Thursday Afternoon Thread: Thursday Throwbacks

Harry Reid: “I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold”
Posted by Ezra Klein on January 24, 2013 at 12:58 pm

…What will be reformed is how the Senate moves to consider new legislation, the process by which all nominees — except Cabinet-level appointments and Supreme Court nominations — are considered, and the number of times the filibuster can be used against a conference report. You can read the full text of the compromise, which was sent out to Senate offices this morning, here (pdf).

…But the deal Reid struck with McConnell doesn’t end the filibuster against the motion to proceed. Rather, it creates two new pathways for moving to a new bill. In one, the majority leader can, with the agreement of the minority leader and seven senators from each party, sidestep the filibuster when moving to a new bill. In the other, the majority leader can short-circuit the filibuster against moving to a new bill so long as he allows the minority party to offer two germane amendment that also can’t be filibustered. Note that in all cases, the minority can still filibuster the bill itself.

…The agreement also limits the number of times you can filibuster a bill after both the House and the Senate have agreed to it, and it limits the post-filibuster period on most nominations from 30 hours to two hours. Both reforms will speed the pace of the Senate a bit — the limit on post-cloture debate for nominations is particularly welcome among reformers — but neither is anything close to a game-changer. The question among some reformers, then, is what happened?

MORE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/24/harry-reid-explains-why-he-killed-filibuster-reform/

Hacktivist anger over US government’s ‘ludicrous’ cyber crackdown

Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer is a hacktivist from the same internet community that has lionised Aaron Swartz as a free information hero. They are polar opposites: Swartz, who became a martyr to the cause after his suicide on January 11, was a highly-regarded, Ivy League-educated liberal from Illinois. Auernheimer is a self-confessed internet troll and a “mean-mouthed southern libertarian” from a trailer park in Arkansas.

…Auernheimer was convicted in November of conspiracy to access a protected computer without authorisation, as well as identity fraud. He faces 10 years in jail for collecting 114,000 email addresses of iPad users stored by AT&T, and passing some of this information to Gawker. The actual harvesting of the emails was carried out by a friend, Daniel Spitler.

Auernheimer passed the information to Gawker to expose AT&T’s security flaws and embarrass them, he said.

AND THIS IS A MEME I HAVE SEEN IN SUPPORT OF THESE STUNTS THAT REALLY PISSES ME OFF:

Liederman has represented Commander X, a hacker who is on the run from the FBI for an attack on a website in Santa Cruz, California, and Raynaldo Rivera, a suspected hacker from LulzSec, accused of stealing information from Sony last year. He has described illegal hacker activities such as Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) as “digital sit-ins” or ” the equivalent of occupying the Woolworth’s lunch counter during the civil rights movement” and has called for the law to be changed.

read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/24/hacking-us-government-cyber-crackdown

Ok, this is just hilarious… I don’t know how true it is.
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Prince Slams Madonna, Maroon 5

He may be famously sparing in his words, but when Prince speaks, he speaks with a purpose. The singer revived some long-standing beef with Madonna in a recent interview with Billboard magazine nearly two years after the pair supposedly cooled off their fiery feud.

The 54-year-old singer, who covers the latest issue, speaks a lot about music ownership in the new interview, and at one point even calls the Material Girl out by name when talk turns to his time with Warner Bros. Records.

“It was always about Madonna,” he tells the magazine, explaining why his relationship with the record label went sour. “She was getting paid, but at the same time we were selling more records and selling out concerts on multiple nights.”

Prince and Madonna, also 54, famously tussled in the public eye after briefly dating in 1985 and collaborating on Madonna’s track “Love Song” from her 1988 album Like a Prayer.

“[He] was a little troll,” she said during a 1994 interview, recalling one of their earlier dates. “He was just sipping tea, very daintily. I have this theory about people who don’t eat. They annoy me.”

Read more here: http://omg.yahoo.com/news/prince-slams-madonna-maroon-5-213000071-us-weekly.html

Oh lawd, here we go:

GOP report on minority outreach due in March

Charlotte, North Carolina (CNN) – A task force charged with identifying winning political strategies and broadening the GOP’s appeal with minority voters will deliver its recommendations in March to the Republican National Committee on what steps the party needs to take going forward.

“We have real challenges and we did get whipped,” in the 2012 election, Mississippi National Committeeman Henry Barbour said at the RNC’s Winter Meeting in Charlotte. “That is not something we take lightly.”

Barbour is one of five Republicans heading up the “Growth and Opportunity Project,” a panel created last month by RNC Chairman Reince Priebus following a presidential election in which Democrats held onto the White House, added to their majority in the Senate and gained ground in the House. The GOP’s performance with minorities was particularly disturbing to party leaders, especially Asian and Hispanic voters.

[snip]

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/24/gop-report-on-minority-outreach-due-in-march/

I truly don’t see how they can reach out to people of color while holding onto their current base, which is in a lather because of a current President who is both superlative and black. I think that the GOP base is going to show their ass again during the midterm primaries; I can’t see this outreach working.

Speaking of computer viruses….

Computer virus turns laptops into spy cams: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/50580620/?ocid=twitter#50580620

Here we go with the habitual line-steppers…

@adept2u
Damn Ed Schultz just agreed that Harry Reid is paid off by the Koch Brothers talk about friends you wouldn’t turn your back on

Ed, agree or disagree with Reid, but take it down a notch or hundred. Ed’s always doing too much.

POU FAM♥ – -Gotta “bounce” 2 a brief bizness meeting. :>) Back as soon as. :>) -

POU FAM♥ – - –Anybody – —watchin’ THIS SERIES? – - – -:>) – -

— -‘Dear Mandela’ and More Must-See AfroPoP Docs – - – -
The Root Recommends: The African Diaspora film series’ fifth season, hosted by Gabourey Sidibe.

– - - For those in need of a documentary fix, new programming is well under way courtesy of Black Public Media. The same people who brought you Ask a Muslim, the docuseries answering frequently answered questions about the misunderstood religion, are presenting AfroPoP: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange. The collection of independent films highlights “contemporary life, art and pop culture in the African Diaspora.”

–Next up in the series is Dear Mandela, a documentary about three activists’ fight against the South African government’s efforts to forcefully evict residents from local townships, which premieres on Jan 29
THERE IS MORE. :>) – — – —-SOUNDS GOOD! :>) – –

I came across this comment to one of the many articles taking Tavis Smiley to task for his over the top and clearly personal years-ongoing media attack on PBO:

One thing I hate about our people is if you disagree with something or someone you are HATED by everyone. I LOVE our president BUT I don’t agree with everything he does, most of it yes. That being said, I will say this and if you don’t agree with me, too bad. I hate this war going on between black America and Tavis and other blacks who agree with him.

I don’t agree with this, at all. I don’t think that people are “hated” for disagreeing with the President. I think that people can detect a disagreement versus a vendetta. No one is imploring Tavis Smiley to have a seat merely because he disagrees with this or that policy and is expressing that (done all the time with no “hate” merely spirited dialogue). It is because Mr. Smiley is pursuing a vendetta, and with the new revelations about his preoccupation with his legacy even to the point of not thinking he’d live past 40, for his own good, he needs to leave this bitterness and hate behind, he needs to chill. Ditto for Cornel West.