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The details aren't pretty. While Gingrich was clamoring for Bill Clinton's ouster due to Monica Lewinsky, here's what his ex-wife Marianne says he was doing: Asking for her permission to continue his 6 year affair with his present wife Calista. [More...]

Marianne, who was married to the lawmaker from 1981 to 2000, unloaded to ABC News, telling the network that when the former House Speaker admitted to having a 6-year affair with his current wife, Callista, he asked if she would be okay with the arrangement. "And I just stared at him and he said, 'Callista doesn't care what I do,'" Marianne Gingrich told ABC News. "He wanted an open marriage and I refused."

Marianne says Newt "carried on the affair" with Calista in Marianne and Newt's bedroom.

Gingrich thinks his daughters will save him. He's referring all questions to them. Why? They are his daughters with Wife #1, how would they know what happened? They don't. According to Newt's website, one is an expert in "brand optimization, credentialing, and marketing" and the other is "Known for her ability to synthesize major news events and ordinary life happenings into a unique perspective that rings with authenticity."

What part are America's Republicans least likely to accept? They may think the open marriage bit is manufactured sour grapes, but Newt himself may have already confirmed it. According to this sourced article and Esquire:

During the divorce proceedings, Congressman Gingrich refused to participate in the discovery process and finally claimed that he and Marianne had an "understanding" about his affairs. Marianne denied this claim, and in a subsequent interview stated that she could end Newt's political career in a single interview.

And what about the duplicity involved in carrying on a six year affair while married and at the same time campaigning on family values? Or ridiculing others in Congress caught having affairs while he was doing the same thing?

From The Washington Post: Settled . . .But Not Over; The Gingrich Divorce and Its Repercussions on the Right,December 18, 1999:

For six years, Gingrich, 56, two-timed his wife with a blonded-up, French-horn-playing Agriculture Committee staffer. His thing with Callista Bisek, now 33, was going strong through the Gingrich Revolution of 1994 that turned the Congress over to Republican majorities. It kept up through the Republicans' "Contract With America," Gingrich's 10-point plan to turn America to the right values. It steamed along during his ascendancy to speaker, when he gestured toward his proud wife in the balcony and called her his "best friend and closest adviser," adding, "If I listened to her 20 percent more, I'd get in a lot less trouble."

On it played through 1996, when Marianne campaigned vigorously for her husband, beamed from his side and shook countless hands. It stood strong while Marianne underwent the trauma and disappointment of unsuccessful in-vitro fertilization. While Gingrich lambasted the president at every opportunity for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, while he successfully orchestrated the first presidential impeachment in a century, he was committing adultery himself.

Other good reads: This 1995 Vanity Fair interview with Newt and various members of his family and of course the Esquire article.

It's always dangerous when a public official thinks the rules apply to everyone but him, and that's exactly what Gingrich has done throughout his political career.

Newt Gingrich has as much chance of becoming President of the United States as the man in the moon.

This could be the first domino to fall:

Rick Perry is telling supporters that he will drop his bid for the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, two sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

Jed asks who Perry will endorse. I say no one for now. [I'm wrong again, he is endorsing Gingrich. Proving yet again that Perry has no clue when it comes to national politics. If by some miracle Gingrich wins the nomination, the GOP will lose a landslide. Perry wants credit for that?] the key point here is with Newt surging in South Carolina, if he has a strong showing, Santorum would be next to drop out and that would set up the much awaited Mitt v.the non-Mitt battle in Florida. I think the Not Mitt forces will make their last stand there.

The Weed Wars continue. Here's the U.S. Attorney's press release on yesterday's California medical marijuana dispensary raids. DOJ's "justification" for the raids is in this earlier press release.

The California Supreme Court has agreed to hear two medical marijuana cases.

The California Supreme Court has jumped into the fray again over the legality of medical marijuana laws, deciding on Wednesday to review two lower court rulings that impact how and whether local governments can regulate pot dispensaries across the state.

In their weekly closed-door session, the justices voted unanimously to review cases out of Long Beach and Riverside that dealt with the ongoing conflict between California's voter-approved law allowing the use of medical marijuana and federal laws barring the use or sale of the drug. The state Supreme Court's rulings in the cases are likely to have a widespread impact in the Bay Area, where cities from San Jose to Oakland have regulations dealing with medical marijuana providers.

[More...]

Last week, warning letters were sent to 23 Colorado dispensaries, landlords and property owners. The letters warned:

The Department of Justice has the authority to enforce the federal law even when such activities may be permitted under state law."

The U.S. Attorney's spokesman in Colorado says the letters are " only the first wave."

The latest in corporations are people too:

Hedge funds have been known to use hardball tactics to make money. Now they have come up with a new one: suing Greece in a human rights court to make good on its bond payments.The novel approach would have the funds arguing in the European Court of Human Rights that Greece had violated bondholder rights[.]

It's probably just a semantic question (this may be the court with jurisdiction over the subject matter), but it is certainly funny, in a strange way, to see hedge funds suing in a human rights court. The optics are not the best. The legal argument goes as follows:

Legal experts suggest that the investors may have a case because if Greece changes the terms of its bonds so that investors receive less than they are owed, that could be viewed as a property rights violation — and in Europe, property rights are human rights.

(Emphasis supplied.) Ron Paul might say "We are all Europeans now!" And Mitt Romney might consider apologizing for America not agreeing that property rights are human rights.

Speaking for me only

As if Facebook wasn't intrusive enough, it's taken another giant leap, adding new apps that tell us way more than we want to know about people we've "friended" and telling our "friends" way more than we ever intended to share.

The apps are all set up to use the “frictionless sharing” function on the social network, meaning that users only have to give an app permission to share information once. After that, the app updates automatically to a user’s profile, letting their friends know instantly what they may be eating, studying or listening to at any given moment.

So now, as soon as you buy a concert ticket, your Ticketmaster app will let your friends know what you’ve purchased immediately.

I'm so close to deleting my account entirely. It took me a half hour last night to figure out how to get rid of seeing what news articles on WAPO and Yahoo "friends" read and what they ate. [More...]

The worst is that I didn't sign up for any apps, but if a "friend" does, it shows up on my page and I have to block each app individually.

The Government is probably loving it. Why bother with the paperwork of getting a national security letter for a bookstore to see what books someone bought when FB publishes it gratis?

It's creepy to see what people I know are reading when the reason I know is not because they wanted me to know but because they clicked on it while logged onto FB. Moral of the story for now: Never use your FB account to log onto a media site to read an article, comment or buy something unless you want the whole world to know.

I especially feel sorry for those with 5,000 friends. Their timelines will be so clogged it will take them hours to slog through and delete this stuff they never asked to know about in the first place.

If you have a FB account, go in now and check your privacy settings. (Mine have always been set to "available only to me" and I'm still getting all this nonsense.)

Marianne Gingrich, the second of Newt Gingrich's three wives, is ready to unload. ABC News has the interview, which as of now, it plans to air on Nightline Thursday night. Excerpts should be available during the day. They aired a short clip Weds. night with the teaser that she says "there are things voters need to know." The only direct quote is of her saying that Newt looked directly at her and told her "Calista doesn't care what I do." The interviewer asks her what that means, and then cuts out before her answer. Guess we'll find out tomorrow.

Marianne Gingrich as spoken out before. [More...]

Here's what she told Esquire in 2010. Shorter version here. He asked Wife #2 to marry him while still married to Wife #1. He asked current Wife #3 to marry him while still married to Wife #2. He lied to the public when he said Marianne asked for the divorce, and records back her up.

As for Newt, he's basking in Sarah Palin's semi-endorsement/a>, (more like a hedge-bet) telling Wolf Blitzer:

"She’s one of the people I’d call on for advice....I would ask her to consider taking a major role in the next administration."

Newt is going into damage-control mode. The sooner he's gone the better. His chances in South Carolina aren't great anyway.

Others report conservative opposition to Mitt Romney is beginning to fade. Hopefully he won't pander to Sarah Palin.

For those that think ABC is showing favoritism, Nightline tonight did a tabloid-y story about Mitt Romney having millions of dollars in bank accounts in the Caymans. The accounts have names like Bain Capital Fund VIII. (Apparently the name of Romney's business is Bain Capital.) Romney declared the accounts on his disclosure forms (Nightline showed a copy) so I'm not sure what the big deal is, other than like many wealthy people, he takes advantage of legal tax reduction strategies.

Romney's campaign responds: ABC is flat wrong. The Romneys' investments in funds established in the Cayman Islands are taxed in the very same way they would be if those funds were established in the United States."

As to the secrecy, of course, it's not true that the Caymans will keep the information secret from the U.S. Government if a proper request is made, and there's a lot of ways to make it. See this 2008 report and its supplement. Between TIEA's (Tax Information Exchange Agreement) with the Caymans, the MLAT treaty and FINCEN, if the U.S. wants the information, it's likely to get it. Here are the IRS FAQs on reporting of foreign bank and financial accounts.

More DEA raids on California dispensaries.

The U.S. attorney's office press release issued today states that the raids were part of an ongoing effort to crack down on storefront dispensaries in California, and that letters "went out today to the owners and operators of currently operating or recently closed marijuana stores--nearly three dozen in Costa Mesa, and one now-shuttered store in Newport Beach. All known stores in these two South Orange County cities are now the subject of federal enforcement actions."

The Supreme Court gives a death row inmate another chance after a mailroom mix-up at his lawyer's firm caused a missed filing deadline. The opinion is here.

An alleged $62 million insider trading bust in New York. The 7 charged are accused of reaping profits on shares of Dell, Inc.

A new season of American Idol begins tonight.

This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Several Senators and Congresspersons have come out in opposition to SOPA and PIPA today including PIPA co-sponsor Marc Rubio.

I have decided to withdraw my support for the Protect IP Act. Furthermore, I encourage Senator Reid to abandon his plan to rush the bill to the floor. Instead, we should take more time to address the concerns raised by all sides, and come up with new legislation that addresses Internet piracy while protecting free and open access to the Internet.

Sen. Jeff Merkel:

Mark Zuckerberg comes out against SOPA on his personal FB page and got 75,000 likes in 10 minutes. It's now 45 minutes, and his post has 372,000 likes. Facebook's anti-SOPA/PIPA views are here. More blackout graphics below: [More...]

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and the three co-founders Jack Dorsey, Ev Williams, and Biz Stone, have tweeted their opposition to SOPA and PIPA.

From Daily Kos:

You can sign here.

Wikipedia is dark.

Mozilla will be dark during the day.

[More...]

Google has black boxes on its website. When you click on one, here's where you go.

Here's a list of those opposing SOPA.

EFF has this handy list of SOPA and PIPA links.

It also reminds people:

On Twitter, please use hashtags: #SOPA, #PIPA, #Blacklist, #SOPABlackout, #J18

EFF says:

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet's underlying infrastructure. The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to block users' attempts to reach certain websites' URLs. In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the Internet grows increasingly balkanized.

It gets worse: the blacklist bills' provisions would give corporations and other private parties new powers to censor foreign websites with court orders that would cut off payment processors and advertisers. Broad immunity provisions (combined with a threat of litigation) would encourage service providers to overblock innocent users or even block websites voluntarily. This gives content companies every incentive to create unofficial blacklists of websites, which service providers would be under pressure to block without regard to the First Amendment.

Service providers would be forced to monitor and police their users' activities as well, threatening the DMCA safe harbors that have been vital to online innovation over the last decade. SOPA gives the government new powers to go after sites that provide information about tools that might be used to bypass the blacklists — even though these are often the same tools used by democratic activists around the world to bypass Internet censorship mechanisms implemented by authoritarian governments like Iran and China.

Colorado Senator Mark Udall is opposing the bill. Sen. Mark Udall, also a Colorado Democrat, does not support the measure. He said Tuesday that it could be "a bill looking for a problem."

"Three things that concern me is that it would kill free speech, it would kill innovation and undermine Internet security efforts," he said. "The government could censor Internet search results, and it encourages lawsuits by private parties."

One more time: Tell Congress now, no SOPA, No PIPA. Congress plans a vote in February, the bills are not dead yet.

Kevin Drum quotes Andrew Sullivan:

[Liberals] have failed to notice that from the very beginning, Obama was playing a long game.

Drum remarks:

This is sort of a watered-down version of the 11-dimensional chess hosannas that deservedly got a lot of mockery back in the day. But it wasn't true of Obama then (both his campaign and governing strategies have been fairly straightforward) and it's not necessary to explain anything now.

I agree. However, I disagree when Drum writes "Why is Obama now taking a harder, more partisan approach toward his GOP adversaries? [. . . H]e's doing it because it's an election year. It's now time for contrast, not compromise. This is Campaigning 101."

I disagree because governing requires contrast too. A pol must convince the populace that how he wants to govern is the right way to go as opposed to the policies proposed by your opponents. FDR was not FDR because he was a firebrand liberal. He governed as he did, and politicked during the governing BTW, because he thought he needed those policies for good governance and, not coincidentally, to win reelection. In terms of political style, Obama followed the Clinton way, and now, as Clinton, he fights the contrast fight, because the Third Way did not work then and will not work now.

Speaking for me only

What's on your mind today? Here's an open thread, all topics welcome.

Wikipedia will go dark tomorrow on the day of protest against SOPA.

Google will place a protest link on its home page.

“We oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” Samantha Smith, a Google spokeswoman, said in an e-mail today.

[MORE...]

The Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate are backed by the movie and music industries as a means to crack down on the sale of counterfeit goods by non-U.S. websites. Hollywood studios want lawmakers to ensure that Internet companies such as Google share responsibility for curbing the distribution of pirated material.

Twitter, which also opposes the bill, will not shut down.

Instructions for how to black out your site are here. More here. Mozilla and Wordpress are joining the day of blackout.

A motions hearing is underway at Guantanamo in the military commission proceeding against detainee and U.S.S. Cole bombing suspect Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. Here's the agenda. Miami Herald/McClatchy reporter Carol Rosenberg provides this backdrop. She's also at Gitmo tweeting updates. The hearing is being broadcast by closed circuit at Ft. Meade.

The big issue involves the reading of al Nashiri's legal mail. Gitmo Chief Adm. Woods will testify tomorrow about how the prison staff is reviewing legal mail. (Update: He is testifying today.) The defense motion is now available here on the court's website (You have to click on al-Nashiri's active case and then bring up the docket and then scroll down to 12/19 for the motion.) [More...]

According to the defense motion, the Gitmo authorities have determined that only communications from counsel bearing their signature are legal mail. Any attachments (such as discovery, court opinions, expert witness CV's, news articles) attached to the letters are not and must go through a screening process which significantly delays the detainee's receipt of the material.

As the defense points out, historically all mail coming from counsel is legal mail which can be opened only in the presence of the inmate and checked for contraband and to ensure it really is from counsel. No further inspection is allowed:

See 28 C.F.R. 540.18.

a) The Warden shall open incoming special mail only in the presence of the inmate for inspection for physical contraband and the qualification of any enclosures as special mail. The correspondence may not be read or copied if the sender is adequately identified on the envelope, and the front of the envelope is marked “Special Mail—Open only in the presence of the inmate”.

As the defense argues, all mail coming from counsel is deemed privileged. The attachments reveal counsel's mental processes and legal strategy. There is no legitimate security reason to review this mail prior to delivery to the inmate.

Another Republican debate? Is anyone here watching?

We've got snow tonight. This is an open thread, all topics welcome.

Zappos has been hacked -- including its database of 24 million customers.

there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information...including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password)."

So the good news is Zappos kept credit card information on a separate server that wasn't hacked. The bad news is if you've ordered from Zappos, hackers now have your name and address, order information, email address and the password you used for Zappos. [More...]

Zappos has changed all email addresses, but with so many customers, getting access to your new password is delayed. They say 30 minutes, it's much longer than that. I'm still waiting. If you need to reset your password, start here.

Here's Zappo's e-mail to its employees about the situation. They've shut down their phone service because it would be overwhelmed. They are being good about sending human generated email responses.

Here's one I just received:

Thank you for contacting the Zappos.com Customer Loyalty Team.

I am terribly sorry for the delay in your receiving confirmation of your email reset password. Due to the current high volume of requests for password resets, there have been noticeable delays by the email notification. This means that your request has been processed as you requested, but it may take time before it arrives at the requested email address.

If you run into a further issues involving your account, please feel free to contact via a response to this email or send your reply to xxxxxxx@xxxxx.com.