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December 2014

Harvard Business School professor Ben Edelman has apologized amid backlash from his private-made-public harassment of Boston-are Sichuan Garden manager Ran Duan. Edelman made headlines after lambasting Duan over a $4 overcharge on his Chinese takeout order. After realizing that the menu prices posted online differed from what he was charged by $1, Edelman sent Duan a series of e-mails threatening agency action and demanding damages (yes, damages) for the incident. The Boston Globe has the exchange: email1ad 2

Over the summer I covered the Argentine government’s default on its debts owed to U.S. hedge funds—its second default in just 13 years. Now fellow Latin American socialist paradise Venezuela is gearing up for a default of its own, as precipitously falling oil prices have decimated the country’s budget and will continue to pressure its currency reserves. Since mid-June, crude oil prices have declined by more than 30%, with West Texas Intermediate (the benchmark measure for North American oil) dipping to $60.55/barrel before ultimately settling at a 5-year low of $61.54/barrel on Wednesday. A CNBC report on the prospect of a Venezuelan default cited a Capital Economics report stating that a default could be expected by next September or October when $5 billion in debt payments come due. Only an upswing of oil prices to somewhere around $121/barrel would allow Venezuela to balance its budget, according to some estimates. But with OPEC recently slashing its 2015 production levels to a 12-year low in response to decreasing estimated global oil demand and increasing supply via U.S. shale production, a significant oil price increase in the short-term seems highly unlikely. Bloomberg reports that the implied probability of default---derived from complex financial formulas---in the next five years stands at 93%, the highest in the world. Meanwhile, low oil prices translate into low oil revenues for PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-owned oil and natural gas company, which means the Venezuelan government will have to dip into dwindling reserves to service debt payments. Ratings agency Moody’s estimates that the country’s non-gold reserves are less than $7 billion, with only half of that “freely available and usable.” How is it that the country with the largest proven oil reserves—more than 297 billion barrels—sports an economy in such shambles? There are many reasons, but a few stand out:

Senator Mitch McConnell has characterized the new CIA report on "torture" as a last ditch effort by outgoing Democrats to stick their thumb in the eye of the George W. Bush administration and of course, he's right. Where were all these Democrats when Obama was pulverizing suspected terrorists into dust with drones if they happened to be on his personal kill list? It's convenient for Obama to kill terrorists with drones because they're enemy combatants he'll never have to place in Gitmo. Vice President Dick Cheney was interviewed by Bret Baier on FOX News Wednesday night and was asked about the highly partisan CIA "torture" report. He didn't hold back: Dick Cheney understands something Obama will never get. People want to know the truth, no matter how ugly it is.

Yeah, they went there. "The killings of Michael Brown and Treyvon Martin clearly shows that we don't live in a post-racial society as many expected when you were elected," Ramos says. Obama chuckled, "Well, I didn't expect that. You probably didn't either." "But many people expected you to do more on race relations, dealing with white privilege. Do you get angry with this? Is it your responsibility?" Then President Obama claimed Americans experience more equality now than before he took office, and also that Eric Holder was awesome. When Ramos pressed on saying, "but there's not really been a lot of improvement," Obama retorted, "The folks who say there's not a lot of improvement, I don't think were living in the 50's and remembering what it was like to be black or Hispanic and interacting with the police then." Take a look:

Fact Check:

Flashback to November 2, 2008. The Washington Post had this to say:

On December 11, 2014, federal court in Detroit will hold a hearing whether the court will accept $50,000 cash bond posted on behalf of convicted immigration fraudster Rasmieh (Rasmea) Odeh, who never disclosed her Israeli conviction and prison sentence for killing to students in a supermarket bombing, and other offenses. As summary of the fact of the case and her guilt have been addressed here many times. The hyperbolic propaganda campaign on her behalf by anti-Israel activists and websites is belied by the historical record of Odeh's guilt. After Odeh was jailed pending sentencing, her supporters launched a furious campaign claiming that she was was put in prison isolation (also called lockdown) as part of a targeting by the U.S. government and that her approximately two weeks in lockdown amounted to torture. Odeh's defense lawyer said:

The murder trial is underway of a Montana homeowner Markus Kaarma, accused of "baiting" an intruder into his garage and then shotgunning him to death has been proceeding in Missoula this past week, as reported by the Missoulian newspaper and other sources.  The defendant is arguing that the shooting was lawful self-defense. The essential facts are that a group of thieves--sometimes characterized as college students--have been raiding neighborhood garages and stealing from them, a practice referred to as "garage hopping."  Kaarma had been robbed in this fashion several times already, including one instance in which his cell phone was stolen resulting in him having an actual phone conversation with the thieves who answered when he called his own number. The prosecution argues that Kaarma and his common law wife, frustrated with the continued thefts and the inability of the police to do much about them, "baited" the garage with a purse, leaving the door slightly open.  This apparently attracted 17-year-old German exchange student Diren Dede to sneak into the garage.  Alerted to the intrusion, Kaarma approached the open garage door from the outside and fired several shotgun blasts into the garage, killing Dede.

Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) may have lost his Senate seat to underdog candidate Cory Gardner in this November's elections, but he hasn't let that stop him from making some explosive statements on the Senate floor about the recently-released "torture report" detailing interrogation techniques used during the George W. Bush Administration. Today, Udall called for the resignation of CIA director John Brennan, and lambasted the Administration for the apparent lack of accountability on the part of the CIA and other intelligence agencies who used the enhanced techniques the early Obama Administration promised to discontinue and investigate. From The Hill:
“It’s bad enough to not prosecute these officials but to reward and promote them is incomprehensible,” Udall said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “The president needs to purge his administration.” Udall reiterated his call for the resignation of CIA director John Brennan, saying he should no longer lead the agency because officials hacked into the Intelligence Committee’s computers during their investigation and deleted a file. He also spilled some findings from the so-called Panetta review, which was not included in the Senate panel’s report but is expected to paint a damning picture of the CIA’s public statements about the interrogation program. “Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture,” Udall said. “The CIA is lying. This is not an issue of the past, this is going on today.” “To date there has been no accountability for the CIA’s actions or the actions of Director Brennan.” Udall criticized Obama, saying he has failed to live up to his campaign promises about transparency and accountability for the CIA’s techniques. “The White House has not led on transparency, as then-Sen. Obama promised in 2007,” he alleged.

Had I not known Tomasky's piece in The Daily Beast was not in fact, parody, I'd have thought I was reading something straight from the annals of The Onion. Bereaved over Mary Landrieu's Louisiana Senate loss to Senator-elect Cassidy, Tomasky made the case (and I use that term loosely), that the Democrats should ditch Dixie (emphasis added to highlight adventitious hilarity):
I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not. And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.) With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.
Gee, what electoral use could Democrats possible have for Florida, or Texas, or Virginia?

The administration is still trying to convince us that Obamacare is a good thing:
On Dec. 3, federal actuaries released data showing that health spending inched up only 3.6 percent in 2013. Marilyn Tavenner, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, boasted that it’s “evidence that our efforts to reform the health-care-delivery system are working.” Sorry, not true. That 3.6 percent figure is an improvement only by a hair. The real slowing of health care spending started way back in 2009...long before ObamaCare even passed. Health spending slowed to a comfortable 3.8 percent rise that year, and stayed at that slow pace in 2010. Not that the president acknowledged that health spending was growing at the slowest rate in a half-century. To pass his health bill, he needed a crisis. So he and then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius repeatedly lied, warning that costs were “skyrocketing,” spending was “spiraling” out of control... On Dec. 2, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced “demonstrable progress” in making hospital care safer. Her report claims that some 50,000 fewer patients died from bed sores, infections, medication errors, falls and other mishaps from 2010 to 2013, largely due to new payment incentives and a patient safety program in ObamaCare. That happy claim was repeated verbatim by many media outlets. Not so fast, say patient safety experts who actually read the report...
There's another much more subtle lie inherent in the administration's claims, which is the assumption that if an effect follows an event, the effect is caused by that event. That sort of "lie" is hardly limited to the Obama administration or Obamacare, of course. It's a common problem with a great deal of social science and medical research that relies on correlations, and where rigorous controls are impossible with the human subjects involved.

For those of you who are new to the blog, or who have not been paying attention, Legal Insurrection filed a FOIA suit against the District of Columbia seeking records related to the non-prosecution of David Gregory and NBC News despite their clear violation of D.C.'s gun law by possessing a 30-round ammunition magazine. We are represented by Judicial Watch, which has done a wonderful job. It's a real credit to them that they work hard to dig out the truth not only on big issues like IRS targeting, but also smaller issues like how draconian D.C. gun laws are not enforced against the famous and connected D.C. elites. In the Gregory case, NBC News was warned by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department that possession of the magazine was illegal, and that NBC News should use a photo not the real thing, but NBC News ignored the warning and used it on Meet the Press. Gregory OAG Email Dec 21 2012 NBC to MPD4 Legal Insurrection was one of the first to note the violation of law, and we pursued the story in a long series of posts. Despite the clear violation of law, the D.C. Attorney General, Irvin Nathan, decided not to prosecute Gregory or any NBC News personnel.

God bless Texas. Last year, the Lone Star State passed a bill that allows schools to say things like, "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Hanukah" without retribution. Co-authored by Dwayne Bohac (R-Houston) and Richard Raymond (D-Laredo), the bill, "allows students, parents, teachers and administrators the freedom to acknowledge these traditional winter holidays without fear of litigation or punishment and restores common sense by placing Supreme Court precedent into state law," according to the law's official website.
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We Californians were happy to see the months of October and November pass without a significant wildfire, especially since there was an unusually early start to the fire season in May. However, December opened up with an intense conflagration that may be a real "man-caused disaster".
A large fire in downtown Los Angeles destroyed an apartment tower that was under construction and forced the closure of parts of two major freeways, snarling rush-hour traffic Monday morning. More than 250 firefighters were battling the blaze at 909 West Temple Street early Monday, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman David Ortiz told the Los Angeles Times. Fire officials also said that two other buildings nearby suffered damage. One building suffered "radiant heat damage" on three floors, while the second suffered fire damage on three floors and water damage on the remaining 14 floors. Officials are inclined to believe it may have been intentionally set, The Times reports. Fires of this magnitude are treated as criminal fires. However, Capt. James Moore said it is "very rare the whole building is engulfed."
Twitter lit up with video from "citizen reporters" via Instagram, and one Los Angelino post this item to YouTube.