Month: March 2014

Deep Thought

No Comments

When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth-unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.

— John Maynard Keynes
Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930)

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The Koch Suckers at the Cato Institute Just Came Out Against Investor-State Dispute Settlements

No Comments

Yes, Cato has come out against the the ISDS, that secret court that allows private entities to sue countries under arbitrary rules slanted in favor of investors.

This is kind of like Ford recommending General Motors pickup trucks for consumers:

Faced with an increasingly vocal opposition to a landmark EU-US trade agreement, a growing number of backers of the deal are starting to ask a simple question: might the future of transatlantic trade be better served if one of its most controversial provisions was simply dropped?

 Almost nine months after negotiations opened with great hope and fanfare, opponents of the mooted Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, are rallying against a plan that would allow private investors to use the pact to sue governments if they felt local laws threatened their investment.
Environmentalists worry that it would allow big US oil companies to challenge France’s anti-fracking laws and other environmental regulations, while consumer groups fret that it would open the EU’s sacrosanct ban on genetically modified organisms to a challenge from American agribusiness.

 The concerns in Europe over the inclusion of an “investor-state dispute settlement”, or ISDS, mechanism grew so loud earlier this year that Karel De Gucht, the EU’s trade commissioner, announced he would suspend negotiations on the relevant text to hold public consultations.

 But in recent weeks, as both sides have been preparing for Monday’s resumption of negotiations in Brussels, the opposition has spread beyond the traditional sceptics.

 In a paper released last week, Daniel Ikenson, director of the trade programme at the conservative Cato Institute, argued that the investor protection measure had become too toxic. And that in order to defuse the growing opposition, negotiators should simply drop what seemed like a superfluous provision.

 “ISDS is not even essential to the task of freeing trade. So why burden the effort by carrying needless baggage?” Mr Ikenson wrote in his paper, which called for the US to drop ISDS provisions from its push for a 12-country Pacific Rim deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as well.

Cato, and the Kochs, are all about enforcing the primacy of the holders of capital over that of democratically elected government, so this turn around is a big deal, and it’s a good thing.

In an era of historically low tariffs, these increasingly anti-sovereignty provisions in trade deals are being viewed with well justified suspicion.

The old argument, “Because ……… Free Trade,” is simply no longer enough to justify trade deals with draconian IP and investor protections.

It’s a welcome side effect of the financial meltdown.

Oh Crap

No Comments

Russia has annexed the Crimea.

This is going to be a complete clusterf%$3 for everyone involved, particularly the people of the Ukraine, about whom all the actors profess to care.

There is a lot of blame to allocate:

  • Some of it goes to Vladimir Putin, because, after all, he is the one sending troops.
  • Some of it also goes to the EU, which is so hell bent on expansion that it ignored the nature of its premature attempts to bring the Ukraine into its its orbit because ……… Europe.
  • Viktor Yanukovych for his abject corruption and venality.
  • Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko for their abject corruption and venality, which is what got Yanukovych elected.
  • The oligarchs, because ……… oligarchs.

That being said, the decision to support and bolster the Fascists in the Svoboda party and the Right Sector militia, and make them the tip of the spear in the protests that drove Yanukovych from power after a deal had already been cut, tripping every switch in Russian psyche, that wasn’t any of them.

That was us.  That was neocon Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland and our State Department, and our CIA, and our front groups like the National Endowment for Democracy that put the Fascists in control of the defense and interior portfolios in the new government.

The Neocons have been wrong about everything since before they were Republicans, when they were staffers for Scoop Jackson’s (D-WA) staff, and yet they continue to drive our foreign policy decisions.

Where are the “Adults in the Room” who are supposed to keep the metaphorical firearms out of the metaphorical hands of metaphorical children (neocons)?

Theoretically, Barack Obama, who won the primaries, and later election as president, over his opposition to “stupid wars”, and so should be keeping these people’s hands away from the reigns of power.

The fact that Nuland was promoted from spokesman to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs by Secretary of State John Kerry, but Obama is in charge, and the decision to place a former Cheney aide in such a position is ultimately his decision.

Or, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point, the Cossacks work for the Czar, which is kind of ironic, because the Cossacks actually come from the Ukraine.

    And I Would have Gotten Away With it Too, if it Weren’t for You Meddling Voters

    1 Comment

    The very rich seem to think that democracy is a drag, because it gets in the way of their making even more money by privatizing essential public functions:

    The newest bit of “wisdom” for public education comes to us from Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor in the Rocketship Education charter school network. At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association on March 4, he said in a keynote speech that the problem with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards. Charter schools have boards that are not elected and, according to his logic, have “a stable governance” and that’s why “they constantly get better every year.”

     Here’s a transcript of part of the Hastings speech, published on stoprocketship.com (and you can watch the video below):

    And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…The most important thing is that they constantly get better every year they’re getting better because they have stable governance — they don’t have an elected school board. And that’s a real tough issue. Now if we go to the general public and we say, “Here’s an argument why you should get rid of school boards” of course no one’s going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90%, so we have a lot of catchup to do…So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow… It’s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90% of charter kids….And if we succeed over the next 20 or 30 years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system, it’s hard. [applause]

    Actually, all charter schools don’t have stable governance and all of them aren’t getting better every year (plenty close because of their lousy governance) and even charter advocates have called for changes to improve governance structures. What Hastings is suggesting is that democratic elections themselves create unacceptable instability in governance of public education.

    Note that Hastings has invested millions in Rocketship charger schools, and while they claim to to be a not for profit, stoprocketship.com does provide numerous links that seem to indicate that much of their activities are structured so as to provide profits for its principals and those who make contributions.

    No wonder Reed Hastings thinks that voters are annoying.  It makes the grifting too hard.

    Note that this is not limited to education, where charter schools do not (when comparing apples to apples) outperform the public school system, and where in the extreme case (New Orleans 90% charters) we are seeing increasing cases of malfeasance and misfeasance requiring greater oversight.

    It also applies to things like trade deals, or the Simpson-Bowles commission.

    Even if this actually resulted in good policy, it would be wrong, but when you look at things like NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, TTIP, etc., it is clear that all it does is that it creates an orgy of corruption and rent seeking.

    When you decide to take democracy out of the mix, and run this stuff “like a business”, someone gets the profit, and ain’t the taxpayer.

    Rupert Murdoch is Insane

    No Comments

    I am not referring to Murdoch’s recent meltdown over the sponsors dropping the St. Patrick’s day parade for their gay ban. (The fact that the quintessential Irish brewer, Guinness, has dropped the parade amuses me.)

    Rather I am referring to the fact that Matt Groening has revealed that Murdoch was considering suing the producers of The Simpsons over their parody of a Fox News crawl:

    Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons over a spoof news ticker, the show’s creator Matt Groening has claimed.

    Mr Groening said Fox News raised the unlikely prospect of suing a show broadcast by its sister channel, Fox Entertainment, because it wanted to stop the Simpsons parodying its famously anti-Democratic party agenda.

    The alleged row centred on a parody of Fox News’ rolling news ticker, which included headlines such as “Do Democrats cause cancer?”

    Mr Groening said the news channel backed down because it would have caused Fox to bring a lawsuit against itself.

    “Fox said they would sue the show and we called their bluff because we didn’t think Rupert Murdoch would pay for Fox to sue itself. We got away with it,” Mr Groening told National Public Radio in the US.

    “But now Fox has a new rule that we can’t do those little fake news crawls [tickers] on the bottom of the screen in a cartoon because it might confuse the viewers into thinking it’s real news,” he added on NPR’s Fresh Air programme.

    I am so reassured that a media magnate billionaire who is one white Persian cat away from being a Bond villain is wasting his time on this sh%$.

    Thank You Victoria Nuland

    No Comments

    Thanks to neocon support right-wing nationalists Ukraine, courtesy of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, Ur-neocon Robert Kagan’s wife, a deal got killed, and there was coup in the Ukraine, followed by anti-ethnic Russian legislation, which was in turn followed by the Russian occupation of the Crimea.

    Well, now we have an overwhelming vote for the Crimea to join Russia:

    Russian state media said Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia on Sunday, as Kiev accused Moscow of pouring forces into the peninsula and warned separatist leaders “the ground will burn under their feet”.

    With over half the votes counted, 95.5 percent had chosen the option of annexation by Moscow, the head of the referendum commission, Mikhail Malyshev, said two hours after polls closed. Turnout was 83 percent, he added – a high figure given that many who opposed the move had said they would boycott the vote.

    Western powers and leaders in Kiev denounced it as a sham.

    Underlining how Moscow’s military takeover of the peninsula two weeks ago has driven Russia and the West into a crisis with echoes of the Cold War, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama spoke by telephone and, according to the Kremlin, the Russian and U.S. presidents agreed on a need to cooperate to stabilize Ukraine.

    This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland, and those who have decided to employ her in (Obama, Clinton, Kerry) need to realize that neocon triumphulism has been a recipe for a US foreign policy disaster.

    I’m not saying that neocons should not be employed by the State Department, but I am saying that they should not be put in positions of authority.

    Witness how we are now repeating the South Ossetia debacle all over again.

    It’s like giving an AK-47 to a hyperactive 6-year old child.

    That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Paul Ryan Edition)

    No Comments

    Paul Krugman serves a can of whup ass on Paul Ryan for his racist dog whistles:

    There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.

     So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. [As an aside, when he was a senior in high school, Charles Murray burned a cross next to a police station, which sort of describes his whole career since then] Oh, wait.

     Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

     Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

    Krugman makes a point that needs to be made.  Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater’s Southern Strategy, the Republican party has aggressively embraced racists and racism, so the the dialogue within the GOP is permeated with racism.

    So he said something that makes perfect sense within a political party that is lacking in, “mindful human beings,” to quote what Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, but it was viewed with horror by much of the rest of humanity.

    And then there is Timothy Egan, who observes that Ryan, who frequently makes hay of the fact that his great-great-grandfather fled the Irish potato famine, which was a product of near-genocidal British policies, which were driven from the Victorian concerns about fostering dependency, which is exactly the same point that he makes when assaulting the social safety net:

    In advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

     A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

     And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

     There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

     But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

    ………

     On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.

     “We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

     Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

    Ouch.

    I Don’t Know Sh%$ About This

    No Comments

    I am referring, of course, to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

    I do not know what happened. I cannot separate the wheat from the chaff from the various reports.

    So, unlike many blogs, as well as Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, I’m going to keep my f%$#ing mouth shut, as opposed to speculating on what happened.

    Once there is a report, I may have some thoughts, but right now I admit that I am without a clue on this.

    If the Gripen Were in the US Inventory, It Would Be a World Beater

    No Comments

    We are getting some new details on the updated Saab Gripen, and its a good example of what happens when you take procurement away from the generals, and give it to procurement professionals like the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV): (paid subscription required)

    Saab, its Swedish air force customer and Selex-ES have disclosed new details of the JAS 39E Gripen fighter, which has been in full development for just over a year following a six-year risk-reduction and demonstration effort. The JAS 39E is a new aircraft in detail, with only a few structural or systems components in common with the current JAS 39C/D, but it shares enough with its predecessor to take full advantage of weapon-integration experience and uses an evolved version of the C/D’s software.

     Compared with earlier Gripen variants, the JAS 39E has a higher gross weight and can carry 2,400 lb. more internal fuel, mostly due to a redesigned main landing gear that retracts into underwing bulges rather than the body. The nose gear has also been changed, from a twin-wheel unit to a larger single wheel that is compatible with emergency arrester cables on runways. The main structure has been redesigned with continuous wing-fuselage frames that extend to the inboard wing pylons, where the outer wings are attached, and the fuselage contours have been changed, partly to accommodate more fuel. However, the redesign has reduced the airframe’s proportion of the empty weight, boosting useful load.

     The JAS 39E will be able to engage stealth targets with a fused, multispectral sensor suite (see article below), according to program officials. It will be able to cruise at Mach 1.25 without using afterburner, and will enter service in 2018 with a full suite of weapons including the MBDA Meteor ramjet-powered air-to-air missile (which enters service next year on the JAS 39C/D). The Swedish air force’s fixed-price contract for 60 complete aircraft, converted from JAS 39Cs but with new engine, avionics and primary structure, equates to a flyaway price of $43 million.

    The JAS 39E is not a classically stealthy aircraft, but the development contract stipulates a significantly lower radar cross-section (RCS) than the JAS 39C. In conjunction with the all-new Saab-developed electronic warfare system, which uses gallium nitride antenna technology and is described as an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensor in its own right, and the new Selex-ES Brite Cloud expendable active decoy, the reduced RCS is expected to allow the fighter to survive against advanced threats, including the Sukhoi T-50 fighter and “double-digit” surface-to-air missiles, while avoiding the cost and risk of an F-35-type stealth configuration.

    The first customers, Sweden and Switzerland, are buying only single-seat aircraft, but codevelopment of the two-seat JAS 39F is being discussed with Brazil, which selected the new Gripen to reequip its fighter force in December.

     The JAS 39E is intended to have a lower acquisition cost than the JAS 39C, despite its greater capability, and to have a lower operating cost than any other fighter. The Swedish air force reports an hourly operating cost of $7,500 for the JAS 39C, including fuel. For development costs (also covered by a fixed-price contract), Saab’s goal is to spend only 60% as much as it would have cost using the same tools and processes that were used on the JAS 39C.

    ………

    Gripen Upgrade

    		JAS 39C JAS 39E
    Empty weight, lb. 13,000 less than 14,000
    Internal fuel, lb. greater than 5,000 greater than7,400
    Max takeoff weight, lb. 30,900 36,400
    Engine Volvo RM12 GE F414-GE-39E
    Intermediate/Max thrust, lb. 12,150/18,100 14,400/22,000
    Supercruise No Mach 1.25
    Radar Mechanical scan AESA
    IRST No Yes
    Cockpit display 3—6 X 8 in. 1—8 X 20 in.

    Interestingly, they accomplish this with a remarkably small amount of commonality with the prior models.

    For the upgrade that they offer from the “C” to the “E”, they will, “retain almost none of the previous airframe, but will reuse parts of its fuel and air systems, plus its ejection seat, windshield, canopy and outer wing elevons.”

    They will be producing a completely new aircraft, one that is more capable than its predecessor, with better avionics, more payload, more performance, more range, and lower purchase and operating costs.

    What’s more, it looks that through sensor fusion they may achieve some fairly impressive anti-stealth performance: (Paid subscription required)

    New sensors being developed for the JAS 39E and close to starting flight tests on the JAS 39-7 Gripen Demo testbed will be able to detect low-radar-cross-section (RCS) targets, and will provide the pilots in a Gripen formation with a new level of situational awareness, according to Bob Mason, Selex-ES marketing director for advanced sensors.

    The JAS 39E will have three Selex-ES sensors. The Raven ES-05 active, electronically scanned array radar (AESA), developed by the company’s Edinburgh unit, will be the first production AESA to be mounted on a “repositioner,” a rotating mount that gives the radar a ±100-deg. field of view around the nose. The Skyward-G infrared search and track (IRST) system (from Nebbiano, Italy) is based on experience with the Eurofighter Typhoon’s Pirate IRST and Selex-developed land- and sea-based IRSTs. The fighter also has a new identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system with three electronically steerable antenna arrays, which matches the radar’s range and field of view.

    The three main sensors will cue one another automatically to display to pilots a fused picture of airspace around the fighter; it will also be fused with the JAS’s new electronic-warfare system. Finally, sensor data can be shared between Gripens in a flight via data link.

    One of the interesting things is that they use “kinetic ranging” to get range on target through the IR sensors, where, “the aircraft performs a weaving maneuver and the range is determined by the change in azimuth angle to the target—or the IRSTs on two aircraft can triangulate the target over the TAU-Link.” (The data network that Gripens share).

    Notice how the Swedes, and Saab, have gone pretty much in the opposite direction that the US did on the F-22 and F-35:

    • Segregated as opposed to integrated software.
    • Keeping cost as a primary consideration as opposed to bleeding edge.
    • Seeing the planes as integrated into an open battlefield network, as opposed to being data roach motels.  (Data goes in, but it doesn’t come out)
    • Using existing technology wherever possible. 

    The progress of the Gripen is an example of how defense procurement can work, and how our defense procurement doesn’t work.

    I Add My First Canadian to my List of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off

    No Comments

    This is truly EPIC ownage of Senator Richard Burr by Dr. Danielle Martin, vice president at the Women’s College Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

    While I understand that in some ways, this is shooting fish in a barrel, Burr is a clueless ignorant tool on pretty much everything he touches, but still, her exquisitely polite (She is Canadian, Eh?) response shows demolishes his delusional objections.

    The nickel tour of the exchange, as rendered by rage comics: (Video follows) (Updated comic. I put in a draft my mistake)

    H/t Salon.

    The Cowardice and Hypocrisy of Some Haredim in One Sentence

    No Comments

    That sentence was, 50 Thousand Haredim March So Only Other Jews Die in War.

    It was written by Yori Yanover who used to work for the Jewish Press, a New York based publication that caters to the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim) community.

    They canned him, and deleted the page, though it is still available in the Google cache.

    This is similar to what goes on with the dole money allotted to Haredim so that they don’t have to work.

    They are using Torah to derive personal benefit, and this is forbidden in normative Judaism, as it is said in Pirkei Avot 4:6, “Do not make the Torah into a crown with which to aggrandize yourself, and don’t use it as a spade with which to dig into them.”

    Basically it means two things:

    • The study of Torah is not about self-aggrandizement or puffing up one’s own ego.
    • The study of Torah is not about deriving personal financial benefit. (Which also implies that draft dodging is out as well)

    Those Haredim who are protesting are batting 0 for 2 on this.

    H/t Mitch Gilbert (the first link) who has republished the article.

    You can also find a copy at Failed Messiah.

    H/t to my brother, aka “The Bear Who Swims,” for cluing me into this story.

    Liar

    No Comments

    In a photo-op with Democratic members of Congress, Barack Obama was asked about the allegations that the CIA hacked into Senate Intelligence Committee computers and threaten the committee staff, Obama let loose with this one of the most blatant lies I’ve heard in a long time:

    Since that time, we have worked with the Senate committee so that the report that they are putting forward is well-informed, and what I’ve said is that I am absolutely committed to declassifying that report as soon as the report is completed. In fact, I would urge them to go ahead and complete the report, send it to us. We will declassify those findings so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward.

    Seems innocuous, but as Kevin Drum observes, “Last I heard, the report was completed in 2012. The CIA responded last June. Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for declassification of at least the report’s executive summary every since.”

    Much like his statement that he welcomed the debate on spying on American citizens engendered by the Snowden leaks, this latest statement is a lie.

    If Obama had any interest in releasing an unclassified version of the Senate report, it would be out now, but he does not want it released, because the details on torture in the report are allegedly even more grisly, and far less effective, than what has already been made public.

    If these details come out will make it difficult for Obama to keep ignoring the moral and constitutional issues raised by the mindless and useless brutality that was done in our name.

    That’s inconvenient, so Barack Obama wants it to go away.

    A portrait in cynicism and cowardice.

    The Republicans Jump C. Megalodon

    No Comments

    C. Megalodon*

    It appears with the implosion of Chris Christie over Bridgegate, Ted Cruz being loathed by every mainstream candidate in the nation, Jim DeMint being the architect of their disastrous government shutdown, Bobby Jindal being too creepy for words, Rick Perry being too stupid (too inarticulate, and ……… oops), Paul Ryan is too creepy, and Rand Paul being too ……… Rand Paul, the Republican Presidential bench is rather lacking for 2016.

    It appears that the Republicans are casting about for a viable candidate, and Joe Scarborough’s name has been mooted:

    For the past several months, we’ve heard a lot about Joe Scarborough’s blueprint for the Republican Party to get back on track.

     The congressman-turned-pundit has been talking about that stuff for years, of course, but it reached a fever pitch last November with the release of his book, “The Right Path.”

     “The buzz among GOP insiders is that ‘The Right Path’ has the potential to galvanize conservatives in the way Barry Goldwater’s ‘Conscience of a Conservative’ did half a century ago — especially conservatives ready to return to the winning ways of Ronald Reagan, who is on the cover, shown striding down the White House colonnade,” gushed Politico’s buzz arbiter Mike Allen.

     Scarborough talked to TPM about the book, casually suggesting that “Joe Scarborough’s worldview” was in sync with “Ronald Reagan’s worldview and Bill Buckley’s worldview and Margaret Thatcher’s worldview.”

     You knew where this was going.

     Inevitably, Joe Scarborough’s book tour was viewed as a springboard for Joe Scarborough’s 2016 presidential campaign. A few months after the book’s release, The Daily Caller’s Alex Pappas reported that it’s “widely believed” at MSNBC that Scarborough has presidential aspirations.

     Two days after that story ran, Scarborough told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that he “won’t rule anything out.”

    I know that somehow or other the Republicans will find a nominee in 2016, but this is beginning to look like the life cycle of a drummer for Spın̈al Tap.

    *The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

    Nothing is the Matter With Kansas

    No Comments

    Thomas Frank in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? he is flummoxed about why the so-called American heartland vote against their economic interests when they vote “God, Guns, and Gays” social issues.

    Well, over at MoJo, Kevin Drum notes that any serious analysis, “Democrats have done virtually nothing for the middle class in 30 years.”

    He’s right.  The  Democrat Party’s record on economic for the middle class, and the poor is amazingly weak tea when compared to anyone but the Republicans:

    There are two problems with the Democratic approach. First, it’s too abstract to appeal to anyone. Second, it’s not true anyway. Democrats simply don’t consistently support concrete policies that help the broad working and middle classes. Half of them voted for the bankruptcy bill of 2005. They’ve done virtually nothing to stem the growth of monopolies and next to nothing to improve consumer protection in visible ways. They don’t do anything for labor. They’re soft on protecting Social Security. They bailed out the banks but refused to bail out underwater homeowners. Hell, they can’t even agree to kill the carried interest loophole, a populist favorite if ever there was one.

    Sure, Democrats do plenty for the poor. They support increases in the EITC and the minimum wage. They support Medicaid expansion. They passed Obamacare. They support pre-K for vulnerable populations. They expanded CHIP. But virtually none of this really benefits the working or middle classes except at the margins.

    Democrats have been unwilling to do any more than nibble around the edges for years.

    It’s all about extracting large donations from rich people, which requires that you support policies that make them richer and richer, and this money is extracted from the rest of us.

    Rule Number 1: Do Not Piss off Jon Stewart

    No Comments

    Rule number 2:  Going on The Daily Show to show what you are really nice guy.

    Jim Kramer of Mad Money’s evisceration was, until last night, the reigning champion of this, but his take down last night of former judge Andrew Napolitano’s ignorant and bigoted spew of Neo-Confederate talking points about Abraham Lincoln mad that look like a tea party.

    I’ll not show you an interview, I’ll just show you the (I sh%$ you not) game show segment.

    It is unbelievably brutal:

    Funny, but unbelievably brutal.

    No Virginia, Trade Deals Do Not Require Draconian IP Restrictions

    No Comments

    Case in point, Canada and South Korea, who signed a free trade agreement without an all encompassing over-broad IP regime:

    Canada and South Korea announced agreement on a comprehensive trade agreement earlier today. The focus is understandably on tariff issues, but the agreement also contains a full chapter on intellectual property (note that the governments have only released summaries of the agreement, not the full text, which is still being drafted). The IP chapter is significant for what it does not include. Unlike many other trade deals – particularly those involving the U.S., European Union, and Australia – the Canada-South Korea deal is content to leave domestic intellectual property rules largely untouched. The approach is to reaffirm the importance of intellectual property and ensure that both countries meet their international obligations, but not to use trade agreements as a backdoor mechanism to increase IP protections.
    Yesterday I noted that Canada might be asked to increase the term of copyright protection given that South Korea had agreed to longer copyright terms in its recent agreements with the European Union, Australia, and the U.S. In fact, the U.S. agreement contains extensive additional side letters on Internet provider liability, enforcement, and online piracy.  The Canada – South Korea deal rejects that approach with copyright, trademark, patent, and enforcement rules that are all consistent with current Canadian law (plus the coming border measures provisions in Bill C-8). 
    On copyright, the summary states the agreement:

    • reflects Canada’s regime as updated by the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act, which brought Canada into compliance with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s two Internet treaties;


    • reiterates existing aspects of Canada’s regime, including the protection of technological protection measures (technology designed to protect copyrighted material), protection of rights management information, and special measures against copyright infringers on the Internet (no change to Canada’s notice and notice regime, which defines the responsibility of Internet service providers in respect of copyrighted material on their networks).

    The specific reference to notice-and-notice is important since it confirms no takedown requirements nor three-strikes rules. The specific measures against copyright infringers may be interpreted as Canada’s enabler provision that targets websites that facilitate infringement. Moreover, the references to reflecting Canada’s regime indicates that there is no copyright term extension or other substantive changes.

    No copyright erxtensions.  No requirement that the other countries accept evergreening of drugs.

    IP sanity.  What a concept.

    H/t Slashdot.

    Barack Obama, What’s Your F%$#ing Problem?

    No Comments

    OK, we now know that the CIA is accused of spying on and breaking into Congressional computers. We also know, thanks to Dan Froomkin, that John Brennan wrote a letter admitting that they hacked into the Senate staffers’ computers:

    Brennan, in his own remarks after Feinstein’s speech on Tuesday, vaguely ridiculed allegations of CIA “hacking” and said that “when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” But nothing he said actually disputed Feinstein’s version of events.

     And as Michael Masnick reported for Techdirt, a January 27 letter to Feinstein that Brennan  sent out to CIA staff on Tuesday actually confirmed the search, though Brennan described it — and the need for it — in the context of concern about a security breach:

    Because we were concerned that there may be a breach or vulnerability in the system for housing highly classified documents, CIA conducted a limited review to determine whether these files were located on the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] side of the CIA network and reviewed audit data to determine whether anyone had accessed the files, which would have been unauthorized.

    And he said he wasn’t done. “Only completion of the security review will answer how SSCI staff came into possession of the documents,” he wrote, saying that he had only “temporarily” suspended further action until getting Feinstein’s consent.

     The “breach” in question concerned the committee staff’s possession of an internal CIA review of the materials the agency had previously turned over to Feinstein’s committee during the course of the four-year congressional investigation into the Bush-era torture practices.

    What is Barack Obama’s response?  Abuses by the CIA are someone else’s problem:

    Barack Obama sought to distance the White House from the fierce dispute between top senators and the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday, claiming it would be inappropriate for his administration to become involved the clash over an investigation into the use of torture in post-9/11 interrogations.

     In the president’s first remarks about the dispute since Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence accused the CIA of a cover-up and intimidation directed at her staff, Obama said it was not a matter for the White House to “wade into at this point”.

    This is something that you don’t “wade into at this point”?  Seriously?  How can this not be a matter that you need to “wade into at this point”?

    You are the HMFIC.*  Do your F%$#ing job, and take charge!

    The chief counsel of the CIA’s review of the Senate report is a subject of the investigation whose name is mentioned 1600 times.

    This person also attempted to intimidate Senate staffers by filing a bogus criminal complaint.

    And the head of the CIA, John Brennan is saying that everything is hunky-dory.

    You are F%$#ing President of the F%$#ing United States of F%$#ing America.  How the F%$ is this not your F%$#ing job?

    I don’t care how F%$#ing awsome you F%$#ing think you F%$#ing are, your mere existence does not constitute the “Hope” or the “Change” that have figured so prominently in your messaging.

    Why the f%$# did you run to be President if you somehow don’t think that this this is not your f%$#ing job?

    *Head Mother F%$#er In Charge.

    I Got One Explanation for this, and It Ain’t Good for Port Authority Chairman David Samson

    No Comments

    The US Attorney in New Jersey is investigating the collection of scandals involving the George Washing Bridge and misappropriation of Hurricane Sandy aid.

    On Friday, something odd happened. The US Attorney for New York City issued a subpoena for Port Authority Chairman David Samson.

    Technically, it might be in the New York US Attorney’s jurisdiction, since there are issues about votes that Samson took where he refused to recuse himself from issues that benefited the legal clients  at his firm.

    The votes took place in New York City, so there are issue of whose case this might be.

    Well today, the subpoena was rescinded:

    A subpoena issued by the federal prosecutor from Manhattan to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey seeking documents related to Chairman David Samson was rescinded this afternoon, a source with knowledge of the subpoena said.

    Samson has been under intense scrutiny by investigators and the media for several votes he has taken on Port Authority actions that may have benefited clients of his law firm, Wolff & Samson.

    The subpoena was initially sent to Samson on Friday by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

    However, the subpoena was withdrawn, according to the source, because of an overlapping investigation by Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

    I understand why the subpoena was issued, but it is not clear why it was pulled back in 1 business day.

    I can only think of one reason why a jurisdictional dispute would be resolved so quickly, and that is that the NJ USA called the NY USA, and explained that Samson is a primary target of their investigation.

    I really cannot see any other scenario which would engender such a quick reversal.