Bad Corporate Texting Policy

Of course, they sent me another text.

Nobody wants to get a single text from your business that is not an emergency alert or otherwise vital information, let alone a series of them. Stop it.

The woman I spoke to yesterday was helpful and accomplished what I asked.  But now I'm annoyed, AT&T.

PANYNJ Needs A Major Shakeup, But Not A Split-up

UPDATED: Fixed a broken link to the NYT article.

The Port Authority is a tremendous vehicle for infrastructure planning and execution in the New York harbor region, which has been arbitrarily split by a political border for centuries. 

We still haven't accomplished what the PANYNJ was originally created to do: build a freight rail tunnel between NY and NJ. But we should. In the meantime the PA has gotten away from its core mission and spent freely on non-core projects.  This is where the reform is needed: 

The report, released on Tuesday from the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University, says the agency spent more than $800 million from 2002 to 2012 on “regional projects” chosen by the governors’ offices. In the coming years, the pace of spending on zero-return state projects is expected to accelerate. As a result, the most powerful testaments to the agency’s peril, according to former agency officials and transportation experts, are not found amid the bridge access lanes of Fort Lee, N.J. They can be traced to the grounds of industrial parks built in the Bronx and in Yonkers, with little obvious transportation purpose, or along the Pulaski Skyway, which the agency agreed to rehabilitate after Mr. Christie canceled the construction of a rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River in 2010 and claimed billions in planned spending to be New Jersey’s money.

Good idea:  Get the PA focused back on its core mission: the infrastructure for moving people and goods around the region.
Atrocious idea:  Christie's suggestion of splitting the authority up along that same artificial political boundary that already divides America's foremost metropolitan area is ludicrously bad. 

If A Republican Senator Can Call It Torture ...

When will the New York Times and the Washington Post stop their evasive, cowardly and ultimately dishonest treatment of the Bush administrations institutionalization of illegal torture?

They have been able to get away with it for so long because of the depraved cowardice of the American news media.

In Announcing Support for Declassifying Report, Susan Collins Uses Word "Torture"

"Two of the last weathervanes of right-centrism have deemed it acceptable to use the word "torture" to describe what the CIA did, a word most of the nation's press still refuses to use for fear it will affect their claim to objectivity. If Susan Collins can use the word torture, then can the other institutions that aspire to be such measures of centrism also do so?"

I don't know how these editors, publishers and producers sleep at night, knowing what they've enabled.

Overturned Tractor-trailer on Eastbound BQE Explains Flock of Helicopters

I knew something was up when I could hear helicopters when I woke up, could still hear helicopters when I left the house, and counted at least four of them hovering in place on my walk to the Borough Hall subway station.  Would prefer not to imagine the traffic involved.

Tractor-trailer Overturned on Eastbound BQE

A tractor-trailer overturned near the Atlantic Avenue exit on the eastbound BQE this morning around 4:30. According to News 12 , “Authorities say another vehicle was involved in the accident, and one …

Speaking of BQE traffic nightmares: it is only a matter of time before we have an ongoing one since state DOT abandoned plans to repair/modernize the Brooklyn Heights cantilever section of this major freight corridor.  I only hope that no one is killed when it happens. 

Libertarian Police!

"And a small picture of Ron Paul".  Priceless.

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief. “Bad news, detective. We got a situation.” “What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?” “Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.” The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?” “Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.” “Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

Do Not Release Jonathan Pollard

The same administration that aggressively prosecutes whistleblowers is considering releasing an actual traitorous spy.  Please tell me this is an extremely poor taste April Fool's prank and not seriously being considered.

Good Grief, Idiots!

Let me just say it: No, no, no, no! We're hearing this morning - intentionally hearing, since these reports are clearly trial balloons of some sort - that the US is again considering releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. To review, if you don't know the backstory: Pollard was a civilian working for US Navy intelligence who was arrested and convicted for passing copious classified information to Israel. The fact that Pollard was a Jew spying for Israel made the case extremely charged, for good reasons and bad. Not surprisingly, the Israeli government has been lobbying for decades to get him released. No big surprise there. We try to get our spies released too. But if the White House is seriously considering using Pollard as a bargaining chip at this stage of the negotiations they've totally lost their minds.

Torture Report: Time For Obama To Start Looking Backward

Our intelligence services have developed a culture of impunity; the only transgressions that ever get prosecuted are "leaks" from whistleblowers exposing the rampant violation of our laws, international law, and the Constitution.  It's long past time for Obama to start "looking backward"  . . . these unprosecuted crimes have infected our institutions like gangrene.  And it's not just the rank-and-file torturer that smust be charged, but also the executive level leaders and the politicians of the Bush administration that must be held to account.  And the lawyers who gave them cover.  John Yoo, for example, should be prosecuted, disbarred, and imprisoned.  Instead he's teaching law.

One official said that almost all of the critical threat-related information from Abu Zubaida was obtained during the period when he was questioned by Soufan at a hospital in Pakistan, well before he was interrogated by the CIA and waterboarded 83 times.

Information obtained by Soufan, however, was passed up through the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community, the Justice Department and Congress as though it were part of what CIA interrogators had obtained, according to the committee report.

“The CIA conflated what was gotten when, which led them to misrepresent the effectiveness of the program,” said a second U.S. official who has reviewed the report. The official described the persistence of such misstatements as among “the most damaging” of the committee’s conclusions.

Detainees’ credentials also were exaggerated, officials said. Agency officials described Abu Zubaida as a senior al-Qaeda operative — and, therefore, someone who warranted coercive techniques — although experts later determined that he was essentially a facilitator who helped guide recruits to al-Qaeda training camps.

The CIA also oversold the role of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. CIA officials claimed he was the “mastermind.”

The committee described a similar sequence in the interrogation of Hassan Ghul, an al-Qaeda operative who provided a critical lead in the search for bin Laden: the fact that the al-Qaeda leader’s most trusted courier used the moniker “al-Kuwaiti.”

But Ghul disclosed that detail while being interrogated by Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq who posed questions scripted by CIA analysts. The information from that period was subsequently conflated with lesser intelligence gathered from Ghul at a secret CIA prison in Romania, officials said. Ghul was later turned over to authorities in Pakistan, where he was subsequently released. He was killed by a CIA drone strike in 2012.

What happens to untreated gangrene, anyway?