Year: 2014

The Neocons Have Lost Mark Halperin???? Seriously???

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Roll Tape!

Did Mark Halperin just call Paul Bremeran incompetent loser?

I think that Halperin, perhaps the poster child for the toxic consensus inside Washington D.C,  did:

“It seems what you’re proposing is to double down on the policies that the Bush administration and you thought would lead to, not just a democratic and independent Iraq, but a force for good in the region,” Halperin said. “Why should we even consider going back to the same set of ideas to try to prop up a government with U.S. intervention, which seems to have failed and left us in this position?”

“I’m not proposing to prop up any government,” Bremer said, arguing that Maliki had dissolved many of the post-surge gains in Iraq. “In fact, I explicitly said we need a new government…I explicitly called for him to resign as Defense Minister and Minister of the Interior.”

“But what business is it of the United States at this point who is in the government of people of Iraq?” Halperin asked. “Why isn’t that up to the people of Iraq, civil society and leaders there, to figure it out and not the United States?”

“Because there is no one there who can do it and no other country who can do it,” Bremer said. “The experience of all of us involved in this for the last decade is that only the Americans can help the Iraqis broker across these sectarian and ethnic lines. There is nobody else who can do it, including the Iraqis.”

“What’s our record on that –” Halperin tried to ask, but Bremer cut him off.

“We may regret that, but it’s a fact, and facts have a nasty way of coming back and basically determining your options,” Bremer said.

This was on Morning Joe, and though the aforementioned Joe (Scarborough) seemed to like the idea of re-invading Iraq, but everyone else, the very heart and soul of the Beltway consensus are actually unwilling to swallow the bullsh%$ that Bremer was attempting to sell.

I think that the evil spawn of Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Senator from Boeing, Richard Pearle, Elliot Abrams, Doug “The f%$#ing stupidest guy on the face of the earth” Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, etc.  may have finally run out their string.

I certainly hope so, but I am an inveterate optimist on such matters.

A Minor Correction

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Yesterday, I suggested that Gary Larson had encapsulated the id of Baltimore.

On further examination, I realized that I neglected to mention B. Kliban, who penned this cartoon.

He’s best known for his cat cartoons, but he was seriously bent artist.

His cartoon is just one step removed from Attila the Hon.

Another Day at Honfest

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In its celebration of all things Ballmur, it strikes me that two of the prominent cultural features of the Charm City, big hair and those funky retro eye glasses, might lead one to believe that it is the spiritual home of Gary Larson’s comic, The Far Side.

Certainly, Mr. Larson and John Waters seem to have a sense of the off beat that comes from similar places.

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Wisconsin Attorney General Threatens People Who Obey Court Ruling

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I just love how right wing Talibaptist types think that the law does not apply to them:

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Thursday that same-sex couples who have wed in recent days are not married in the eyes of the law and that county clerks issuing marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples could be prosecuted.

Also Thursday, Republican Gov. Scott Walker backed Van Hollen’s work defending the gay marriage ban but sidestepped questions on whether clerks should be charged and what his personal views on gay marriage are now.

Three district attorneys running for attorney general — two Democrats and a Republican — said they would not issue charges against clerks and their area. A Democratic state representative running to succeed Van Hollen also criticized the idea of issuing charges.

“You do have many people in Wisconsin basically taking the law into their own hands and there can be legal repercussions for that,” Van Hollen said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “So, depending on who believes they’re married under the law and who doesn’t believe they’re married under the law may cause them to get themselves in some legal problems that I think are going to take years for them and the courts to work out.”

The Republican attorney general said he did not believe same-sex couples could be prosecuted but that county clerks risked charges.

………

County clerks can be jailed for up to nine months and fined up to $10,000 for issuing marriage licenses that aren’t allowed under state law. The same section of the statutes also provides penalties for judges, ministers and others who officiate over a “fictitious marriage,” but Van Hollen did not address whether they could be charged.

………

United States District Judge Barbara Crabb last week declared that Wisconsin’s ban on same-sex marriage violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the law. She has not yet entered an injunction instructing public officials what to do about her finding.

After all, who has to listen to some judge anyway?

Judge Crabb, could you please find this rat f%$# in contempt?

Another Reason to Shut Down the Fusion Centers

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Because they treated a consumer boycott for “Black Friday” 2011 as a terrorist event:

The documents reveal that Fusion Centers and their personnel even conflate their anti-terrorism mission with a need for intelligence gathering on a possible consumer boycott during the holiday season. There are multiple documents from across the country referencing concerns about negative impacts on retail sales.

The Executive Director of the Intelligence Fusion Division, also the Joint Terrorism Task Force Director, for the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department circulated a 30-page report tracking the Occupy Movement in towns and cities across the country created by the trade association the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).

He directed that the recipients of the document, who included top staff at the Washington, D.C. Fusion Center, “develop a one page product that we can send to our District Commanders to make them aware of the potential threat.”

(emphasis original)

Can you say out of control totalitarian organization?

Good, I knew that you could.

Linkage

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Time to stare into the face of God.

It’s not a nova, it’s the light from some sort of stellar upheaval reflected off of interstellar gas.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Eric Arthur Blair is Spinning in His Grave, Again

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Over at Emptywheel, Jim White shows us a bit of cognitive dissonance that will make your head spin on the “World” section of the New York Times:

Seriously, first, we, (and the House of Saud) arm rebels in Syria, then they move into, and take over ¼ of Iraq, and take more of our weapons, and the very serious people think that we need to send them more weapons.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

(On Edit)

And Obama is looking at air strikes to support the government. Obama has gone the full Nixon/Vietnamization route.

Quote of the Day

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If a thousand armed Blacks had gathered in one place, pointing rifles at federal officers, and two of them later cold-bloodedly assassinated policemen, the federal response would touch every Black neighborhood in America. But the armed white Right gets a pass. Racists are resources to those in power. “The national security state’s legitimacy is based on (white) mass fear and loathing of the Other.”

—Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report

The World Cup Begins

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It is unique among the mega-huge sporting events in that the quality of the sport is actually lower than the ordinary competitions.

At the World Series, or the Superbowl, or the Stanley Cup, or the FA cup, we have the best teams competing with each other, while in the world cup, you don’t have a team, you have a bunch of (supremely talented) individual players.

On the other hand, I really don’t see FIFA particularly corrupt as compared to, for example, the NCAA, which exists solely to create the myth of “student athletes” in order to codify slavery.

Some Thoughts on Eric Cantor

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First, the very serious people inside the Beltway are freaking for a number of reasons:

  • The results sh%$ on their “tea party is dead, and the Republican adults are back” meme.
  • David Cantor was “people like them”, in that he was a soulless apparatchik climber.
  • Freaking out is what they do.

As to the significance, I think that this is all about, as TBogg so eloquently, “All things considered, Eric Cantor probably lost because he’s a dick.”

On a slightly more serious note, Cantor did not take his constituents seriously.

To paraphrase Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill story goes, Cantor never asked for their votes.

The Beltway consensus is that it was all about immigration, but as TBogg, and many others noted, immigration reform was supported by nearly 4 to 1 in the district, and that same night, Lindsay Graham not only won his primary, but did so in a large field with enough of a margin to avoid a runoff.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that Cantor being Jewish had much to do with his loss, with a margin over 11% in a district that he had dominated before, but I do think that some of the advertising did seem to invoke this (though note that in the article, Salon solipsistically posits that it was anti-Silicon Valley sentiment).

Looking at the ad, where he’s hanging with Mark Zuckerberg, I feel compelled to invoke Mr. Subliminal.

You have an ad with the picture Cantor a guy with a Jewish name who looks stereotypically Jewish, and accuses him of giving their jobs to foreigners, and I wonder if this is not a sly reference to his religion.

Holy Crap!

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Eric Cantor just lost his primary for reelection to a Teabagger:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), the chamber’s second-ranking Republican, was badly beaten in a primary contest Tuesday by an obscure professor with tea party backing — a historic electoral surprise that left the GOP in chaos and the House without its heir apparent.

Cantor, who has represented the Richmond suburbs since 2001, lost by 11 percentage points to Dave Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. It was an operatic fall from power, swift and deep and utterly surprising. As late as Tuesday morning, Cantor had felt so confident of victory that he spent the morning at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill, holding a fundraising meeting with lobbyists while his constituents went to the polls.

He did not just lose, he got shellacked.

With the possible exception of John Boehner, whose dislike of, and rivalry with, Cantor was very tangible, the Republican establishment must be profoundly unhappy now.

To paraphrase Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), reports of the Tea Party’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

Not sure where the Dems will go from here, but reaching across the aisle would not be my suggestion.

Because by Devaluing Workers and Listening Cockamamie Theories from Rich People Worked So Well for the Rest of Us

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It is sure to be appealed, but a judge in LA has just ruled that California’s teacher tenure laws are unconstitutional:

Teachers union officials denounced a ruling Tuesday by a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge deeming job protections for teachers in California as unconstitutional as a misguided attack on teachers and students.

 The ruling represents a major loss for the unions and a groundbreaking win by attorneys who argued that state laws governing teacher layoffs, tenure and dismissals harm students by making them more likely to suffer from grossly ineffective instruction.

 If the preliminary ruling becomes final and is upheld, the effect will be sweeping across California and possibly the nation.

 Judge Rolf M. Treu ruled, in effect, that it was too easy for teachers to gain strong job protections and too difficult to dismiss those who performed poorly in the classroom. If the ruling stands, California will have to craft new rules for hiring and firing teachers.

Rather unsurprisingly, privatizer in chief, Arne Duncan, loves this, because for Wall Street to make money off of our children, they first have to make sure that they have a cowed and cheap work force.

Interestingly enough I had occasion to look up the record of Geoffrey Canada, the hero of the anti-teacher agitprop Waiting for Superman, the former CEO of  the Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools in response to a sickeningly hagiographic article about him.

What did I discover?

  • He was paid $553,000 for a school system with just 1500 students, (link) more than twice the salary of the Chancellor of the New York City Schools (link) a system with 1.1 million students.
  • He lied about the graduation rates, basing his numbers on those the graduation rate for entering seniors, not the rate for people entering as freshmen as is the norm, which would yield a 36% drop out rate. (link)
  • He has “fired” (dumped) entire classes, including what would have been his first high school class to make his numbers look good. (link)

I have no doubt that there are good charter schools out there, but I’ve let to see one on the national stage.

You have looting behind a not-for-profit corporate façade (Rocketship), widespread forgery and fraud in testing (Michelle Rhee), sexual and financial irregularities (Kevin Johnson, Michelle Rhee’s husband), insane levels of teacher turnover (all of them), and aggressive policies to foist low performing students back on the public school district. (again, pretty much all of them)

Seriously, whenever you take a cursory look at the charter school movement, and the educational-industrial complex that supports them, there are layers of corruption and opacity that are at the core of their business models.

At the core of the issues with our educational system are societal problems of grinding poverty, a porous social safety net, and law enforcement that frequently acts more like an occupying force than peace officers in poor neighborhoods.

Until these are resolved, we will have problems educating poor children, no matter how well our schools are run.

But the current focus on fill in the box testing and privatizing education serves only to make money off the backs of our children’s future.