Beware of Trojans bearing gifts: Murdoch computer hacking scandal begins to unwind

Josh Halliday, The Guardian:

A 52-year-old man has become the first person arrested as part the Metropolitan police’s investigation into alleged computer hacking by the press.

The man was arrested in Milton Keynes on Thursday morning in connection with computer misuse offences.

He is the first person to be arrested by Scotland Yard’s Operation Tuleta, the force investigating breaches of privacy involving computers.

Who is Occupy Wall Street?

One of the huge lies on right-wing TV is the characterization of Occupy Wall Street as lefties, losers and drug addicts. It’s actually a remarkably broad movement. One of its members is retired police captain Ray Lewis:

(Image from Mindbabies)

Interview Part 1

Interview Part 2

Ray Lewis is an amazing guy. He adds excellent perspective of what the police action looks like from the standpoint of an experienced officer. He notes that the police violence is coming primarily from supervisors, not the ordinary officers, who treated him entirely professionally. His reaction on seeing the pepper spraying in UC Davis? “The man [Lieutenant Pike] is a psychopath.”

Wonder when Fox Noise will let Captain Lewis explain why he’s at OWS.

No, I don’t.

Posted, cringing

As a Christian, stories like this trouble me deeply. Claire Gordon, Daily Finance:

A $10 bill is a joyful sight for a server. But when one waiter went to retrieve such a note out from under a diner’s plate recently, he reportedly noticed something curious. The tip it provided wasn’t monetary, but took the form of advice. “SOME THINGS ARE BETTER THAN MONEY,” it said on the back, “like your eternal salvation, that was brought and paid for by Jesus going to the cross.”
…
The idea that Christians are poor tippers apparently has been whispered in service circles for a long time. Many waiters try not work Sunday brunch, so as to avoid notoriously stingy churchgoers, claims Justin Wise, the director of a Lutheran ministry in Des Moines, Iowa.

“Christians don’t tip very well,” he wrote for The Lutheran magazine in January 2009. “As a matter of fact, we’re pretty cheap. What makes this worse is that we paint ‘cheap’ with a religious-sounding veneer and call it ‘being a good steward.’ Nothing like hiding behind the Bible to camouflage your stinginess.”
…
[Now, in fact, a careful study has shown that Christians are not less likely to tip less for good service. But] while it is statistically false to say that Christians are bad tippers, it is true that Christians are more likely to stiff their servers than people of other religious (or non-religious) bents.

The waiter who got the counterfeit-Christian bill makes $2.65 an hour plus tips. Now, in upscale restaurants during busy times, waitstaff make really good money, the kind that Tom Emmer imagines they make. But the reality is that:

In May 2008, median hourly wages (including tips) of waiters and waitresses were $8.01. The middle 50 percent earned between $7.32 and $10.35. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $6.73, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $14.26 an hour. For most waiters and waitresses, higher earnings are primarily the result of receiving more in tips rather than higher hourly wages. Tips usually average between 10 percent and 20 percent of guests’ checks; waiters and waitresses working in busy or expensive restaurants earn the most.

If you work 60 hours a week, you can expect to take home about $25,000 a year. If you’re simply not able to handle that much work–and most of us can’t after we hit 40 or 50–then you’re probably making $16,000 per year. Not even enough to raise a family in dignity.

That makes waitstaff in most restaurants the least of these. And for those, Jesus said this:

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’ (Matt. 25)

And that is why there will be so few self-styled “Christians” and so many self-styled “atheists” in heaven.

If you haven’t done something tangible to help someone feel thanksgiving on this holiday, take a moment. There are homeless people who lack clothing. There are families with not enough to eat. There are unemployed folks, including many veterans who need to know that they are not forgotten. And if you’re eating out and don’t have enough money to have a good dinner and pay a tip, well, eat a little less and tip a little more.

Krugman: CBO scores Obama policy as contractionary

We all know that the advent of the Republicans meant that fiscal policy became even more contractionary. But what’s interesting is that the planned stimulus by Obama was far, far less than the decline in potential GDP, even as it was known in early 2009. Krugman:

The CBO has released the latest assessment of the American Recovery and Reconstruction Act, aka Obama stimulus. What it tells us is that the US federal government has been practicing destructive fiscal austerity since the middle of 2010 (and that’s not even talking about what’s happening at the state and local level). Here’s the average of CBO’s high and low estimates of the impact of the ARRA on the level (not the rate of growth) of GDP by quarter:(emphasis added)

Krugman shows a nice graph. To me what is interesting is what it says about the overall predicted stimulus was about 1.5% of GDP for 2009 and 2010, then essentially bupkis. But even in 2009, we knew that the output gap was much larger. The following graph, from early 2011, prior to the recent GDP revisions, shows an output gap of 7.5%. narrowing barely to 6.1% in 2011. Not so coincidentally, 6.1% is approximately 1.5 percentage points less than 7.5%.

In other words, there was no growth except from the stimulus. There was no bootstrap effect, in which business gains some confidence, hires some workers, and a virtuous circle is re-established.

Media Finally Starts Backtalking To Bloomberg, NYPD’s Kelly

Finally:

A cross-section of 13 news organizations in New York City lodged complaints on Monday about the New York Police Department’s treatment of journalists covering the Occupy Wall Street movement. Separately, 10 press clubs, unions and other groups that represent journalists called for an investigation and said they had formed a coalition to monitor police behavior going forward.

Monday’s actions were prompted by a rash of incidents on Nov. 15, when police officers impeded and even arrested reporters during and after the evictions of Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the two-month-old movement.

Maybe this might make the press a bit less willing to swallow Bloomie and Kelly’s dog-and-pony shows? Maybe?

Foreclosers foreclosed

Soon, the staff will get to do a real-life enactment of what they were mocking!

(Image from Zero Hedge)

New York Foreclosure Firm That Mocked Homeless to Close Down

A New York law firm criticized for mocking the homeless is closing. Steven J. Baum P.C. is one of the largest-volume mortgage foreclosure firms in the state. Last month, leaked photos published by the New York Times showed employees of the firm dressed up as foreclosure victims, squatters and homeless people at a 2010 Halloween party. Their office was decorated to look like a row of foreclosed homes. The firm has been under investigation by the New York attorney general’s office and has agreed to a $2 million fine for filing misleading documents in state and federal courts.

Let us celebrate this small dollop of justice, and pray that Goldman et al. receive their just deserts.

Pregnant Occupy Seattle Protester, Kicked And Pepper-Sprayed By Cops, Loses Baby

And now we have, in addition to the figurative miscarriages of justice connected to police violence against Occupy protesters, a literal miscarriage as well, as Jennifer Fox has just lost the fetus she was carrying, five days after being kicked and hit in the stomach by Seattle police:

“I was standing in the middle of the crowd when the police started moving in,” she says. “I was screaming, ‘I am pregnant, I am pregnant. Let me through. I am trying to get out.’” At that point, Fox continues, a Seattle police officer lifted his foot and it hit her in the stomach, and another officer pushed his bicycle into the crowd, again hitting Fox in the stomach. “Right before I turned, both cops lifted their pepper spray and sprayed me. My eyes puffed up and my eyes swelled shut,” she says.

Fox asked for medical attention—the now-famous photo by Josh Trujillo of her being carried to the ambulance is here (click to the second photo)—and was rushed to Harborview Medical Center, she says, where doctors performed an ultrasound and said that they “didn’t see anything wrong with the baby at the time.” Fox says she had also seen a physician at Harborview for prenatal care about five week before.

“Everything was going okay until yesterday, when I started getting sick, cramps started, and I felt like I was going to pass out,” Fox says.

A friend called for an ambulance near the community college campus. (Fox says she has been camping with Occupy Seattle since it first began in Westlake Park. She is homeless and says, “I don’t have a place. This is the place I call home.”) When she arrived at Harborview at 11:00 a.m., she says, a doctor told her that “there was no heartbeat” from the baby. “They diagnosed that I was having a miscarriage. They said the damage was from the kick and that the pepper spray got to it [the fetus], too.”

If she can get her doctors to say this in writing and on the record, there will be hell to pay for the Seattle Police Department.
_____________
Charles adds, 11/23: Dominic Holden, who originally reported this for The Stranger, has developed doubts about the veracity of Jennifer Fox’s claims. However, his reasons are thin: she has said she was either one, two, or three months pregnant. Uncertainty about how far advanced a pregnancy is is not too unusual. She hasn’t yet filed a complaint. Again, not necessarily unusual. Holden might be surprised to learn that women who lose a wanted pregnancy are grieving a death, and don’t necessarily respond well to having papers thrust at them with a demand that they prove their claim. If they are planning to file a complaint, they might even want to talk to an attorney. It’s hard to see any advantage to Fox for making up the story and carrying it to the lengths she has, including holding a service. Without medical evidence, she cannot prevail in a claim against the city.

But, ok: suppose she is just making this up. The fact remains that the police did not know whether she was pregnant or not when they started swinging sticks and spraying people with pepper spray. They behaved recklessly. When they are not facing any threat, as was the case in Portland, they should treat everyone as if they might be causing irreparable harm.
______________
Charles adds, 12/31: I cannot find any evidence that Fox has substantiated her claim of a miscarriage. However, there is one indication that she wasn’t confabulating. A Seattle blogger said he saw a medical report supporting her claim. But this remains an unfinished story.

Glenn Greenwald on Link TONIGHT

Glenn Greenwald will have a show on Link at 11PM Eastern, 7PM Pacific.

Probably worth your time. If you don’t have cable, I think you can watch here.

Don’t let the door hit you, Bernie

My history with Cardinal Law has nothing to do with his disgraceful behavior with regard to the child abuse scandal in the Boston diocese. Instead, I wrote to him to urge him that if he genuinely cared about the unborn, he and the Catholic Church could best start by declaring that smoking is not consistent with the so-called Culture of Life. I got a letter back from one of his flunkies telling me that the then-Archbishop had received my letter. To the best of my knowledge, the Church has never, ever taken a stand against the tobacco industry. And, when you think about it, that’s arguably an even more serious sin than even condoning industrial scale child abuse. It’s an institutional decision to let hundreds of thousands of Americans, including wanted unborn children, die for the profits of the tobacco industry. How is it possibly morally excusable to call abortion “murder,” as the Church does, but condone actions known to lead to miscarriage?

Anyway, the wheels of justice grind slow, but Law is finally being forced out of public view. Sarah Delaney of CNS delicately phrases it this way:

Cardinal Bernard F. Law, former archbishop of Boston, has been replaced as archpriest of the Rome Basilica of St. Mary Major, the Vatican announced.
…
Cardinal Law turned 80 Nov. 4, at which time he stopped being a member of Roman Curia agencies.

Pope John Paul II appointed Cardinal Law to the position in May 2004, about two years after he resigned as Boston’s archbishop amid criticism of his handling of clerical sexual abuse cases in the archdiocese.

The AP has a few more details.

The only rationale that I can see for the longevity of Bernard Law in the Catholic Church is that he is a loyal soldier for Opus Dei and the political right.

Dear AP Et Al: Dow Tanking Because ECB Won’t Rescue Europe, Not Because Super Committee “Failed”

David Dayen speaks:

This is ridiculous. The collapse of the talks has nothing to do with the stock market. Europe is leading the world to depression. US lawmakers failed to replace $1.2 trillion in budget cuts with some other $1.2 trillion in budget cuts. Either way, there will be $1.2 trillion in budget cuts. Every rating agency has come out and said that this will not have any impact on US long-term borrowing rates. And even if they did, like Standard and Poor’s did earlier in the year, it had absolutely no impact on those borrowing rates. In fact, those rates plunged even lower.

To sum up, there will be no impact globally from the failure of the Super Committee. There will be no impact outside of the 10 miles square in the District of Columbia. That’s why the committee failed. There was no advantage to either party to make a deal. In fact, both parties perceived an advantage to not make a deal. And since the fallback was spending cuts, even distasteful spending cuts, it was attractive to both parties – to Democrats because the cuts avoided entitlements and hit defense, to Republicans because taxes would not be touched.

Paul Krugman speaks:

What would you expect to see if debt worries were roiling the markets? The short answer is that you would expect to see interest rates and stock prices moving in opposite directions: debt worries should be sending US borrowing costs up and US equities down. What you actually see is the opposite correlation. Here’s the past year:

This immediately suggests that what’s driving both asset prices is fluctuating optimism or pessimism about the economy, with fears of economic weakness driving both rates and stock prices down.

But of course the entities pushing the “Supercommittee failure roils stocks” line want to see huge tax cuts from grandma- and economy-killing austerity, so they’ll likely keep pushing it.