Political Irony

The good news is Congress passed the $1.15 trillion spending bill that will keep the government from shutting down next week.

How they did it is the bad news. First of all, it includes $620 billion in tax breaks, which will make our deficit worse.

The really bad news is that new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan inserted the entire CISA (Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act) into the budget bill during reconciliation. Reconciliation is the process by which, after the House and the Senate have passed a bill a joint committee irons out the differences between the two versions so the bill can proceed to the president for signature. Reconciliation is not meant as an opportunity to add an entirely separate (and unrelated) bill into the mix.

CISA is the bill that could not pass on its own. You would think we would know better, after all the revelations that our government has been illegally spying on its own citizens, something that we know about only because of people like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange, who have paid dearly with their freedom. Instead, CISA gives the government even more power to spy on us, and gives corporations the ability to share personal and private information about us with each other.

Doubling down, the version of CISA that Ryan inserted into the must-pass budget bill is far worse than the CISA that could not pass on its own. Originally touted as a bill that would protect us from cyber-terrorists in order to sell it to Congress and the American people, the new version drops that pretense and “Quietly Turns CISA Into A Full On Surveillance Bill“.

The new bill guts requirements that your personal information be scrubbed from mass collected data. It also allows the government to use this information to detect any criminal behavior. The Constitution specifically prohibits searches without probable cause, but this bill allows the government to spy on your digital life any time it wants for any reason (actually, for no reason at all).

To put this in perspective, what would you think about a country where the government put microphones in everyone’s home and business and listened in on all their private conversations? Where the government opened everyone’s mail, including personal letters and credit card statements. Or could demand that any company provide them with all information they have about their citizens (including from Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Google). You’d probably say they lived in an oppressive, totalitarian country. Well, that’s what CISA does to us.

Yes, we had a chance to block CISA. Obama could have vetoed the entire spending bill, shutting down the government. That would have been political suicide for the Democrats. No, Ryan and the GOP knew they could sneak this into the must-pass spending bill at the last minute. Especially now after the recent terrorist shootings.

We have given up our freedom for a modicum of security. And as Benjamin Franklin said, we deserve neither. And we will get neither. This bill makes us less secure, while destroying our freedom.

More bad news from Conservative Utopia. And in an ironic way it is too bad that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker quit his run for the presidency, or else this story would be getting more attention.

Part of why Walker never got any traction in his presidential bid is that his state’s economy has gone into the toilet under his command (especially compared to adjacent states with progressive governors). But a less well known reason is because he has repeatedly violated campaign finance laws (despite those laws being ridiculously lax).

Walker was accused of coordinating with a number of “dark money” groups, including several associated with the Koch brothers. These groups are supposedly charities, so they don’t have to disclose their donors, but are expressly prohibited from working directly with any candidates.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against the investigation back in July.

Never mind that two of the justices who ruled against the investigation had received large sums of money from the same dark money groups (in Wisconsin, Supreme Court justices are elected), and did not recuse themselves. Their decision even “legislated from the bench” (something that conservatives claim to abhor), allowing politicians to coordinate directly with special interest groups on “issues ads” as long as they don’t explicitly tell people to vote for a specific candidate, even though any coordination at all was previously illegal. Indeed, in 1999 then-Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Jon Wilcox’s campaign was fined $60,000 for engaging in exactly the same type of coordination on issue ads as done by Walker (a majority of the court’s eight current justices served alongside Wilcox).

But now the story has taken another ironic twist. More evidence had come up against Walker, sending the case back to the Supreme Court. Of course, they ruled against the new evidence as well, but then they went one step further. They fired the special prosecutor for the case, Francis Schmitz. Schmitz is a retired US Army colonel and a former counter-terrorism prosecutor. At the same time, Republicans launched a campaign to discredit Schmitz, accusing him of being a “partisan investigator run amok” conducting a witch hunt against the governor. Which is pretty silly as Schmitz is a Republican, was appointed by Republicans, and even voted for Walker in the 2012 election.

Why did they fire him? Because it will prevent Schmitz from taking the case to the US Supreme Court, which would be the next logical step given the conflicts of interest on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. According to a respected former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, “To somehow remove the lawyer representing one of the parties after the opinion [has been issued] is extraordinary. It puts the case in a very odd situation, removing counsel so he cannot file an appeal.”

And in a dissenting opinion, a current justice said “The Special Prosecutor’s authority to proceed would still be intact if he had not brought a motion for reconsideration. Does this make sense? Not to me.”

The best part is the response from Schmitz to being fired. In a prepared statement, he said:

The miscalculation I made in this investigation was underestimating the power and influence special interest groups have in Wisconsin politics. My career in the military and as a federal prosecutor fighting violent criminals and terrorists did not fully prepare me for the tactics employed by these special interest groups.

UPDATE: Wisconsin seems to be dismantling its ethics laws.

© Tom Tomorrow

Transgendered liberal activist? Video of a living fetus being debrained? Pyramids are really grain silos?

Unfortunately, I think Republicans have gone way beyond quantum mechanics and into quantum fantasy, where Republicans can believe multiple contradictory things at the same time, and people are losers just because someone said they are.

On Saturday night in Paris, the nations of the world, rich and poor alike, signed a historic agreement to fight climate change. It may not be perfect, but it is better than almost anyone expected. Many parts of it are legally binding. What a change from the Copenhagen talks in 2009, which collapsed in chaos.

© Nick Anderson

The artist known as Banksy just unveiled a painting in the refugee camp in Calais, France, depicting Steve Jobs as a Syrian refugee. The elusive artist released a rare statement to go along with the mural:

We’re often led to believe migration is a drain on the country’s resources but Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian migrant. Apple is the world’s most profitable company, it pays over $7billion a year in taxes–and it only exists because they allowed in a young man from Homs.

The birth city of Abdulfattah “John” Jandali (Jobs’ biological father) has been ravaged by Syria’s brutal civil war.