Blogs

If you haven't heard yet, there's a good, old fashioned filibuster going on right now. The filibuster is over confirmation of John Brennan to head the CIA. It is being lead by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and other Republicans, such as Ted Cruz (R-TX) have now joined in.

The filibuster started almost 12 hours ago and is going in full force.

Now I want to take a page from the Republican playbook of the last decade. We are currently embarked in a global war on terror. At such a time we need someone to lead out main foreign intelligence agency. So why are Republicans trying to prevent that intelligence and aide terrorists?

Now do I believe that? No I don't, but it is the exact thing Republicans accused Democrats of over and over again during the Bush years.

But let's look into the reason for this filibuster. It boils down to 2 paragraphs from a response Attorney General Eric Holder gave to Rand Paul on the drone program:

“The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no president will ever have to confront. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”

“For example, the president could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances like a catastrophic attack like the ones suffered on December 7, 1941, and September 11, 2001,” Holder continued.

Casino mogul Sheldon Adelson spent an estimated $150 million last year in campaign contributions to help Mitt Romney and other Republicans around the country win elections. Now, in a new filing with the SEC, it turns out that's not all Adelson spent money on:

In its annual regulatory report, filed with the commission on Friday, the Sands reported that its audit committee and independent accountants had determined that “there were likely violations of the books and records and internal controls provisions” of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The disclosure comes amid an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the company’s business activities in China.

It is the company’s first public acknowledgment of possible wrongdoing. Ron Reese, a spokesman for the Sands, declined to comment further.

This is the first admission of possible guilt by Adelson's company in an investigation that goes back years. Adelson began a big push in China over a decade ago and that caught the eye of investigators.

But in 2010 something big happened. Steven C. Jacobs was fired from his job as President of the company's operations in Macau. He then filed a wrongful termination suit, which alleges he was pressured to engage in improper leverage against foreign officials. In the same suit Jacobs also alleges that the company turned a blind eye to China's organized crime.

A growing problem in the tech age has been sexting, the sending of racy photos of one to another via text message. It's an epidemic that is really evident in our schools.

Here in Ohio we are no strangers to sexting. We have seen one local student commit suicide over a sexting scandal and now have another school involved in a huge scandal.

Police and officials at a Cincinnati-area high school say hundreds of students may have been involved in recent cases of "sexting."

There have two been recent investigations into cases at Madeira High School of students circulating photos of nude or sexually involved students on their cell phones.

In January, officers confiscated up to eight cell phones belonging to high school students that had videos on them made by a male student who the Madeira police chief says has since been expelled.

In a second investigation, an official estimated that "hundreds" of Madeira students and possibly others outside the school had received or circulated pictures of naked female students. That case has been dropped according to Chief Frank Maupin since the parents did not wish to press charges.

In the January case, the student has been charged with a four felony counts of pandering obscenities involving a minor. His attorney says he is not guilty.

In Ohio sexting is a felony, on par with distributing child pornography. I have never heard of the parents having a say in rather a child is prosecuted for a felony like this or not. The reasons the chief gives are also laughable:

Maupin says while the students involved may have been tech savvy, were lacking in legal know-how.

"I think the majority of them, they don't understand or realize the consequences criminally, let alone if that were to get out on the Internet," he said.

How dare you talk about David Vitter's private life! That's what the right kept saying when Vitter's name came up in the D.C. Madam scandal.

But now we have a new sex scandal. This time it involves a Democrat and apparently the right wants to talk about it none stop!

First, the back story:

Amid a handful of allegations that threaten to mar his reputation in the Senate, Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., continues to maintain his innocence, decrying the accusations as right-wing attempts to "destroy" his career and invoking the words of Martin Luther King Jr. in asserting his faith that justice will win out.

Menendez, who was re-elected to his seat in November, has since been hit with allegations that he solicited prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, where prostitution is legal. The FBI is looking into the claims. The allegations were originally reported by a conservative website citing an anonymous source.

So, as far as prostitution is concerned, Menendez did nothing wrong, if he did pay for a little booty. After all, he was in a place where it is legal. Didn't we even hear the same thing about Rush?

That means this is boiling down to an issue of morals, and the right is having a field day with this. Here's the Memeorandum thread talking about this issue.

Today's wingnutopia outrage of "why to hate Hagel" is brought to you buy that bow-tie wearing dweeb, Tucker Carlson's, conspiracy tabloid, The Daily Caller:

A pro-Hezbollah, pro-Hamas candidate for the Iranian presidency, a man linked to Iranian-controlled front groups, brought former Republican Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel to speak at Rutgers University in 2007, according to another professor on campus.

Hooshang Amirahmadi, who led Rutgers’ Center for Middle Eastern Studies when Hagel came to campus, is the founder and president of the American-Iranian Council. He arranged for Hagel’s speech on March 2, 2007, the faculty source told The Daily Caller.

Why that must mean that Hagel supports terrorism! Why can't we have good ole' Republicans anymore, like Dick Cheney, who would never do anything to help Iran!

Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government.

But Cheney was just protecting capitalism by setting up offshore companies in the Cayman's so that they could circumvent sanctions against Iran in the 90's and sell them highly profitable nuclear parts.

Apparently selling parts to develop weapons of mass destruction to terrorist regimes is a sign that you are strong against terrorism. Well, at least to the pea brains of the Republican Party.

And let's not forget another Secretary of Defense and how much he opposed our former enemies:

Wayne LaPierre, the execute vice-president of the NRA that thinks movies and video games are where blame should lie for mass shootings, has written an op-ed in The Daily Caller. Let's take a look at some of it:

It has always been sensible for good citizens to own and carry firearms for lawful protection against violent criminals who prey on decent people.

During the second Obama term, however, additional threats are growing. Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States.

Ok, I hate to stop a quote mid-paragraph, but I must here. All this has happened in Obama's second term? So in only 3 weeks, with no gun law changes or anything, drug gangs have invaded every significant city?? Wow Obama is working fast to "ghettoize" our country! But let's continue with that paragraph, because it gets even better:

Phoenix is already one of the kidnapping capitals of the world, and though the states on the U.S./Mexico border may be the first places in the nation to suffer from cartel violence, by no means are they the last.

Now I thought more guns were the answer? Arizona is already one of the easiest states in the union to get a gun, so why so much violence there? If you ask me it sounds like old Wayne is contradicting the NRA's argument right here.

Then Wayne goes even more off the wagon:

When the next terrorist attack comes, the Obama administration won’t accept responsibility. Instead, it will do what it does every time: blame a scapegoat and count on Obama’s “mainstream” media enablers to go along.

When the last terrorist attack came, Obama wasn't even in the Senate. Instead George Bush and his enablers started blaming the Clinton administration.

On Thursday of this past week a large number of websites had a very unpleasant experience. As a user went to popular sites like NBC, CNN, Huffington Post and others, they were instantly redirected to a Facebook error page.

If you click the Okay button, you were then taken to a blank page. In short the error resembled some sort of page hijacking hack.

The problem was quickly isolated to Facebook Connect, their popular Single Sign-On platform and Facebook jumped into action, fixing the problem. But now, as it turns out, Facebook might face a more serious problem.

I first realized this problem on Thursday night with a client's site. This was before any articles were written or tweets had even gone out. Even if the articles were out, it wouldn't have been much help. Why? Well this client doesn't use Facebook Connect. The only Facebook code loading on the pages is the Facebook Like button. As soon as I removed that code everything went back to normal.

So now you maybe saying that the problem was related to Connect and not Like, so why did this site have an issue? Well apparently Facebook uses Connect in their like button. An article in Salon makes that exact same connection:

Not so fast! We should stop and think about what really happened. By demonstrating a direct connection between our Facebook logins and the Facebook Like buttons on non-Facebook pages, Facebook inadvertently advertised exactly how much it potentially knows about all our Web browsing habits.