Top ethics watchdog files suit against DOJ concerning those FBI texts that were made public.

Courtesy of Business Insider: 

A top ethics watchdog said Wednesday it is suing the Justice Department for all communications concerning the DOJ's decision to share with the press text messages exchanged between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, during the 2016 election. 

Many of the texts were overtly critical of President Donald Trump, and Strzok and Page mocked him at various points throughout the campaign, calling him an "idiot." 

Strzok and Page also disparaged other political leaders, like the Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders and former Attorney General Eric Holder. The texts concerning Trump, however, were quickly weaponized by the most vehement critics of special counsel Robert Mueller following the DOJ's decision to release them to Congress and the press. That release came just one day before Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified before the House Judiciary Committee on December 13. 

The department has failed to answer a significant lingering question stemming from that release: how it chose which texts, of the more than 10,000 the department obtained over the summer, to unveil publicly. Nor has it released additional messages that could provide context to the ones that were shared with lawmakers and reporters. DOJ has also not disclosed who authorized the release. 

The lawsuit, filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the " DOJ’s senior leadership offices for all communications concerning the decision" to give the texts to a small group of reporters the day before Rosenstein's testimony. CREW filed the expedited request Wednesday after the DOJ failed to respond to their initial inquiry within 20 working days. 

Yeah I would like to see these questions answered as well.

Since when do private communications between lovers become the business of the DOJ unless one or more of the participants are under criminal investigation?

White House ethics lawyer resigns. Wait, the White House had an ethics lawyer?

Courtesy of The Hill:  

James Schultz, whose work included ethics and financial disclosure issues, is planning to go back to his private practice at Cozen O'Connor, a Philadelphia-based law firm, Politico reported. 

"That was something Don [McGahn, the White House counsel] and I discussed very early on," Schultz told the news outlet. 

"I was interested in continuing with private practice and saw this as a tremendous opportunity to go serve and get things up and running and the plan was to move on about this time." 

He added that people typically stay in these positions for a year to 18 months.

Yeah, okay.

Schultz claims that he is willing to join the debate about conflicts of interest in the White House so that he can talk " about the good work the Trump administration is doing on these issues."

Which leads me to believe he was not worth a damn when it came to steering Trump and his administration toward being more ethical.

In my opinion the only ethical thing Donald Trump could do was to resign for the good of the country.

And that is what a GOOD ethics lawyer would be telling him every day they were on the job.

Puerto Rico is in near devastation since being hit by Hurricane Maria, but here is the president fighting with the NFL again.

So proud of NASCAR and its supporters and fans. They won't put up with disrespecting our Country or our Flag - they said it loud and clear!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2017

Many people booed the players who kneeled yesterday (which was a small percentage of total). These are fans who demand respect for our Flag!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2017

The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem. NFL must respect this!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2017

This of course is a carry over from yesterday's Twitter rant, which followed comments made on Friday attacking NFL players that #takeaknee.

That means that Trump has spent an entire weekend attacking the most popular sporting event in America (Only interrupted by a brief attack on another of America's favorite sports.) instead of actually doing his fucking job.

Meanwhile, like I said at the top, the US territory of  Puerto Rico has been decimated by Hurricane Maria, and not a peep out of the Orange Fuhrer.

The People's President Hillary Clinton has urged Trump to send in the Navy to help deal with the tragedy: 

"President Trump, (Defense) Sec. (James) Mattis, and DOD (Department of Defense) should send the Navy, including the USNS Comfort, to Puerto Rico now," the former presidential nominee tweeted Sunday morning. "These are American citizens."

But so far America's response has been minimal at best.

Apparently Trump has been too busy attacking Republicans who have not passed a bill to repeal Obamacare, and continuing his feud with the NFL.

That last one resulted in an ethics complaint being filed against Trump for attempting "to influence the employment practices of a private entity “solely on the basis of partisan political affiliation."

By the way Trump also retweeted this a little while ago.

NFLplayer PatTillman joined U.S. Army in 2002. He was killed in action 2004. He fought 4our country/freedom. #StandForOurAnthem #BoycottNFL pic.twitter.com/k1FXHRoozY

— Ⓙay (@jayMAGA45) September 24, 2017

Methinks that Trump does not really know much about Pat Tillman, because from what I learned about the man he would probably have already taken a knee a long time ago.

"We are pretty close to a laughingstock" says outgoing ethics watchdog.

Courtesy of the New York Times:  

Actions by President Trump and his administration have created a historic ethics crisis, the departing head of the Office of Government Ethics said. He called for major changes in federal law to expand the power and reach of the oversight office and combat the threat. 

Walter M. Shaub Jr., who is resigning as the federal government’s top ethics watchdog on Tuesday, said the Trump administration had flouted or directly challenged long-accepted norms in a way that threatened to undermine the United States’ ethical standards, which have been admired around the world. 

“It’s hard for the United States to pursue international anticorruption and ethics initiatives when we’re not even keeping our own side of the street clean. It affects our credibility,” Mr. Shaub said in a two-hour interview this past weekend — a weekend Mr. Trump let the world know he was spending at a family-owned golf club that was being paid to host the U.S. Women’s Open tournament. “I think we are pretty close to a laughingstock at this point.”

The only dispute I have with that is that I don't think we are CLOSE to a laughingstock.

I think we ARE a laughingstock.  

In fact everything that we could be proud of as Americans seems to have been turned on its head, whether it is welcoming immigrants, our dedication to election integrity, or our treatment of minorities.

You would not think that it would only take six months to erase the prestige of America, but I guess that was not entering Donald Trump into the equation.

Top crime watchdog quits because she felt holding businesses accountable for ethical violations while Donald Trump is in office was hypocritical.

Courtesy of  New York Magazine:

Until late last month, former federal prosecutor Hui Chen worked in the Justice Department’s fraud section, ensuring that corporations followed federal ethics laws. She started the job in the fall 2015, but in the last six months it became impossible to conduct her duties without feeling as if she was “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic,” she recently wrote on LinkedIn. So she quit, and she blames the White House: 

First, trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome. To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it. 

As a compliance expert in DOJ’s fraud section, Chen essentially served as a corporate crime watchdog. She helped ensure that companies made changes to the policies that resulted in their prosecution and then monitored the effectiveness of those changes.

Totally get it. It's sort of like being a firefighter in a town where the fire chief is a pyromaniac.

Of course with Chen out that means that nobody is watching the candy store, and I think we all know that even IF Trump decides to replace her it will be with somebody who is completely blind to unethical behavior by corporations.  

If you ever before wondered just how much damage one president could do in only one term, sit back and watch, because you are about to have that question answered in spades.

Donald Trump exempts entire senior staff from ethics rules.

We laugh in the fact of your ethic rules.

Courtesy of The Daily Beast:

President Donald Trump has exempted his entire senior staff from provisions of his own ethics rules to allow them to work with political and advocacy groups that support the administration. 

Staffers given a pass on those rules include White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who has the green light to communicate and meet with “political, advocacy, trade, or non-profit organizations” that formerly employed her consulting firm, despite ethics rules that would otherwise bar work with former clients. 

Chief White House strategist Steve Bannon also received a waiver to the rules as part of a blanket exemption for all White House appointees allowing them to communicate with the press. His reported discussions with former colleagues at the pro-Trump site Breitbart News, which Bannon chaired until last year, had raised red flags among ethics watchdogs. 

Bannon and Conway will both be free to work with a network of political groups backed by the wealthy Mercer family, which was integral to Trump’s victory last year and continues to support his agenda as president.

And that folks is how you advertise your contempt for the rules so that all the world can see that you are above such petty restrictions on your power. 

What is it that they say?

"Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely?"

Well what happens when the already absolutely corrupted get absolute power?

I think we are about to find out.

White House attempts to block disclosure of Trump Administration ethics waivers, gets rejected.

Uh oh.

Courtesy of NPR: 

The Office of Government Ethics has rejected a White House attempt to block the agency's compilation of federal ethics rules waivers granted to officials hired into the Trump administration from corporations and lobbying firms. 

The White House action, a letter to OGE Director Walter M. Shaub Jr. from Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, was first reported by The New York Times. The newspaper had earlier published a detailed account of lobbyists turned appointees who were granted waivers and now oversee regulations they previously had lobbied against. 

With an ethics waiver, a federal official is free to act on matters that normally would trigger concerns about conflicts of interest or other ethical problems. Federal regulations say the waivers generally should be made public on request. The Obama administration routinely posted waivers online. The Trump administration has issued an unknown number and released none. 

Shaub notified the White House and federal agencies in April that OGE wanted to see all ethics waivers issued by President Trump's administration. He set June 1 as the deadline. The broad request is known as a data call.

Oh I think we see another Trump White House scandal looming over the horizon.

Fighting this only goes to prove that the Trump Administration is terrified of ANY disclosures of  what they have been doing behind the scenes.

I would be willing to bet that there are some very interesting ethics waivers that have to do with, not just with members of the cabinet, but members of the Trump family as well.

Trump's team skipped ethics course that teaches about laws, judicial appointments, and executive orders. Seriously, anybody surprised?

"Ah, we don't need it. Besides no one knows more about ethical behavior than I do. Believe me, no one."

Courtesy of Politico: 

President Donald Trump’s team rejected a course for senior White House staff, Cabinet nominees and other political appointees that would have provided training on leadership, ethics and management, according to documents obtained by POLITICO. 

The documents suggest the program could have better prepared officials for working within existing laws and executive orders, and provided guidance on how to navigate Senate confirmation for nominees and political appointees, how to deal with congressional and media scrutiny, and how to work with Congress and collaborate with agencies — some of the same issues that have become major stumbling blocks in the early days of the administration.

But the contract was never awarded because after the election the transition team shifted its priorities, according to a letter the General Services Administration sent to bidders such as the Partnership for Public Service. The program was expected to cost $1 million, the documents show. The contract-based training program was authorized in 2000, and the Obama and Bush transitions both received the training. 

“It has been determined that the requirements as defined in the RFQ do not accurately reflect the current needs of the Presidential Transition Team,” the GSA contracting officer, Matthew Gormley, wrote in the Jan. 10 letter.

Well this explains a lot.

I wonder if the course included direction to NOT select cabinet members compromised by a foreign intelligence agency?

Cause that might have been useful.

But to be fair WHY would the Trump transition team care to take a training on ethics when they had no intention of being ethical?

I mean that's just silly.

Hey remember when Mitch McConnell was a real stickler for cabinet appointees to have their paperwork finished before any hearings? Yeah neither does he apparently.

Courtesy of Think Progress:  

The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate plans to rush forward this week with confirmation hearings for many of Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet and other key executive positions. Though many of the picks have not yet completed the customarily required ethics clearances and background checks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has shown no willingness to delay.

But back in 2009, McConnell took the exact opposite view. A letter to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), posted on Twitter by Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington co-founder and former Obama administration ethics adviser Norm Eisen on Sunday, shows he demanded that “financial disclosures must be complete” before any confirmation hearings be scheduled.

In his letter, McConnell wrote that his party’s duty to “conduct the appropriate review” of presidential nominations, “consistent with the long standing and best practices of committees, regardless of which party is in the majority,” was one it took seriously. “These best practices serve the Senate well,” he added, “and we will insist on their fair and consistent application.” The then-Senate Minority Leader called the financial disclosure process and other ethical steps essential “to fairly review a nominee’s record and to make an informed decision prior to a vote.”

Yep, that ole Mitch McConnell is a by the book kind of guy.

Right up until it inconveniences a president from his party that is.

Government Ethics Office upset that Trump cabinet picks scheduled for hearing next week have not submitted paperwork. Update!

Courtesy of HuffPo: 

The head of the Office of Government Ethics expressed alarm Saturday that the Senate would begin considering President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees for cabinet positions before they’ve been fully vetted for conflicts of interests. 

“As OGE’s Director, the announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” wrote OGE director Walter Shaub Jr. in a letter to Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). 

“This schedule has created undue pressure on OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials to rush through these important reviews,” he added. “More significantly, it has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings.” 

The letter comes ahead of a week in which there will be a flurry of hearings for Trump’s cabinet picks. There will be hearings on six nominees on Wednesday alone.

By the way this is no mere formality,  without this paperwork there is simply no way that these men can be considered for any position of responsibility in a presidential administration.

In fact it is the OGE's job to help these folks avoid any conflict of interest laws, something they simply cannot do without knowing what those conflicts might be.

MSNBC received access to correspondence which shows the OGE desperately trying to do their jobs, and being completely ignored by Trump and his transition team.

Here is what Elizabeth Warren had to say on the topic:

Confirmation hearings historically aren’t conducted until the @OfficeGovEthics certifies that each nominee has no unresolved conflicts.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 7, 2017

This is ridiculous. @realDonaldTrump’s noms can’t drag their feet on ethics paperwork while their Senate friends try to run out the clock.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 7, 2017

Cabinet officials must put our country's interests before their own. No conf hearings should be held until we’re certain that’s the case.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 7, 2017

Personally I don't think that Donald Trump wants anybody in his administration that could pass an ethics investigation.

After all ethics never meant anything to him as a businessman, why should they matter now?

The only question remaining is do they matter to the American people?

Update: Reince "twice and" Priebus says that there is "no reason" for Trump's appointees to fill out government ethics paperwork. 

Let me remind you that until very recently this guy was the head of the RNC. 

Drunk with power the first move by the Republicans in Congress is to make sure there will be no swamp draining on their watch.

Courtesy of The New York Times:  

House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail. 

The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure. 

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

With this office now gutted it essentially means that these lawmakers can do as they please with no independent oversight and if anybody complains they will promise to have their pals on the newly created, and totally partisan, Office of Congressional Complaint Review "look into it."

Here was Nancy Pelosi's statement: 

“Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp,’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House GOP has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions. Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress. 

“The Office of Congressional Ethics is essential to an effective ethics process in the House, providing a vital element of transparency and accountability to the ethics process. The amendment Republicans approved tonight would functionally destroy this office. 

“Congress must hold itself to the highest standards of conduct. Instead, the House Republicans Conference has acted to weaken ethics and silence would-be whistleblowers.”

Remember this happened on DAY ONE. And it can only get worse from here.

Trump himself also tweeted his displeasure at this move by House Republicans.

With all that Congress has to work on, do they really have to make the weakening of the Independent Ethics Watchdog, as unfair as it

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017

........may be, their number one act and priority. Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance! #DTS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2017

However his opinion makes little difference. And he is undoubtedly only tweeting this to cover his gigantic orange ass.

Any moron who voted for Donald Trump and these ass clowns because they believed they were going to "drain the swamp," and clean up Washington, is a special kind of stupid.

If we thought we had seen corruption before we are about to get a taste of what REAL corruption looks like.

York Township Committeeman resigns from the Republican party after 30 years.

Below is a portion of the letter that Chris Ladd, thirty year member of the Republican party and friend of Texas Governor Rick Perry posted online yesterday:

From his fairy-tale wall to his schoolyard bullying and his flirtation with violent racists, Donald Trump offers America a singular narrative – a tale of cowards. Fearful people, convinced of our inadequacy, trembling before a world alight with imaginary threats, crave a demagogue. Neither party has ever elevated to this level a more toxic figure, one that calls forth the darkest elements of our national character. 

With three decades invested in the Republican Party, there is a powerful temptation to shrug and soldier on. Despite the bold rhetoric, we all know Trump will lose. Why throw away a great personal investment over one bad nominee? Trump is not merely a poor candidate, but an indictment of our character. Preserving a party is not a morally defensible goal if that party has lost its legitimacy. 

Watching Ronald Reagan as a boy, I recall how bold it was for him to declare ‘morning again’ in America. In a country menaced by Communism and burdened by a struggling economy, the audacity of Reagan’s optimism inspired a generation. 

Fast-forward to our present leadership and the nature of our dilemma is clear. I watched Paul Ryan speak at Donald Trump’s convention the way a young child watches his father march off to prison. Thousands of Republican figures that loathe Donald Trump, understand the danger he represents, and privately hope he loses, are publicly declaring their support for him. In Illinois our local and state GOP organizations, faced with a choice, have decided on complicity. 

Our leaders’ compromise preserves their personal capital at our collective cost. Their refusal to dissent robs all Republicans of moral cover. Evasion and cowardice has prevailed over conscience. We are now, and shall indefinitely remain, the Party of Donald Trump. 

I will not contribute my name, my work, or my character to an utterly indefensible cause. No sensible adult demands moral purity from a political party, but conscience is meaningless without constraints. A party willing to lend its collective capital to Donald Trump has entered a compromise beyond any credible threshold of legitimacy. There is no redemption in being one of the “good Nazis.” 

I hereby resign my position as a York Township Republican committeeman. My thirty-year tenure as a Republican is over. 

Sincerely, 

Chris Ladd

Well it's nice to see that there are at least some Republicans with ethics, and from this day forward it will be easy to pick them out from the crowd.

If they refuse to support or vote for Donald Trump, then they have ethics.

If they do support Donald Trump, well then may they burn in political purgatory for all eternity.

Bernie Sanders asks for another 45 day extension on filing his personal financial disclosure.

BREAKING: @BernieSanders camp asks for (and gets) another 45-day extension on filing personal financial disclosure pic.twitter.com/QUdjX6Dy8J

— Dave Levinthal (@davelevinthal) June 30, 2016

Okay now I have been willing to accept the idea that Bernie Sanders is for the most part an ethical guy.

However let me just say that this really does not make any sense.

Bernie Sanders (Oh I'm sorry I mean his wife Jane.) has had ample time to get his tax information ready to release to the public, and yet we still have not seen anything besides his 2014 returns, which quite frankly raised some concerns.

And let's not ignore the fact that this 45 day extension takes us past the date of the Democratic Convention, July 25-28, which means that after Sanders concedes and throws his support behind Hillary the press will probably no longer bother to ask him about this anymore.

And doesn't that you just a tad suspicious?

Cause it does me. 

Apparently people are still surprised that secular parents are raising children with good morals and values.

Courtesy of LA Times:  

So how does the raising of upstanding, moral children work without prayers at mealtimes and morality lessons at Sunday school? Quite well, it seems. 

Far from being dysfunctional, nihilistic and rudderless without the security and rectitude of religion, secular households provide a sound and solid foundation for children, according to Vern Bengston, a USC professor of gerontology and sociology. 

For nearly 40 years, Bengston has overseen the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which has become the largest study of religion and family life conducted across several generational cohorts in the United States. When Bengston noticed the growth of nonreligious Americans becoming increasingly pronounced, he decided in 2013 to add secular families to his study in an attempt to understand how family life and intergenerational influences play out among the religionless. 

He was surprised by what he found: High levels of family solidarity and emotional closeness between parents and nonreligious youth, and strong ethical standards and moral values that had been clearly articulated as they were imparted to the next generation. 

“Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious' parents in our study,” Bengston told me. “The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterized by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose.” 

My own ongoing research among secular Americans — as well as that of a handful of other social scientists who have only recently turned their gaze on secular culture — confirms that nonreligious family life is replete with its own sustaining moral values and enriching ethical precepts. Chief among those: rational problem solving, personal autonomy, independence of thought, avoidance of corporal punishment, a spirit of “questioning everything” and, far above all, empathy. 

For secular people, morality is predicated on one simple principle: empathetic reciprocity, widely known as the Golden Rule. Treating other people as you would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs. As one atheist mom who wanted to be identified only as Debbie told me: “The way we teach them what is right and what is wrong is by trying to instill a sense of empathy ... how other people feel. You know, just trying to give them that sense of what it's like to be on the other end of their actions. And I don't see any need for God in that. ...

That last part is dead on.

You know I don't talk about it much but I was married for fourteen years to the daughter of a minister.

She had a lot of weird hangups concerning nudity, alcohol consumption, and using curse words, but virtually no problem with lying, taking things that did not belong to her, or saying terrible things behind people's backs.

In the marriage it was also up to me to deal with setting guidelines for the children, and it was not uncommon to have little to no backup from my Christian wife.

However I must have done something right, because my daughter is an even bigger stickler for the rules than I am, and often functions as my moral sounding board when I stumble into a gray area.

And NO she did not get that way by way of HER Fundamentalist mother either.  Trust me on that.

New poll shows that the more religious you are the more okay with torture you are. I know, right?

Courtesy of Libraland:  

One characteristic, above all else, defines the sociopath: an utter lack of guilt or remorse. One characteristic, above all else, defines Christianity: freedom from guilt and remorse. Christianity, as a rule, doesn't explicitly endorse the worst possible things a person can do. But it does forgive them, and that insidious negation of conscience is a quietly lethal thing. Anything's possible when you don't have to live with the guilt of doing it. And as one poll from NBC shows, even a group less trusted than rapists can be good, if there's no one around to take away the guilt of being bad. 

The poll comes from MSNBC's This Week in God, 12/20/14 edition. It was conducted in concert with MSNBC's friend in print, the Washington Post. First up, this question, with results sorted by race and religious affiliation, or lack thereof:

 The poll also asked the respondents if the CIA torture was justified. This how they answered in response to that question.

In the headline to this article over at Liberland was the word "shocking." However nothing about this shocks me.

The idea that people of faith are more moral or ethical is false, and one of the main reasons that I started The Immoral Minority in the first place.

Anytime any group claims to be the moral superior of others not in their group you can be dead certain that that is where you will find the most morally corrupt of them all.

Chicago investigating mysterious robo-calls that caused 2,000 election judges not to show up on election resulting in seven hour long lines at the polls. Want to guess which political party was responsible?

Courtesy of Think Progress: 

Chicago election judges received misleading and factually incorrect robocalls before the midterm, causing close to 2,000 of them to not show up on Election Day. As a criminal investigation gets underway, the Chicago Sun-Times has tied the calls to two Republican activists while the Republican Party has denied involvement and distanced itself from the party members who it claims acted alone. (Yeah, sure they did.)

An unknown number of election judges received one or more automated phone calls that informed them about an additional required training session or told them they needed to vote a certain way in order to keep their position. As a result, polling places across the city were understaffed and lines reached seven hours in some precincts. A smaller number of voters were turned away from certain locations. 

The city was forced to dispatch standby election judges when some polling places had just one or no election judges present at 6 a.m. when polls were scheduled to open. At the time, the Chicago Board of Elections said it didn’t know who made the calls or why they were sent out. The Cook County State’s Attorney has launched a criminal investigation and Mayor Rahm Emanuel called for hearings on the robocalls.

Of course this is on top of gerrymandering that has made some Republican strongholds bullet proof, and the influx of enough corporate money to drown a medium size city under a tidal wave of dollar bills.

You know I did not play too many team sports growing up as I don't work or play well with others. However I did compete in individual sports like powerlifting, wrestling, and martial arts.

And I cannot think of one of my coaches or instructors who would EVER have encouraged me to cheat in order to win. Even if winning were the most important thing in the world to them.

I was raised to try my hardest, refuse to give up, and to accept defeat graciously if I could find no path to victory.

Losing sucks balls. But winning, when you know you do not deserve to win, well that would shame me to my very core.

And what type of people do we have running our local and federal governments, if they have no problem showing up for a job that they know they do not deserve? How can we expect them to be ethical and honest, if they got where they are by being the exact opposite?

Because if you have to cheat, lie, and bully in order to get into a position of power, than that is the very last place you should be. 

Statistics and Atheism.

Source

Quite often people accuse Atheists of being arrogant, but I think they simply confuse a refusal to bow to the superiority of their religious brethren that invites that label.

And remember we are not among those who claim a moral superiority, nor go door to door threatening eternal damnation for those who do not accept our point of view.

Just saying.

Blogger files Freedom of Information Act request to finally determine how many Atheists are in the prison system. Answer will blow your mind.

Courtesy of The Friendly Atheist: 

Earlier this month, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Bureau of Prisons asking them about the religious makeup of prisoners. Over the weekend, to my surprise, I received a response. 

Not only did they have the information, they gave me a faith-by-faith breakdown. 

So… what do we learn from that information? 

Of the prisoners willing to give their religious affiliations (and that’s an important caveat), atheists make up 0.07% of the prison population. 

Not 1%. 

Not even the 0.2% we’ve been using for so long. 

Atheists constitute an even smaller percentage of the prison population than we ever imagined. (That includes prisoners whose affiliations were unknown. If I used Golumbaski’s method, the number would be 0.09%.) 

In addition to that, Protestants make up 28.7% of the prison population; Catholics, 24%; Muslims, 5.5%; American Indians, 3.1%. 

Okay now of course we all know that there is such a thing as prison conversion, so some of the people identified as one religion or another  may have come in unaffiliated or without muhc religious instruction to speak of.

However I will go on record as saying that I don't believe that too many of those converted started out as Atheists, for the simple fact that being an Atheist usually requires a great deal of research and self evaluation.

It is not something that a person would casually identify themselves as, esepcially in America.

So while I am not willing to say that it never happens that an Atheist is converted to religion in prison, I am fairly confident that it is not the most common of conversions to occur.

Having said that I would simply add that with the number of Atheists being so incredibly low it would seem to indicate that either there are fewer Atheists breaking the law than those who claim to be religious, regardless of which religion, or that there are just as many Atheists breaking the law, but they are too intelligent to get caught.

I tend to think that it is the first.

And remember these are people who do the right thing, NOT for fear of punishment of eternal damnation, but because doing the right thing, is the right thing to do.

Immoral minority my ass!

The Godless commit less crime, have longer marriages, and are better educated. That last one is a gimme.

Courtesy of Knox News:  

The godless commit less crime, have longer marriages and are more highly educated than almost any other group in America. 

According to Federal Bureau of Prisons data, the number of responding people in prison acknowledging they were Catholic was 39 percent; Protestant, 35 percent; Muslim, 7 percent; Jewish, 2 percent; and godless, 0.2 percent (20 percent did not respond). 

Since the number of godless is estimated to be 10 percent of the general population, all things being equal you would expect their prison population to be 10 percent. 

If, as many people assume, the godless do not lead moral lives, you would expect the number to be greater than 10 percent. The fact that the actual number is 50 times less than expected can lead to only one of two conclusions: either the godless commit less crime than the religious or they’re too smart to get caught very often. 

According to a Barna Research Group report, fundamentalist Christians have the highest divorce rate, followed by Jews and Baptists. The godless are tied with Catholics and Lutherans for the lowest divorce rate. It seems that some groups that claim to follow the Bible most strictly are not putting their money where their mouths are. The godless who are thought to be without morals seem to take their vows more seriously. 

According to a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Survey, the least-educated Americans are Jehovah’s Witnesses, followed by black Protestants and fundamentalist Christians. The most highly educated are reformed Jews, followed by Unitarian Universalists and the godless. 

In fact, a review of worldwide studies found that criminality and religion go hand in hand. The countries with the most religious people have the highest crime rates, highest sexually transmitted diseases and the highest teen pregnancy rates. 

This is also true in the United States. The more religious a state’s population, the higher the crime, STD and teen pregnancy rates. The report does say that the religious are happier than the secular but posits that the ostracism of the latter may be a major cause. 

In spite of this easily obtained information, the groups with the highest crime rate, the poorest marriages and the lowest education continually strive to force their beliefs on the nonreligious. And the politicians pander to them. Why else would they pass laws to put religion in the schools and on courthouse facades? And then they wonder why the godless could possibly be upset.

There is literally NOTHING that pisses me off more than some smug Bible thumper claiming moral superiority based on the fact that they have turned off their critical thinking skills and accepted a child's fairy tale as fact.

And then if THAT were not enough, they feel compelled to spread their anti-intellectual virus all over the world, supplanting indigenous religions, and destroying ancient cultures at will.

As I have said before I would leave people alone in whatever delusion they subscribe IF they were willing to keep it to themselves and out of our science, our education system, and our politics.

The bottom line is that the moral superiority argument does not pass the smell test and without that WHAT could possibly be the reason for judging the non-religious as less trustworthy and ethical than those who supplicate themselves to a god, a goddess, or a pantheon of deities?

I'm sorry  what's that? Yeah that's what I thought.

Alaska's lone Representative Don Young fights ethics charges by using money from unethical sources.

Courtesy of ADN:

Alaska Rep. Don Young is reaching into a legal defense fund bankrolled by a Louisiana oil field services company in order to pay lawyers to defend him in his latest ethics investigation. 

The Alaska Republican paid $60,000 this spring from his legal defense fund to the Washington, D.C.,-based law firm Akin Gump, according to new disclosures filed with the U.S. House of Representatives. The House ethics committee is investigating Young over allegations that he improperly accepted gifts, used campaign funds for personal purposes and lied to federal officials. 

Young’s payment to the lawyers drained nearly half the money remaining in the fund, the disclosures show, with the investigation of him still ongoing. So Young could need to start soliciting money for his legal bills for the first time since 2011, when Young held a fundraiser in Texas and Gary Chouest, head of Louisiana oil field services company Edison Chouest, handed him an envelope with $60,000 inside. 

Edison Chouest is heavily involved in Shell’s troubled efforts to drill for oil in the Arctic waters off Alaska. 

Edison Chouest built and operates the vessel that was towing Shell’s drilling rig Kulluk when the rig lost control on New Year’s Eve and grounded for several days near Kodiak Island. The incident is under investigation and is among the mishaps that led the Interior Department to declare that Shell “screwed up” in the Arctic. 

People often ask HOW Sarah Palin was elected Governor in the first place.

Don Young, Frank Murkowski, Ted Stevens and numerous unethical Republican politicians up here represent the answer to that question. She was younger, seemingly unconnected to the old guard, and a female. Sadly that was all it took to convince a number of people that she would represent a breath of fresh air.

Instead she has become the biggest embarrassment this state has ever seen.

And that is REALLY saying something with competition like this:

Young started the legal defense fund in 2008 after spending more than $1 million of his campaign contributions on lawyers to defend him from a corruption investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI’s investigation covered Young’s connections to the disgraced oil-field service contractor Bill Allen and his Veco Corp. It also dealt with the revelation that Young or someone from his office had changed the 2005 transportation legislation after it passed Congress to fund start-up work on a Florida interchange sought by a Young campaign contributor. 

The FBI closed its probe after concluding in 2010 “there was not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to ultimately convict Congressman Young." The FBI, however, turned over its findings to the House ethics committee, which reviewed them and other evidence about Young’s expenses and travel costs before deciding in March to launch its own investigation. 

Don Young is a criminal, and EVERYBODY up here realizes that. However as long as the Republicans run the state, he will continue to win elections until the is locked into a prison cell, decides not to run for reelection, or dies in office.  I prefer the first option.