The Netanyahu fan club didn’t know that they were being recorded…
Picking up chatter from live mics and then recounting to the public is no different than what WikiLeaks does:
A staff member reportedly explained that the headphones to go with the translation sets were not yet being handed out because this would have allowed journalists to listen in on the private conversation still going on. Half a dozen journalists immediately plugged in their own headphones and caught three minutes of the private exchange.
The conversation apparently began with Obama criticising Sarkozy for not warning the US that France would vote in favour of the Palestinians’ application to join Unesco, the United Nations agency for culture and education.
One French journalist told Arrêt Sur Images that the conversation was broadcast for around three minutes before officials realised the mistake. Another told the website that the reporters agreed not to publicise the remarks because of their sensitive nature.
WikiLeaks had it’s problems (namely protecting sources), but they just focused on this type of journalism: getting people with access to information hidden by the powerful to release documents that eliminate the truth.
You would hope that the older you get, the better you understand was important in life. Besides teaching principles, facts and axioms one of the most important jobs of an educator is to help their students learn a system of ethics. I can’t look at this video and see a guy enjoying people cheering his name and think he is capable of teaching his students ethics.
After it has basically been confirmed that he covered up the rapes of at least nine boys at the hands of his longtime defensive coordinator and football benefactor as coordinator emeritus, to be out here happy and smiling…we’ve been had.
It was all a dream
I used to read Word Up magazine
Salt ‘n’ Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangin pictures on my wall
Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl
-Notorious BIG, Juicy
Dwight Myers aka Heavy D died of pneumonia related complications on Tuesday in his home. A damn shame. Heavy D was universally respected and he was last of the “regular life” rappers. They didn’t have to be the hardest, the illest, the richest or the most gangsta. I could play most of his music in front of my parents without getting my tape collection broken (Mom did stomp out my whole tape drawer after my little bro had found my DJ Quik tape…for millennials: tape drawer smashed = someone deleting mp3 library by smashing the computer it’s on..pre-cloud. nevermind). Miss this hip-hop, but it’s been A&R’ed out of existence (yes consolidation of radio stations kills music’s breadth and rap’s diversity because gangsta is the biggest bang for the buck). My all time favorite Heavy D video…Nuttin But Love:
As a 16 year old. The women in this video. Damn. Chris Tucker calling out the Noxema girl FTW.
Final Interview with Tim Westwood:
Dumping Flash will make Android better, it will make BlackBerrys better, it will make the entire web better. iOS users have been benefitting from this ever since day one, in June 2007.
So very true. Flash is the earliest grave for websites. It’s overused by lazy web developers who want to impress unwitting clients. With HTML 5 and JQuery and Microsoft abandoning Silverlight, hopefully developers rely on it less and less.
I can think of a fewfolkswho have “innovated” this new form already. With Ferguson’s new op-vid it’s not a big deal. The validating authority is Sullivan’s widely read, reader and colleague critiqued opinion blog. Someone will most probably write in to tell him he’s wrong.
In other words, this patent never should have been granted, and it used the almost always questionable “continuation” process to patent something fairly common, with lots of prior art. Good thing the patent reform bill that recently passed doesn’t touch on any of this stuff.
So the company with money to hire the most patent lawyers has the inside track on the future of American industry. Not the company that actually developed and deployed the technology first. This makes the USPTO a regressive force in the world of software development.
The response of Central Mountain High School officials to former PSU football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse charges has really exposed Spanier, Curly, Schultz and Paterno as being woefully morally and professionally negligent in protecting pre-teen and teen boys brought to PSU through Sandusky’s Second Mile youth charity:
The attorney general says the quick action taken by officials at Central Mountain High School is in marked contrast to the action of those at Penn State 7 years earlier.
[…]
The attorney general says Central Mountain officials called police and barred Sandusky from the campus when that parent came forward.
The reports from here helped launch the attorney general’s investigation.
“The local people at least cared enough to say something and take care of it but he got away with it for a long time,” said Penny Williams of Mill Hall
It needs to be said that Sandusky was a crafty predator. He was using his cache as a former PSU coach and his Second Mile charity (founded in 1977) to reach prospective victims Sandusky wasn’t exposed at either place for years. There’s no Chris Hansen running around catching predators. It takes a courageous victim and family to confront this horror and seek justice in these cases and even then, those in authority often do not protect the victims and prosecute perpetrators to the fullest extent. It seems the difference is that Central Mountain’s officials protected their students to protect their institution, Penn State protected their knowledge of Sandusky’s transgressions to protect their institution.
The more that comes out about this situation, the worse it looks for everyone at Penn State.
Broncos over Raiders with both teams being led by two QBs trying to prove they belong. (Any confidence in Palmer should be tempered by the fact that QB Andy Dalton has led his former team to the top of AFC north during the 1st half of his rookie year). In the end this week’s redemption was Broncos running back Willis Mcgahee’s.
Bengals over Titans: Andy Dalton has a beast of a day while leading keeping the Bengals in the drivers seat.
Cards over Rams to OT with Larry Fitzgerald getting his 1st TD of the season from his QB of choice’s backup and Peterson’s game winning kick return
Giants over Pats with (Eli) Manning killing the Pats late.
Packers over Chargers in a spread busting game exposing both defenses as pretenders and both offenses as contenders and Phil Rivers as a QB who could be on the cusp of becoming a great or a goat while playing the greatest QB this year Aaron Rodgers.
Ravens at Steelers. Bad blood. Great game. clutch drive by Big Ben to put Steelers into the lead made irrelevant by clutch 92 yard game winning drive by Joe Flacco.
Gerald "Jerry" Sandusky sits in a car as he leaves the office of Center County Magisterial District Judge Leslie A. Dutchcot, Nov. 5, 2011, in State College, Pa. (Andy Colwell/The Patriot-News/AP)
If allegations are true, Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier knew about Jerry Sandusky’s use of Pennsylvania State University Athletic Department facilities to sexually assault boys since 2002 and the Athletic director knew of Sandusky’s crimes since 1998.
And in 2002, Kelly said, a graduate assistant saw Sandusky sexually assault a naked boy, estimated to be about 10 years old, in a team locker room shower. The grad student and his father reported what he saw to Paterno, who immediately told Curley, prosecutors said.
Curley and Schultz met with the graduate assistant about a week and a half later, Kelly said.
“Despite a powerful eyewitness statement about the sexual assault of a child, this incident was not reported to any law enforcement or child protective agency, as required by Pennsylvania law,” Kelly said.
There’s no indication that anyone at school attempted to find the boy or follow up with the witness, she said.
Curley denied that the assistant had reported anything of a sexual nature, calling it “merely ‘horsing around,'” the 23-page grand jury report said. But he also testified that he barred Sandusky from bringing children onto campus and that he advised Penn State President Graham Spanier of the matter.
The grand jury said Curley was lying, Kelly said, adding that it also deemed portions of Schultz’s testimony not to be credible.
Schultz told the jurors he also knew of a 1998 investigation involving sexually inappropriate behavior by Sandusky with a boy in the showers the football team used.
But despite his job overseeing campus police, he never reported the 2002 allegations to any authorities, “never sought or received a police report on the 1998 incident and never attempted to learn the identity of the child in the shower in 2002,” the jurors wrote. “No one from the university did so.”
Sandusky was barred from bringing children on to the campus, and yet he could continue to use Campus facilities for his charity golf tournament in 2007. The report notes that long time head coach Joe Paterno immediately reported the incident to his boss, Penn State athletic director Tim Curley. University President Spanier knew of these allegations while Curley sat on the allegations. Oddly enough Curley was charged with violating state law by failing to report the incidents to authorities but Spanier wasn’t. Spanier then released the following tone deaf statement:
The university president, Graham B. Spanier, who the grand jury said had been made aware of the 2002 incident, said in a statement that he stood behind the two officials.
“I have known and worked daily with Tim and Gary for more than 16 years,” Mr. Spanier said. “I have complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations about a former university employee.”
…
A graduate assistant for the team told the grand jury he alerted Mr. Paterno in 2002 that he had seen Mr. Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in the shower at the Lasch Football Building on the Penn State campus. The graduate student told the grand jury he went to Mr. Paterno’s home the next day and described what he had seen. Mr. Paterno, in turn, told Mr. Curley.
In 2002, Penn State officials were alerted they had a pedophile using their facilities and football program to lure and molest children and then leveraged this access to the football program to bribe the children into silence. It’s 2011 now and Sandusky is just now being charged. It’s unacceptable that Spanier didn’t demand action from his subordinates and it’s equally shameful that Paterno would simply comply with minimum reporting policy and not demand Sandusky turn himself before Paterno, Curley or Spanier did.
The blog post Scripting News: Mike I thought I knew yuz illustrates how character narrative becomes a misleading shorthand for some political truths. Winer is suprised by Bloomberg’s defense of Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis triggered by his distaste for Occupy Wall Street:
Finally we had an adult in there, someone who is smart, and because he’s super-rich, didn’t have to sell out to win his office. He could stay grounded in the truth. Sure, he made mistakes. Everyone does. But for the most he was doing a good job of running a very complicated place.
But now this OWS thing has really sent him for a loop. He’s lying. I gotta believe that’s what it is. Because I just can’t accept that he is so stupid that he actually believes the Republican bullshit he’s saying.
Winer discount’s Bloomberg’s business and political practices prior to OWS.
Bloomberg thrives on Wall Street even as he holds office. It wouldn’t be good business for Mayor Bloomberg to criticize his clients. He moved from the 142nd richest person in the world to the 17th in the end of the aughts and 12th by 2011. This is due to Bloomberg LP the financial media & news firm which he owns 82% of and is a vendor delivering 300,000+ terminals to financial professionals through the flagship terminal product alone. You see, before and during his tenure as a Mayor, he was a vendor to most of Wall Street. I imagine he will be one after. On top of that, any New York mayor enjoys a tax base inflated by Wall Street and doesn’t want to push those dollars away.
I would guess Bloomberg became a Republican in 2001 because he was fine with the social landscape on a state and national level (the sum total of his left leanings) and felt a need to implement more Republican policy. The move was as politically prudent as it was electorally convenient. I think Bloomberg loves to cultivate this political image of “independence”, especially with recent criticism of GOP candidates:
“We have presidential candidates who don’t believe in science,” Bloomberg said, without singling out dubious Republican candidates directly.
“I mean, just think about it, can you imagine a company of any size in the world where the CEO said ‘oh I don’t believe in science’ and that person surviving to the end of that day? Are you kidding me? It’s mind-boggling!”
Bloomberg grew coy when asked which candidate he was talking about.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You can check the presidential candidates’ speeches… I don’t have time to go do it but all their speeches, everything they said.”
Couple that with NYPD’s treatment of protesters under Bloomberg during the 2004 Republican convention in New York, well prior to Occupy Wall Street and the fact of the matter is you shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t see Wall Street as run amok and OWS as useful. If you are forced to govern, especially for three terms, you become a partisan on every issue.
This is a provably bad idea. Congress passed a repatriation tax holiday in 2004. The Congressional Research Service reported “little evidence” that new investment was spurred. A recent study by the Democratic staff of a Senate subcommittee found that the 15 companies that repatriated the most profits, more than $150 billion, ended up cutting their U.S. workforces by nearly 21,000 jobs.
It’s a simple fact: CEOs of large companies in bad times work to create efficiency and keep the balance sheet in the black. The easiest way they can do that is to lay off workers, replace current labor with cheaper labor and hoard cash. If they don’t spend the additional cash, it has little effect on the nation’s economy.
A related Senate location privacy proposal, introduced in June by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), was slightly weakened to attract Republican support. (Wyden’s proposal addresses only location-tracking, including warrantless cell phone tracking, not cloud computing and the other principles embraced by the coalitionn.)
The final version of Wyden’s bill deleted about nine pages of text that would have curbed foreign intelligence location collection. But it also gained a conservative Republican supporter in the form of Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah.
This week, Sen. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican, announced he was signing on to Wyden’s bill.
“The technological advancements we’ve seen in the past 25 years have revolutionized the way we live our lives, but unfortunately surveillance protections have not kept pace,” Kirk said. “It’s time our digital privacy laws go Back to the Future for a sorely needed update
I use a lot of Google products. Search. Gmail. Docs. Android 3.x on two devices. Maps. Navigation. Google+. Google Voice. GChat. One of my favorite was Google Reader through Google.com in Chrome browser (primarily), apps on my T-Mobile G2 (secondarily) and occasionally on my iPad 1 through the Google App and Samsung Galaxy Tab Tablet.
From the 1st to the 20th of October, I used Google Reader through all these channels this much:
From your 220 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 7,832 items, clicked 543 items, starred 140 items, shared 2,454 items, and emailed 88 items.
Since May 29, 2009 you have read a total of 300,000+ items.
Those shared items are there for an express reason. I use the aggregate of those shared items to populate the “recommended reads” list on my blog. I use(d) the share button to do two things:
“Share” to my voluntary Google Reader followers (share)
Curate my sources into an RSS feed (that is this blog’s recommended reading list (share)
Along with some other features I find (found rather) extremely valuable about the product:
Sharing with notes. i could share an article without just saying: read this. I could say read this and leave a note saying “beware of graphic content”. Or I could say read this and leave a note saying: “I think whatever this person is saying is b.s. and here’s why”. (share with notes)
The other functionality I use is the “Send” function which allows me forward articles a list of e-mail recipients. (send)
Read the Curated “share” lists of my “Followers”. (“Friends” feeds”)
Tags as feeds: Tagged folders were also feeds.
Using Google Reader in this manner I amassed all of 20 some followers directly. Google Reader is going to disable the current Google Reader Sharing Functionality and replace it with Google+’s +1 button. They tell me: this is better. Reasons I don’t like Google’s sea change:
Sharing is not Distributing: Sharing is opening up to the public and passive, +1 is distribution to a private list and active. Anyone can stumble across what I have shared.
Distribution is hardest to disrupt: There are already mailing lists, online groups/message boards and social networking groups to facilitate this communication. I have no interest in going through thousands of contacts and creating a copy of these groups so I can use Google+.
“+1” doesn’t mean what Google wants it to: +1 will be awful, inaccurate terminology to use for something I would “share”. It’s the same problem with “like”. I can definitely share something I don’t like.
This is an arrogant statement born of a belief that I won’t take my news reading elsewhere or the belief that they are sure that in sharing all those items to the general public my true intent was to share them to my 7 closest friends from high school. I use Google Reader to save time spent reading and recommending news, time I don’t have to waste. Now that it’s a subordinate to Google+, Reader is good as dead to me.
A few years ago it was pretty common to hear folks like Fred Barnes gleefully noting how much Palin annoys liberals.
Cain is tapping into this with his ads. To tea baggers he is saying: I believe what you believe is self evident. Everyone else: Your opinions don’t matter to if you are tothe left of say Pat Robertson. Unlike Palin (and McCain for that matter), Cain passes the sound off test. Romney fails this too. By “sound off” test, I mean if you turn off the TV and don’t know what Cain is talking about, his time motivational speaking shines through.
Cain is playing the charismatic drumbeat for the tea bagger hymn: flat taxes, identifying racism as the figment of brainwashed black people’s minds (as brothers like he and Rick Perry know to be true), dropping regulations, and telling young people, Democrats and the liberal media to shut the heck up if they ask about foreign policy or social issues. Take Cain’s campaign at this level, and you’ve got it! Don’t think anymore.
If you think 9-9-9 is a tax plan that will raise prices for the middle class, just know Herman Cain said it won’t. Economists disagree with Herman Cain? Well, they don’t understand embedded cost, so they need to just shut up. Okay, 9-0-9 for the poor people. But that’s it.
And that people frying border fence? To paraphrase Cain: I was joking. But the more I talk about it, the more I think ‘We’ll make it happen’.
That’s how he rolls.
Explain ludicrous plutocratic platform with attitude. When all else fails: smile. I’m joking. But in a serious way (then turn back to your tea bagger base and re-assure them: I. Ain’t. Joking. Because we azll know Muslim caliphate, Kenyan Mau Mau, Militant Black Panther, White People Hating, Puppet of Jewish People, America Destroying, Not Black Enough because he’s half a hippie Barack Hussein Obama isn’t when he meets in secret with his America hating friends. That’s right, he can get away with saying “just kidding” because they think Obama (prior to that Clinton) and any other Democrat has secretly sworn allegiance to a host of evils. So it’s okay to be deceptive to the liberal media and Democrats. They are in on the liberal conspiracy too. That’s right friends: “black helicopters” is a mainstream campaign strategy. Palin and Cain and Perry aren’t winking and smiling at liberals, they are letting their base know: remember that stuff we talked about…I’m about it. 24/7. That’s why he is in the lead.
Barack Obama didn’t nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Scarborough is honest about that. After that he is dishonest about the reason why. Scarborough says that Obama is such a Wall Street chum that when the bankers said: don’t, Obama would have said: o.k. If Wall Street did control Obama, the CFPB never would have been implemented in Dodd-Frank and/or Obama would have vetoed it.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who pushed for Warren to be named the agency’s director, said she was not interested in the long-term appointment. Obama said Warren would “play a pivotal role” in helping him choose the agency’s director.
But White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs would not rule Warren out as a potential nominee for the position. He said Obama would nominate a director in the next several months.
Obama’s appointment of Warren was cheered by her supporters in Congress and at consumer and liberal groups that had pushed strongly for her to be the agency’s first director.
“This is the boldest step Obama’s taken so far to rein in the big Wall Street banks. And it’s a major victory for grass-roots progressives who rallied for Warren,” the liberal group MoveOn.org said in an e-mail to members titled “Victory!”
But some Republicans in Congress and business groups criticized Obama’s move. They said that the agency, with an annual budget of about $500 million, had broad power, and the confirmation process for the director is one of the only congressional checks.
Warren and the Obama administration were aware her appointment would be blocked by Senate GOP. I am sure she would have liked to have the job, but the point here is that she was able to start the CFPB as a special adviser to the president. Scarborough isn’t hearing any of these facts (start right before the 10m mark):
Obama didn’t nominate Warren because if she had been officially nominated, her nomination would have been blocked by 44 Republicans and 3 to 5 Wall Street friendly, Blue Dog Democrats also known by the title US Senator. . A recess appointment was in order? Well the Senate GOP blocked that too by staying in touch:
The Senate is technically staying in session – even though senators won’t be doing any business – over next week’s Memorial Day recess because Republicans want to prevent President Obama from making recess appointments, including the possible appointment of Elizabeth Warren to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Congressional Republicans, with the backing of Wall Street, have fiercely opposed the appointment of consumer advocate and Harvard professor Warren to head the commission she helped create. GOP Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) accused Warren of lying this week in one example of the aggressive criticism of Warren from the right.
“Well, the White House dropped consideration of Elizabeth Warren because the Republicans in the Senate said they will not let her pass. Period,” Schumer said. “Even were the President to try a recess appointment, they wouldn’t allow the Senate to recess. So the President was just facing reality when he said that he couldn’t nominate her because she never would have been approved. Forty-four senators I believe signed the letter; 44 Republican senators that wouldn’t allow her to come.”
Warren would have been in a holding pattern and all of her work done while interim admin of the CFPB would have not been done. Later, as it was clear Senate conservatives would block Warren’s nomination no matter what, Obama did nominate a good candidate who was elected state wide in a swing state. Ohio AG Rich Cordray was supported by Republican lawmakers from his state. Which means he should be confirmed regardless of the senate’s make up, right? of course not:
Attorneys general from 37 states and U.S. territories urged senators to confirm the nomination of their former colleague, Richard Cordray, to be the first director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The nomination of Cordray, Ohio’s attorney general from 2009 to 2011, has been stalled in the Senate because of Republican demands for major changes in the structure of the agency. But the attorneys general — including eight Republicans — urged senators to vote for Cordray because he is “both brilliant and balanced.”
“Some of us may disagree with aspects of the Dodd-Frank legislation,” they wrote in a letter Tuesday on the letterhead of the National Assn. of Attorneys General. “But we are united in our belief that Mr. Cordray is very well qualified to carry out the responsibilities of this position.”
One of the Republicans who signed the letter, Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff, said it was important to get a director confirmed who could start working with states on mortgages and other key issues.
“We need Rich Cordray in there,” Shurtleff told reporters on a conference call organized by the White House. “He knows us, knows how to work with us.”
The Senate Banking Committee approved Cordray’s nomination this month on a 12-10 party line vote. This spring, nearly all Senate Republicans — enough to keep the nomination from moving forward — publicly vowed to block any nominee to head the agency unless the Obama administration agreed to water down its power by making some key changes.
Congressional Republicans don’t want the Obama Administration to have success. Period. Whether or not Obama’s policies are liberal or not is not the case. He literally has a congress that won’t allow him to fully staff the federal government. The failure of the American people to understand this falls upon media talking heads like Scarborough who drag exposition of their own ideological views in front of the political truth. In this case Scarborough confuses donations with prerogative : Obama has tried to staff the government to execute his strategy. The Republicans won’t let him staff the executive branch as a craven political tactic.
The Occupy Oakland encampment in Frank Ogawa Plaza—renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by its new residents—was kicked out by Oakland police using smoke grenades on Tuesday morning over what authorities claimed were “sanitary and public safety concerns.” At least 75 people were arrested in the process, and protesters say three were hurt. “I think we allowed people to exercise their rights to free speech and free assembly,” OPD Chief Howard Jordan told reporters.
Protests bring out the best and worst of Police executives and our big city governments. They really do.
When the other Democratic candidates lost support in the 08 primaries, Obama, Edwards and Clinton and later (Obama and Clinton) readily gained most of that support. Those two candidates were in most Democratic voters top 1 to 3 choices. When Bachmann, Perry and now Herman Cain are taking turns supplanting a candidate as a front runner, that candidate has to be concerned about their constituency not being that enamored of them. You are already outside of the top choices for most of the voters for the GOP nomination.
