“We are not looking to criminalize ordinary politics, nor are we demanding that elected officials be virtuous or vice-free.
“If you want to send an inappropriate tweet, knock yourself out. Just try not to steal our money.”
via Skelos being investigated next by Bharara: report – NY Daily News.
For the last couple days, we’ve been seeing breathless headlines about how the infamous Koch bothers plan to spend nearly $1 billion on the next election to further their conservative views. The reality is a bit less breathless.
The $889 million figure is a fundraising goal for their network of conservative groups.
Mind you, even if their network doesn’t reach that lofty number, the bros and their friend will still drop a hefty chunk of change on the election.
Most interesting to us at the BiteCastle is what this says about the future of the political parties:
The $889 million target would more than double the amount spent by the Republican National Committee during the 2012 cycle. The comparison underscores the migration of power and money away from the political parties and their candidates and to outside groups that — unlike the parties and candidates — can accept unlimited donations from individuals, corporations and unions.
This is not happy news. Political parties are deeply flawed institutions, but 99%ers can have more influence within the parties than with the Koch brother’s billionaire friends.
So whip out your checkbook and send some dough to your favorite candidate before the oligarchs take over everything.
via Koch donors give Marco Rubio early nod – Kenneth P. Vogel and Tarini Parti – POLITICO.
Fueled by investors seeking better returns, the sub-prime auto market has been heating up. The lenders find people with marginal credit ratings and put up the money for them to buy cars at high interest rates. The loans are then packaged and syndicated to investors. The problem is that those packaged loans may be much more risky than their “ratings” would suggest.
You may not own such loans directly, but they could be in your portfolio through a mutual fund or pension fund. Even your bank accounts could be at risk if you carry a large enough balance.
“If you are in a poker game and after 20 minutes you don’t know who the patsy is, then you’re the patsy.” (attributed to Warren Buffett)
Investment Riches Built on Subprime Auto Loans to Poor – NYTimes.com.
Patricia Todd, a member of the Alabama House of Representatives, says “I will not stand by and allow legislators to talk about ‘family values’ [in regard to gay marriage] when they have affairs, and I know of many who are and have. I will call our elected officials who want to hide in the closet OUT.”
Good for her!
And, in case anyone has forgotten,
Gay Alabama lawmaker: I’ll ‘out’ adulterous officials fighting same-sex marriage.
You know Sheriff Joe Arpaio — the wingnut who has a vendetta against undocumented workers, runs unconstitutional jails, and spends his spare time trying to prove that Barack Obama isn’t a US citizen.
Sheriff Joe had been going around arresting workers who use a stolen identity to obtain employment. That is, until the United States District Court for the District of Arizona issued an injunction that barred Joe from enforcing the Arizona law that made it a felony to steal someone’s identity to get a job.
Apparently the judge in the case, David Campbell, thinks it’s ok to steal my identity as long as it’s for a worthy cause.
Yeah? Well Bite Me, Judge Campbell.
Mark Bernstein tells how a group of game enthusiasts used terror tactics against anyone who dared critique the violence and misogyny of computer games. They then went on to dominate a corner of Wikipedia and ban all feminist viewpoints from the online encyclopedia.
What do we say? Bite me!
According to Snopes, “In recent years, the spread of fake news stories (designed to drive traffic to fake news-generating sites) by inducing social media users to share links has been increasing in a manner that appears almost exponential.”
Here at BITEME, we love fake news. In fact we used to sit around, reading randomly-clipped articles from the Weekly World News, the Onion, and the New York Post, and then try to guess which paper the clipping came from.
But in case you’re not smart enough to do it yourself, Facebook has announced
Today’s update to News Feed reduces the distribution of posts that people have reported as hoaxes and adds an annotation to posts that have received many of these types of reports to warn others on Facebook.
Interestingly, the fake ads that used to abound on Facebook seem to be fewer these days.
This just in from Matthew Leone, in response to our inviting him to blog here at BITEME.ME:
A thousand thanks for considering me, BiteMaster! Let me expand and work up my fury to significant levels before I commit to contributing, as I will otherwise doubtlessly downgrade your masterful site.
Verizon tracks you using their secret cookies but doesn’t want the government to be able to subpoena their offshore servers which store data from their US customers.
What gives?
Maybe they’re angling for Kim Dotcom’s or Dread Pirate Robert’s business.
—
@threatpost: #Government Demands for @Verizon Customer Data Drop – http://t.co/VOXVSerw6S
Shared via TweetCaster
Online ad company Turn uses tracking cookies that come back to life after Verizon users have deleted them. Turn’s services are used by everyone from Google to Facebook.
If you’re surprised, you haven’t been reading Biteme close enough. Like Google tricks Internet Explorer into accepting tracking cookies and We’re boned: Google bypassed Apple Safari privacy.
Hat tip to MrMild.
Zombie Cookie: The Tracking Cookie That You Can’t Kill – ProPublica.