-based programs like the EITC. Blasting those programs because they don't show up in the poverty rate is like arguing that Netflix shows have zero viewers by pointing to cable ratings. 

And Republicans have been throwing this accusation around for a couple of years now: that the War on Poverty has been a $12 trillion (or $18 trillion or $22 trillion, depending on who is telling the lie) waste of money that hasn't helped anyone in America.

That's just an out and out lie.

A much better metric, which takes anti-poverty programs fully into account and is based on more recent data, is known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure. The SPM factors in government programs, and is based on current data about spending on food and other necessities. It's the poverty rate people like Ryan should be referencing. While the federal government has only been using the SPM for a short while, a group of researchers centered at Columbia — Christopher Wimer, Liana Fox, Irv Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, and Jane Waldfogel — went back and calculated SPM numbers for every year since 1967. To distinguish from the government-issued SPM metric, they call this "anchored SPM." 

The researchers found that anchored SPM (the blue line below) has fallen dramatically in recent decades. But if you take out government programs, you get the green line below, which doesn't fall at all. Poverty — measured accurately, in a way that includes the government programs Ryan is trying to evaluate — fell, and it fell entirely because of government programs: 

Wimer et al 

"After accounting for taxes and transfers, poverty falls by approximately 40 percent, from 26 percent to 16 percent," write Wimer et al. Absent those programs, poverty actually would have increased slightly.

So yes, we've reduced poverty in this country by a lot.  We still have a long way to go however. And Paul Ryan and the GOP will completely reverse that progress and will add millions more into poverty once they get control of everything.

There is a difference between electing Republicans and Democrats, and fighting poverty versus massive austerity is just one major difference.

StupidiNews!

• German police officials say four German nationals have been arrested for planning attacks on German Muslims and mosques.
• A Nebraska woman has filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Omaha naming herself as "an ambassador of God" against the plaintiffs, the entirety of every LGBTQ person in America.
• Hillary Clinton's latest policy speech on immigration calls for a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants and attacked her Republican rivals' plan for "second-class status".
• As Greek PM Alexis Tsipras reaches 100 days in power, the ECB is considering tighter liquidity rules for Greek banks in exchange for continued emergency funding.
• The 11th Cirtcuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that the government does not need a warrant to obtain your cell phone's location history records from your wireless carrier.

Last Call For Maximum Gohmert

You knew GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert wasn't going to be able to resist the awesomeness that is the US military's Jade Helm 15 exercises in Texas and the Southwest.

Tea party darling Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) on Tuesday demanded that the U.S. military alter a planned training exercise that some conspiracy theorists believe is cover for a possible takeover of the Lone Star state.

Gohmert said in a statement that he understands Texans' concerns that the exercise, dubbed "Jade Helm 15," may be a precursor for martial law. He directed his criticism specifically at what has been reported to be a map of the training exercise, which labels Texas, among other states, as "hostile" territory.




"Once I observed the map depicting ‘hostile,’ ‘permissive,’ and ‘uncertain’ states and locations, I was rather appalled that the hostile areas amazingly have a Republican majority, ‘cling to their guns and religion,’ and believe in the sanctity of the United States Constitution," Gohmert said in the statement.

"Such labeling by a government that is normally not allowed to use military force against its own citizens is an affront to the residents of that particular state considered as 'hostile,' as if the government is trying to provoke a fight with them," he later added.

The congressman urged the military to alter the tone of the training exercise and draw up a new map so as to dispel any notion that the federal government is "intentionally practicing war" against particular states.

States attacking other states?  Boy, he must have really hated the Confederacy actually doing that 150 years ago.

Seriously, Gohmert's going to be howling about this for months, might as well let him exhaust himself with a tantrum or sixteen now.

It's not a precursor for martial law, but it's not like Gohmert is, you know, sane.  PS, if this was under Bush's watch, noooobody would have cared.

Not Just Democrats Who Are Corrupt In New York

With all that Wall Street cash buying friends, it's no wonder that long-time NY State Assembly Speaker, Democrat Sheldon Silver, was charged with federal corruption counts back in January. Now in May, the other shoe falls as the GOP State Senate Majority leader, Dean Skelos, is facing federal corruption charges along with his son Adam.

Skelos, a 67-year-old Republican, and his 32-year-old son, Adam, were named in a six-count criminal complaint filed in Manhattan federal court that included charges of conspiracy and extortion. 

Prosecutors said Skelos pressured a real estate developer and an environmental technology company to pay his son more than $200,000 in exchange for his support on infrastructure and legislation. 

The men surrendered to the FBI on Monday morning and were expected to appear in court later in the day. Their lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

The case marked another blow to Albany, a capital that in the last decade has seen 22 legislators charged for corruption, according to New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice.

Congrats, New York, you've set a new milestone in the jackass Olympics: you've managed to make New Jersey and Illinois look good.

Then-New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, was himself was charged with corruption offenses in January, making this the first time leaders of both of New York's legislative chambers were simultaneously facing charges. 

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said Skelos's case showed that "public corruption is a deep-seated problem" in New York. 

Monday's complaint built upon evidence secured by authorities through cooperating witnesses, wire taps and search warrants.

We'll see where both of these cases go, but I'm betting running as a State Assembly or State Senate incumbent is going to be bad news in the Empire State come 2016.

Location, Location, Location

A major new study adds to the evidence that where you grow up plays a major role in how far you get in life, and of course it's the worst for kids growing up in poverty-stricken urban counties.

The feelings heard across Baltimore’s recent protests — of being trapped in poverty — seem to be backed up by the new data. Among the nation’s 100 largest counties, the one where children face the worst odds of escaping poverty is the city of Baltimore, the study found. 

The city is especially harsh for boys: Low-income boys who grew up there in recent decades make roughly 25 percent less as adults than similar low-income boys who were born in the city and moved as small children to an average place. 

Beyond Baltimore, economists say the study offers perhaps the most detailed portrait yet of upward mobility — and the lack of it. The findings suggest that geography does not merely separate rich from poor but also plays a large role in determining which poor children achieve the so-called American dream. 

How neighborhoods affect children “has been a quandary with which social science has been grappling for decades,” said David B. Grusky, director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, who was not involved in the research. “This delivers the most compelling evidence yet that neighborhoods matter in a really big way.”

So yes, after decades of white flight, gated communities, exurbs, urban gentrification, and taking schools, infrastructure, and jobs with them, are we surprised that kids who grow up with multiple structural advantages do better than those who grow up with nothing?

Why, it's almost like the people who keep pointing out that there are structural barriers to the American dream for an entire class of people, and those barriers are not a product of nebulous "morality" as some would have it but a distinct feature of our broken system (if not the desired outcome of that system that's not broken at all, but working as intended.)

In America we stack the deck so high that it blots out the sun and people still wonder why the grass doesn't grow very well. The redistribution screamers are perfectly fine with the wealth remaining in the giant Scrooge McDuck money bins that exist now. The rest of us are just there to get crushed under all that loot, I guess.

P.S. The worst counties to grow up poor in according to the study? Reservation counties, particularly in South Dakota, counties along the lower Mississippi, and Forsyth County NC, home of Winston-Salem, about a hour from where I grew up.

StupidiNews!

• Islamic State radio is now claiming responsibility for the two gunmen who attacked a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest in Texas on Sunday, promising "future attacks" against the US.
• In an appearance on David Letterman's show last night, President Obama said there are a "handful of police who are not doing the right thing" in America's cities.
• Former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee is expected to formally throw his hat into the ring for 2016 today, hoping to repeat his 2008 Iowa caucus win and more.
• Australia's central bank has cut interest rates a quarter-point to a new low of 2% as household spending is starting to rebound.
• Comcast spent over a third of a billion dollars through 2014 and 2015 in its failed attempt to buy rival Time Warner Cable as the cable giant revealed first quarter earnings this week.

Last Call For Carly Fail-O-Rama

So, guess which GOP 2016 hopeful and former HP CEO failed to register carlyfiorina.org?

This goes on for a while.

A loooooooong while.

Finally, at the bottom:

Why no, Carly Fiorina is not going to be President of the United States anytime soon, especially after getting paid $42 million to lay off those 30,000 people when that didn't fix HP's problems.

Hooray for wealth redistribution I guess if she's going to spend those millions maybe getting one or two percent of the GOP primary vote.

Blood Baiting In Texas

I'm not really sure what worse, the fact that two gunmen opened fire on a Texas event to draw the Prophet Mohammad, or the fact the event was designed specifically to provoke this kind of response and that the organizers are thrilled that this happened.

Texas police shot dead two gunmen who opened fire on Sunday outside an exhibit of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad that was organized by an anti-Islamic group and billed as a free-speech event.

The shooting in a Dallas suburb was an echo of past attacks or threats in other Western countries against art depicting the Prophet Mohammad. In January, gunmen killed 12 people in the Paris offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in revenge for its cartoons.

Sunday's attack took place at about 7 p.m. in a parking lot of the Curtis Culwell Center, an indoor arena in Garland, northeast of Dallas. Geert Wilders, a polarizing Dutch politician and anti-Islamic campaigner who is on an al Qaeda hit list, was among the speakers at the event.

Now, this seems important: we don't have a motive for this yet, but people are making a lot of assumptions. At least one of the suspects was in fact someone the FBI has been watching, a convicted felon on probation.

The exhibit was organized by Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI). Her organization, which is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group, has sponsored anti-Islamic advertising campaigns in transit systems across the country.

Organizers of the "Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest" said the event was to promote freedom of expression. They offered a $10,000 prize for the best artwork or cartoon depicting the Prophet, as well as a $2,500 "People's Choice Award."

Depictions of the Prophet Mohammad are viewed as offensive in Islam, and Western art that portrays the Prophet has sometimes angered Muslims and provoked threats and attacks from radicals.

I'll spare you the link to Geller's blog on this event, but she's thrilled and ecstatic this happened because it proves that basically all Muslims in America need to be shot, or something. Yes, the gunmen opened fire and they were immediately killed by the hefty security forces that Geller hired for the event. one security guard was shot in the leg, and nobody else but the gunmen were killed.

But frankly, if the worst "Christians" in America got into a shooting match with the worst "Muslims" in this country, I'd be rooting for nobody to be left standing so that the rest of us can get back to our lives.

Besides,



"Cartoon Event Organizer" describes her perfectly.

May The Fourth Be With You

And also with you. (Catholic Jedi joke, Zandardad will laugh for hours.)

May 4th has gotten to be a pretty decent sized unofficial holiday for Star Wars fans, so much so that you'll find all kinds of events today.

"May the 4th be with you" is a full-fledged unofficial holiday, "Star Wars Day." 

Actually, as far as Lucasfilm and Disney are concerned, it's quite official. 

So why this day, and what is there to do other than watch it trend on Twitter? (After all, it's apparently important enough to send hardcore fans into a tizzy when they feel it's been mistreated.) 

As legend has it, and according to the origin story recognized by Lucasfilm, the phrase was first used on May 4, 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher took office as UK prime minister. The Conservative party allegedly placed an ad in the London Evening News which read, "May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations." 

It took off in the social media age (where it has become a big deal every year) and finally expanded to real-life with events in Toronto. Now, there are events celebrating the day worldwide. 

There are online and in-store deals on "Star Wars" merchandise and gaming, "Star Wars" food galore and events where fans are encouraged to dress up or play "Star Wars" trivia or just enjoytheir favorite film franchise.

Well, Thatcher was pretty much a Sith Lord, so it makes sense.  Anyhow, bunch of awesome deals on Star Wars stuff and fun events to check out too.  Here's hoping that Episode VII restores balance to the Force after the trashing it got with the three prequel films.  Odds are we'll still have a long way to go to get the series back on track.

But never tell me the odds, as the man said.

StupidiNews!

• Police have killed two gunmen who attacked an event in Dallas where a $10,000 prize was being given for the best cartoon or caricature of the Prophet Mohammad.
• Dr. Ben Carson will join former HP CEO Carly Fiorina and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in making formal announcements this week to join the 2016 GOP race.
• GOP House Speaker John Boehner says that Hillary Clinton "can't sit on the sidelines" when it comes to supporting President Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
• New McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook is expected to announce today a plan to turn slumping sales at the Golden Arches around.
• Four broadband internet industry groups are petitioning for an immediate halt to the FCC's net neutrality rules classifying internet service as a public utility.