May 27, 2016

Silicon Valley Needs a Valleywag. Libertarian Billionaire vs Journalism vs Democracy

We're not talking the Koch brothers here. We're talking Paul Thiel and his vendetta against Gawker because he's rich and he can. I find interesting that this story isn't getting more play here. I find it interesting that no one seems to be disturbed that some rich fuck can shut down a media outlet - while others fall over themselves to defend one's right to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Bizarre


Silicon Valley Needs a Valleywag. Peter Thiel’s misguided, secret war against Gawker Media proves it.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and Facebook board member who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, has plenty of reasons to hate Gawker Media, the company he’s now trying to sue into oblivion by proxy. So do a lot of his peers in the technology industry, who were the chief target of Gawker Media’s now-defunct Silicon Valley–focused gossip site, Valleywag.

Thiel and his friends are not wrong to loathe Valleywag. But they are wrong to think that its caustic brand of muckraking has no value. More importantly, they are wrong to think that using their money and power to silence its parent company, Gawker Media, will solve the problems it presents for them.

On the contrary: Thiel’s previously secret, high-stakes war on Gawker is the strongest possible argument for Valleywag’s existence.

<snip>

What Thiel and the Silicon Valley power players who have sided with him get wrong is that Valleywag was never fundamentally about bullying, though it may have seemed so to those who found their names in its headlines. To bully is to push around those weaker than you. Valleywag, with occasional exceptions, saw itself as punching up. Its scoops and gibes were intended not to intimidate but to puncture the valley’s utopian veneer. Its editorial philosophy was about tearing back the masks and capes in which Thiel and other members of Silicon Valley’s tech elite tend to cloak themselves. It was about calling out hypocrisy in a realm where it runs rampant. It was about regarding our tech and business overlords with the same skepticism we typically reserve for politicians, because Valleywag’s core insight was that they’re just as powerful (and just as petty and flawed).

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2016/05/peter_thiel_just_proved_why_silicon_valley_needs_gawker_and_valleywag.html

May 26, 2016

Flashback: Rove Erases 22 Million White House Emails on Private Server at Height of U.S. Attorney Sc

Probably nowhere near as bad as the CIA deleting files related to torture or Hillary - which is so bad that she should be given the death penalty!

Clinton has said she deleted about 50,000 emails that dealt with personal matters, citing her daughter’s wedding and her mother’s funeral as examples. All the correspondence pertaining to official business was turned over to and archived by State. The deletion of the emails, though perfectly legal, has excited House Republicans, including Speaker John Boehner, who has announced plans to deploy House committees to investigate what might aptly be called Servergate.

Never mind that former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican, has said he used a system similar to Clinton’s — and never mind that in 2007 Karl Rove deleted 22 million emails from a private server in the Bush White House — a matter about which the Beltway media said little and Republicans in Congress, like Rep. John Boehner, said nothing.

Here is a brief refresher on the White House email scandal:

Not long after George W. Bush assumed the presidency in 2001, Rove, his top political aide, set up a private email server for use in the White House. The stated purpose of the system — the primary domain name on which was gwb43.com — was that it would be used exclusively for the sort of political correspondence that Bush and Rove were not permitted to do on the taxpayer’s dime.

Seven years later, Bush and Rove were embroiled in two competing scandals — the Valerie Plame scandal, in which operatives for Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, including Rove and Scooter Libby, were accused of unmasking Valerie Plame, a CIA specialist in the black market for weapons of mass destruction, for purely partisan reasons, and the U.S. Attorney purge, in which Rove’s political operation in the White House was accused of ordering Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to purge eight U.S. attorneys who were qualified prosecutors and replace them with political hacks with little or no prosecutorial experience.

Rove escaped prosecution in the Libby case, but Libby was convicted (Bush quickly commuted the sentence) on March 6, 2007, at the same time Bush and Rove were under fire for purging the U.S. attorneys. During the investigation, it came to light that Rove’s server had been used to send official, non-political emails — correspondence that was required by law to be preserved under the Presidential Records Act.

more: http://www.pensitoreview.com/2015/03/18/flashback-rove-erases-22-million-white-house-emails-on-private-server-at-height-of-u-s-attorney-scandal-media-yawns/

May 21, 2016

In my 50+ years, the GOP hasn't ONE positive contribution to humanity

So spare us the posts about how fabulous free market capitalism is and if it weren't for moderates... You've got nothing. Who's rights did the right ever go to bat for? Billionaires and bigots?

Fuck off already.

May 12, 2016

Internet Message Board America: Donald Trump Is Weighing Newt Gingrich for Vice President

http://time.com/4328193/donald-trump-newt-gingrich-vice-president/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter

Gingrich has praised Trump in the past

Donald Trump is considering former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as one possible option for his running mate in November, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

Trump, the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, has been discussing Gingrich with his confidants as a potential ticket mate, a source familiar with the talks said, making the former House speaker one of the handful of options the likely Republican standard-bearer is considering for the fall.

Gingrich has praised Trump in the past, telling TIME he has “the potential to be an extraordinarily dynamic president who shakes up a bureaucratic city that badly needs to be shaken up.”