perfidy

Can you guess which of the ministers might have been responsible for this gem of succinct, trenchant commentary?

If I pooped on a sheet of paper and used my finger to smear it into ones and zeroes, I would have written a better Windows browser than Safari.

Just saying.

And this follow-up, for those who might have thought the first comment wasn't ambiguous?

if I may be succinct:

ass browser.

First person to guess correctly gets, free, the URL from which they can download Apple's Safari browser.

Aside from "My name is Al Sharpton" (which I take at face value to be the truth), this:

"Our position has nothing to do with whether the person using the language is black or white, rich or poor, friend or foe," Sharpton said on Saturday, reiterating what he has been saying since the trial ended. "We cannot have different standards for sexism or racism."

While looking for the answer to a completely different question, I ran across this nugget at Yahoo Answers:

Should politicians who fillibuster be tazed?
And put on Americas funniest?

This from a person named “Dr. Spanky”. Oddly, the site doesn’t appear to list where s/he went to med school or garnered a PhD, but since it appeared, ignoring the inherent irony of the site’s name, on Yahoo Answers, you know it’s a credible and important question, needing an answer.

Or not, as it turns out. Most of the several answers were provided in what I think was the spirit of the question. One, however, I think his name was “Buzzkill”, responded:

No, because the rules specifically allow for that activity.

You cannot (reasonably) punish someone for following the rules. All you can do is change the rules.

And since he’s flagged as a “Top Contributor”, whatever that implies, I guess there’s supposed to be some authority behind his revelation, for which we’re all better off. I’m sure that his next act, after posting that clarification, was to go out and yell at the neighbor kids to get off his god damned lawn.

[Wik] Apparently, I ran across that question while it was still fresh, and Buzzkill’s comment was less than a minute old. Serendipity, I guess. Anyway, the discussion’s already degenerated to whinging about brown shirts with Tasers, how they should actually taser the guy who started a war based on lies, and the usual bullshit claptrap. It was fun for the couple minutes it lasted, though.

[alsø wik] But wait - the fun’s not quite over yet! This, from the (appropriately) self-monikered “Deep Thought”:

Why stop at tazering for filibusters? I’m sure there is good money to be made if you just let people tazer Robert Byrd for fun. Think of the potential. 535 members of Congress. Millions of upset voters. We could pay off the deficit.

But it doesn’t. From a WSJ email, dispatched this evening to my inbox, this story:

NEWS ALERT
from The Wall Street Journal

Sept. 17, 2007

William Lerach is set to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy in the criminal case involving the noted securities lawyer’s former firm, now called Milberg Weiss LLP. The plea agreement, which calls for a one to two year prison term, could be announced as soon as Tuesday.

I’m all for protecting the common man, the common investor, and I’m nothing if not both of those things. However, while Milberg Weiss (...Bershad Hynes & Lerach) LLP has always claimed that their seldom-seemly, and often seedy, pursuit of class action lawsuits, against any company whose stock price took a noteworthy downturn, was for the public good, I’ve never been able to agree.

Not in my stance as a champion of the unfettered right of public companies to run roughshod over their investors, either. Because I have no such stance. Instead, my dim view of him and all who practice his kind of law is justified by standard tactics he and his partners (current and former) have used in pursuit of specious claims. Think “greenmail”, ala Carl Icahn and Boone Pickens in the 1980s - make life tough enough for someone, even someone who’s got no basis for having to defend their actions, and they’ll pay you to go away.

As referred to in an Los Angeles Business Journal article of Sep 3, 2007, Lerach is an “economic terrorist”, and I don’t think that’s too tough a characterization of him. As the article says:

Lerach, of course, did not invent but did perfect the securities class action lawsuit. In that scheme, most any company that sustained a stock drop, even if it had nothing to do with anything of consequence, often found itself the recipient of allegations of fraud in a Lerach-engineered lawsuit. Likewise, companies that announced most anything negative could get the same kind of lawsuit – often within hours of the announcement.

Lerach then pounded the company, using the discovery process to find some little scrap somewhere in some underling’s file drawer that “proved” the company knew that bad news could develop.

In other words, this guy, and all lawyers like him, specialized in swooping in any time there was even a flimsy pretext for doing so. I mean, there’s no way a stock could drop without malfeasance and lying on the part of management, right?

Well, no - that’s wrong. But Lerach, et al, after having put their lawsuit’s stake in the ground, would then embark on forced discovery at their target companies, essentially fishing around for a reason to justify their lawsuit.

And one doesn’t have to be a big-business apologist to find that sort of thing to be outside the bounds of fair and reasonable play.

Over the years, I’ve been the recipient of at least 50 securities class action solicitations. I received one just the other day, ”In re CARDINAL HEALTH, INC. SECURITIES LITIGATION“. And while I almost never take the time to participate in these paper chases, I’ve always paid particular attention to any such action which has either “Lerach Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP” or any of the many versions of “Milberg Weiss +/-Bershad +/-Hynes +/-Lerach LLP” listed as the attorneys looking out for my “best interests”.

Because they don’t, they haven’t, and investors are simply a raw material for them and their business process. And I throw their solicitations away as soon as possible, to avoid stinking the house up.

His former partner Bershad has already pled, and if the news report is correct, Lerach’s getting ready to do the same. It’s not the Christian thing to say, but I’m not much of a Christian anyway, so I’ll hope that Milberg, Weiss, and all the rest be following them to the pokey soon after.

And, yes, I'm posting a mildly topical fake-blog item, just to nudge Sparky's junk (below) off the top half of the page. For the children.

In my time, I've seen examples of just about every scam possible via the Internet. It takes a lot any more to even get my attention as I'm one-button flushing my spam folders.

However, when someone goes above and beyond the call of scum-baggish presumption in reader/recipient stupidity, I think it deserves to be highlighted. I'm a "giver" that way.

Below, in its exact form, including the badly mangled HTML formatting, but minus the actual link to the scamster's site, the silliest and least plausible piece of spam I think I've received in at least a couple days:

Of course, I almost fell for it, because:

• The IRS always communicates with me by sending me email at my blogging email address, natch
• The IRS always speaks to tax payers that way, all courtly-like, and offers its "Regards"
• The IRS always gets things done in 6-9 days
• The IRS claims copyright on all of its email messages, just like normal citizens do
• While claiming said copyright, the IRS always makes sure the recipient knows that it's the "Internal Revenue Service U.S.A.", to avoid confusion with all the other Internal Revenue Services around the world.

It occurs to me that if we didn't have Russian, Romanian, and Slobovian hackers, we'd have to invent them, for our own amusement.

[wik] It further occurs to me that, in order to avoid appearing churlish, I should point out that if someone wants my $93.60 refund, let me know, and I'll pass along the link.

Back on May 21, 2007, I saw an article that I almost, almost thought worthy enough of derision that it justified a post. For reasons that now escape me, I decided otherwise at the time. However, as sometimes occurs, it's again become current, so I'll revisit.

This, from the Austin American Statesman:

A panic attack move into private equity?

By Robert Elder | Monday, May 21, 2007, 02:07 PM

Writing in the May 18 issue of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, Dallas investor and state of Texas pension official Frederick “Shad” Rowe tees off on the leaders of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas pension fund.

Rowe examines the Texas teacher fund’s recently announced plans to move massive amounts of its holdings into private equity and out of publicly traded stocks. The strategy strikes him as the investment equivalent of a panic attack.

(Rowe notes that the Texas Pension Review board, which he chairs, has no authority over TRS investment strategy and that he’s writing as a private citizen.)

Rowe writes that the teacher fund is trying to juice returns by moving into so-called alternative investments (hedge funds, buyout firms, hard assets such as timber, toll roads) a little late in the game. Maybe even just in time for the private equity bubble to pop and the very stocks the teacher fund is selling to rise in value.

Please ignore for a moment the fact that private equity and hedge funds are not the same thing - Rowe's core point, I think, was that high return comes with high risk. Big shock, that. But it appeared, in May, not to have occurred to the managers of TRS. I don't know whether TRS had gotten around to the absurd reallocation plans they announced at the time, increasing allotment to alternative investments from 3% to 35%. But Mr Rowe had the opportunity to weigh in again on the subject in a story from today's WSJ (subscription):

Pension Managers Rethink

Their Love of Hedge Funds
By CRAIG KARMIN
August 27, 2007; Page C1

Many public pension funds in recent years have become eager to invest in hedge funds. Now, some are getting cold feet.

Pension-fund managers from Louisiana to Ohio are saying they may slow their push into these funds after the recent losses suffered at big hedge funds -- including ones run by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and AQR Capital Management -- have reinforced some of the risks.

Indeed, one critic suggests that pensions would be foolish to keep pursuing hedge funds. "It's like planning a vacation to an exotic land, and finding out that there's an outbreak of bubonic plague," says Frederick Rowe, chairman of the Texas Pension Review Board, which provides oversight of Texas public pension funds.

I'm not certain which is more admirable - consistency, correctness, or the fact he avoided doing an overt Icky Shuffle and rubbing their nose in it. But in any event, Mr Rowe was stating the obvious back in May, all the while not claiming there was anything inherently wrong with hedge funds or their doppelgangers in the alternative investment universe, just that the TRS was clearly not thinking things through in their sudden mania for the flavor of the month.

Good for him, and, I guess, good for the teachers covered by the TRS. I have no dog in the race, but I hope the managers of the TRS paid attention back in May, for the sake of their beneficiaries.

Gad, I hate to seem to mimic the style of the "lovely and talented" John Edwards' campaign, but my reaction to this morning's news that Alberto Gonzales is resigning (WSJ - subscription) was, roughly, "What took so long?".

No shock, but he's being run out of town on a rail. Not alone among those with an opinion on the matter, I only think it's a shame that he's being run out for all the wrong reasons. The US Attorney firings? Pfft. Not a big deal - he, and the White House, have been well within bounds on the firings themselves, as previously discussed. Severe missteps, such as the McNulty Memorandum, should be considered embarrassments to him and the department, but are just horrifically bad administration, not criminal acts. As also previously discussed, his timid, goofy, and cackhanded defense of his boss, his office, and himself has been so inept that it's been embarrassing to watch.

Never one to favor viewing people humiliating themselves (and thus, my aversion to most forms of reality TV), it's been a cringeworthy handful of months, and the ordeal will soon be over.

Based on the WSJ story linked above and other sources, it seems there's a race to the bottom of the barrel in search of his replacement. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff? What an awful choice he'd be, and not just because he looks like a character who could have played alongside Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice. He's not obviously competent, and while that would make him a perfect stand-in for Gonzales, it would seem that now, in the last 17 months of the Bush administration, they ought to attempt to at least raise their game at the Justice Department.

Chertoff, far more so than the other choices mentioned in the WSJ article (Mueller, Johnson), strikes me a choice only slightly better than dragging Harriet Miers back out of mothballs and propping her up for yet another position beyond her scope.

Also odd, there were several names in the version of the WSJ story made available this morning (the link above is to a front-page version in tomorrow's print edition, but earlier today it was the breaking news version). Louis Freeh and Ted Olson were both mentioned, and either of them strikes me as a potentially apt choice, so it comes as no shock to find them no longer on the list, as reported by the WSJ. The IHT version of the story, available here, retains mention of Olson, but also omits Freeh.

Like Rove's resignation, the Democrats seem to have plans to continue their chase, harrying him as best they can in search of crimes not committed. Life would, I think, be far easier for the Dems if they just took what Bushies hand them on a silver platter (incompetence, ham-fistedness, PR stone-deafness) and ran with it, rather than inventing new crusades on which to wander. But that's just me.

Every so occasionally, an Onion post strikes my funny bone, and if I'm lacking the time to actually write something, I'll toss out a "FakeBlogging" entry, like this one, to memorialize the chuckle. In fact, I created the "FakeBlogging" category specifically to hold my Onion links.

The problem with the Onion, recognized and reported by others smarter and more widely read than I, is that most of the time, the entire punchline can be communicated simply via the article headline. For me, that's not so much a problem, because the text is generally also both juvenile & funny, and doesn't detract from whatever the headline was. I might be alone in that view, however.

To allow our readers to form their own impressions on that crucial question, should they care to, I present several items linked or relinked from today's Onion daily email:

Forgive me for thinking that, however insensitive, these are funny.

"Investment Strategies in a World Where Time Travel is Possible"

It's got aliens, it's got time travel, it's got the possibility of end of days. What's not to like?

I don't know about any of you, but I've worked with "that guy" more times than I can count.
 

[wik] Not that I have a dog in this race, but I found myself thinking it would be fairly cool if the blender had broken and he'd been impaled by one or more iPhone parts. Nothing against Blender Guy, of course, and I'm sure that attitude is just a compensation for all the WWE & NASCAR I don't watch.
 

I bring you David Gross of San Francisco, who not only:

...asked his bosses for a radical pay cut, enough so he wouldn't have to pay taxes to support the war.

but

In any event, his employer turned him down and he quit.

Which, I guess, good for him, standing up for his convictions that way and all. Left unanswered, at least for now, is whether federal taxes are levied on the wages of "guests of the Federal Government". Why would I be curious about that? Because

Gross, 38, now works on a contract basis, and last year he refused to pay self-employment taxes.

All by itself, that doesn't distinguish him from a lot of people. The AP story notes that between 8 and 10 thousand people fail to pay their taxes for reasons similar to those of Gross. Contained in the story, at a meta-level, is the fact that this particular non-Rhodes Scholar allowed the AP to write a story about him evading taxes. Nothing like calling out the IRS by name to get them to leave you alone. Posing in two pre-mug shots for the story? A priceless addition, though I'm sure the Feds could already have found him whenever and wherever they needed to.

Of course, these days, he won't end up becoming a guest of the Federal Government:

Unlike the days when Thoreau was sent to prison in a tax protest against the Mexican-American War, modern war tax protesters rarely go to prison, according to tax resisters. The IRS may take their money from wages and bank accounts - with penalties and interest - after sending a series of letters.

"They're very polite, which makes it a little boring," said Rosa Packard of Greenwich, a longtime anti-war tax protester.

But if he thinks he is going to avoid collection of his taxes owed, by hook or by crook, after having trumpeted his resistance on a national newswire, he's perhaps not smart enough to be gainfully employed, as a contractor or otherwise.

Will his protest, and others like his, have the desired effect? As James Taranto said in the OpinionJournal piece where I first saw this story, "Something tells us the economy will survive."

(also posted at issuesblog.com)

...that we live in a world of plenty, nay, a decadent world. Did he really need that badly to see the innards of his new iPhone?

I don't think he's just trying to get his Bluetooth speakers working, either. At $500+ a pop, he must have been affirmatively pissed at his new toy. [wik] For any iPhoners who might find themselves irked at activation problems, don't worry, don't get mad, and don't bust your iPhone to smithereens. It seems that "DVD Jon" has already broken the activation process. [alsø wik] For those with WSJ subscriptions, further info on the myriad workarounds the first week of the iPhone's life hath wrought.

Found in today's NY Times:

Correction: Just Don’t Call Them Inexpensive

Published: July 5, 2007

An article last week about inexpensive dresses misstated the name of a clothing store on Broadway. It is Yellow Rat Bastard, not Dirty Yellow Bastard.
(Go to Article)

Given even the slightest chance, the Bush administration has shown an amazing ability over the past several years to choose the worst of all possibilities presented to it in any given circumstance.

However, with last evening's commutation of prison sentence for Scooter Libby, they appear finally to have gotten one right.

Libby's head was hung on a pike for public political enjoyment (and no, I neither have time nor feel like going into the details), and his case has not reached even its first appeal. The happy dance so far engaged in by the judicial class in Washington DC has served to do nothing but continue the political theater and public shaming of Libby. The courts' having ordered him to begin his jail term with his appeal in process, while not unheard of, is far outside the bounds of standard practice in these matters.

For anyone who might disagree with that characterization, I've got two words for you, words that in any rational comparative world would cause snickers and insistence that Libby receive full exoneration and the apologies of the government for its having hassled him: "Sandy Berger". And the fact that they both have little-boy first names is only a coincidence.

Back to my point - Bush had several choices which would have made a hash of this matter, including doing nothing (wrong, not because it might have upset "the base", but wrong because loyalty and fairness dictated action of some sort), and issuing a full pardon (wrong, because he was convicted, however potentially wrongly, and his appeals have not yet run their course).

Deft handling of the matter, via a focus on the one ragingly unfair portion of the story - the immediate incarceration, was as welcome to see as it was surprising. I've come to expect the Bush administration to regularly puke in its own lap, and this time, they didn't.

The fine stays in place, along with the probation, all pending completion of the appeals process. If those appeals are unsuccessful, for the record, I'd react badly to an end-of-term full pardon, just so we're clear on things. Based on what I've seen of the judicial process so far, however, I expect Libby to eventually clear his name in the courts. Allowing him to do so outside of the Graybar Hotel seems quite fair to me.

For the first time in quite a while, then, I'm in a position to compliment Bush for not fucking up something simple. Which is a blessing and a shame, now that I think about it.

(With a serious nod to the actual creators of the "Quotes entirely relevant..." genre, Long or Short Capital):

"There are some players that have psychologists," Cabrera said. "I smoke."

Just seen in the Perfidious Advertising section, left:

Beautiful Russian Brides seeking men for marriage and dating. Find your true love now.

Luckily, we're not planning to refurnish the Ministry Bunker and Castratorium from the proceeds of advertising. And, while I hope it goes without saying, we as a group express no opinion on whether any reader will find their true love, from Russia or anywhere else.

Subject? Supreme Court rulings. Found in today's news, a story about the several decisions just handed down by our benign judicial overlords. The first two cases on which they ruled are interesting, but not part of the current exercise.

The case in question, Brendlin v. California, is covered in a Washington Post story entitled "Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Car Passengers". The heart of the case?

The court decided that when police stop a vehicle, passengers are "seized" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment and -- like drivers -- can dispute the legality of a search.

The ruling overturned a California Supreme Court decision in the case of Bruce Edward Brendlin, who was arrested on parole violation and drug charges after a November 2001 traffic stop in Yuba City, Calif. Brendlin, who subsequently was sentenced to four years in prison, appealed his conviction on the grounds that the drug evidence should have been suppressed because the traffic stop amounted to "an unlawful seizure of his person," according to today's ruling.

Although the state acknowledged that police "had no adequate justification" to stop the car, in which Brendlin was a passenger in the front seat, it argued that he was not "seized" and thus could not challenge the government's action under the Fourth Amendment's search and seizure protections. Government lawyers also argued that Brendlin could not claim that the evidence against him was tainted by an unconstitutional stop, according to the ruling.

California, in this case, was clearly and deeply wrong, and it's good, if unsurprising, to find the Supremes coming down unanimously in Brendlin's favor.

So, what's wrong with the story, you might ask? Well, not so much the story as the storyline - The WaPo story didn't cover this angle, but in the Wall Street Journal version of the story (subscription), I found this nugget:

The American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP backed Mr. Brendlin, arguing that a ruling in the state's favor would encourage police to conduct arbitrary traffic stops to target passengers, especially minorities, who lack the same rights as drivers.

Left unspoken is the irrelevant fact of Mr Brendlin's minority status, but I'll assume he's black. He could have been chartreuse without having any impact at all on this case, for all it would have mattered.

So Brendlin got the precisely correct result from the Court, for what I think hope are the right reasons, including the prima facie absurdity of California's position on the case. But the underlying theme, when the NAACP's and ACLU's involvement, their raison d'etre in this case, seems to indicate that absent some racial grievance, the alternative result would have occurred.

I have zero concern about the involvement of those two august organizations in providing Brendlin the legal and financial support in his battle, and good for them. Couching this as an issue that only or primarily resonates for minorities? That, I think, is a problem

...I can get away with fakeblogging. Like this:

I can't figure out how this entry was tagged in today's WSJ Best of the Web Today as one of the Bottom Stories of the Day:

"Marshalltown Police: Woman Stole Toilet Paper From Courthouse; Police Chief Says Butts Caught in Act" 




Oh, wait - never mind, I get it. Subtle, that Taranto. Very subtle. 

Please also note, B, that this entry is very conservative in its use of category tags, so there's that.