Month: February 2016

Understanding the Trump Voter

No Comments

In 2004, Mark Ames wrote about the “Spite Voter”, and it is the best explanation of the Trump appeal.

Here is a sample paragraph:

Spite voting is not just an American problem; it’s a flaw in democracies everywhere. When I lived in Kosovo in the late summer of 2000, I asked my Serb friends there if they thought Milosevic was going to win the upcoming Serbian presidential elections. Most were pessimistic. They told me of friends, young people even, who voted for Milosevic “just out of spite.” The Serbian spite voters believed that if the opposition got their way and Serbia became as tame and civilized as Luxembourg, all those college-educated Otpor protestors and pro-Western intellectuals would simply take the privileges enjoyed by Milosevic’s cronies for themselves. They didn’t want caste-based happiness and its accompanying propaganda, so they voted for Milosevic precisely because he was wrong, because he was a vote against hope. Under Milosevic, nearly every Serb was f%$#ed equally, and that suited some people, particularly some Serbian males, just fine. But if you’re a failure under two completely different regimes, then the inescapable conclusion would be that it’s your own damn fault. Better to keep the villain in, and the young ambitious go-getters out.

(%$# mine)

Read the rest.  It’s long, but well worth reading.

Have I Said before That Our Policies in Syria Are Completely Incoherent?

No Comments

We are now in a situation where our Pentagon supported rebels are at war with out CIA supported rebels:

American proxies are now at war with each other in Syria.

 Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S. government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported by another arm of the U.S. government.

 The infighting between American proxies is the latest setback for the Obama administration’s Syria policy and lays bare its contradictions as violence in the country gets worse.

 The confusion is playing out on the battlefield — with the U.S. effectively engaged in a proxy war with itself. “It’s very strange, and I cannot understand it,” said Ahmed Othman, the commander of the U.S.-backed rebel battalion Furqa al-Sultan Murad, who said he had come under attack from U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in Aleppo this week.

 Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert program, overseen by the CIA, that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and analysts tracking the conflict.

 The Kurdish militants, on the other hand, receive weapons and support from the Pentagon as part of U.S. efforts to fight ISIS. Known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, they are the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy against the extremists in Syria and coordinate regularly with U.S. airstrikes.

 Yet as Assad and his Russian allies have routed rebels around Aleppo in recent weeks — rolling back Islamist factions and moderate U.S. allies alike, as aid groups warn of a humanitarian catastrophe — the YPG has seized the opportunity to take ground from these groups, too.

And now we also have the Turks demanding that the US cease aiding the Kurds, who are arguably the most effective opposition to ISIS:

The U.S. said it won’t break off ties to a Kurdish militia that’s fighting Islamic State in Syria, rebuffing the demands of NATO member Turkey, which blames the group for a bombing in the capital Ankara this week.

Turkey says Wednesday’s attack on a military bus, which killed 28 people, was carried out by the PKK and its Syrian affiliates. The U.S. agrees with Turkey that the PKK, which has been fighting for autonomy in Turkey’s Kurdish regions for three decades, is a terrorist group. But the status of the Kurdish fighters in Syria has been straining ties between the NATO allies, as their interests there diverge after more than five years of war.

The U.S. says defeating Islamic State, also known as Daesh, is the overwhelming priority. Turkey has signed up for that goal, but it’s also trying to prop up rebels in northwest Syria fighting against President Bashar al-Assad, whose Russian-backed army threatens to encircle them. The Syrian Kurds are in position to cut off vital supply lines to Aleppo, where the opposition groups are holed up, and their territorial gains may also set an example for Kurds seeking autonomy inside Turkey.

So, we are fighting ISIS, as are the Kurds, and we are allies with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who have supported ISIS, and oppose the Kurds.

And now Ankara and Riyadh are looking to mount a ground war to “put down ISIS” but is really intend to create a fundamentalist Sunni regime and put down the Kurds.

Confused enough yet?

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

No Comments

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has released more of his emails, and it is pretty clear that he knew that he was poisoning the people of Flint, and he did not care:

Gov. Syder released 1.02 GB of emails in pdf form from various departments in his administration. However, none of them are pre-2014, a time period when many of the decisions regarding Flint’s move to the Flint River as its temporary source of drinking water were being made. Still, there is a LOT of new information in these emails and much of today’s news round-up comes from analysis of them by various news outlets. If you have a burning desire to plow through the gigabyte and change of files, here are the links to all of them:

………

In late March 2013, a full year before Flint switched to the Flint River as the source for its drinking water under the order of its Emergency Manager and with sign-off by their boss State Treasurer Andy Dillon, DEQ officials warned them about the potential for problems. In an email sent on March 26th, Stephen Busch, a staffer in the drinking water division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) informed his superiors about problems they could anticipate making the switch. That email was then forwarded up the food chain to Treasurer Dillon. Here’s are some of the warning flags he raised:

………

Mike Glasgow, Flint’s laboratory and water quality supervisor at the time of the switch to the Flint River made it very clear in an email to DEQ officials that the city’s water treatment plant was not going to be ready to treat river water in time for the conversion from water obtained from the Detroit Water and Sewerage (DWSD). However, his superiors were blowing him off:

………

On September 30th, Gov. Snyder finally acknowledged what nearly everyone else already knew: Flint had a problem with poisoned water and his administration had made mistakes, including not properly treating the water to prevent corrosion. However, it took until November 4th for his administration to finally authorize the installation of the corrosion control equipment:

………

Between Gov. Snyder’s admission and the approval of the corrosion control equipment, DEQ director Dan Wyant, a man with no background in water treatment or water regulations, assured the public that corrosion control had been in place the whole time. By the time he got around to approving the equipment, Flint had already switched back to DWSD water (that is already treated with phosphate for corrosion control.)

All of this happened, by the way, months after the EPA had been pushing them to begin phosphate treatment back in August:

The original docs are at the link along with some damning quote.

I want to see some prosecutions for depraved heart murder.

They knew that they were putting people’s lives at risk, and they did not care.

I Would Not Expect This from Him

No Comments

Neel “Cash and Carry” Kashkari, current president of the Minneapolis Bank of the Federal Reserve and former minion of Goldman “Vampire Squid” Sach, has called for a breakup of the big banks and utility style management of essential financial institutions:

What does one make of it when someone whose career has been based on having powerful friends and contacts at the top levels of the financial services industry appears to be acting as a traitor to his class? In this case, the apparent turncoat is one Neel Kashkari, ex Goldman, ex Treasury, ex Pimco employee, now the new President of the Minneapolis Fed, who in his first speech in his new job, said all sorts of unpleasant truths: the financial crisis imposed huge costs on society as a whole, Dodd Frank didn’t go far enough, the authorities won’t be willing to risk using untested new powers in a financial meltdown and will bail out banks again. He also argued that the financial system was now stable enough to make (by implication overdue) transformative changes to end the “too big to fail” problem, such as breaking up banks and regulating them like utilities. Kashkari plans to come up with a comprehensive plan by year end and is seeking public input, including having expert discussions that will be webcast.

………

This is the guts of Kashkari’s speech:

Now is the right time for Congress to consider going further than Dodd-Frank with bold, transformational solutions to solve this problem once and for all. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is launching a major initiative to develop an actionable plan to end TBTF, and we will deliver our plan to the public by the end of the year. Ultimately Congress must decide whether such a transformational restructuring of our financial system is justified in order to mitigate the ongoing risks posed by large banks.

………

I believe we must seriously consider bolder, transformational options. Some other Federal Reserve policymakers have noted the potential benefits to considering more transformational measures.6 I believe we must begin this work now and give serious consideration to a range of options, including the following:

  • Breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities.

  • Turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).

  • Taxing leverage throughout the financial system to reduce systemic risks wherever they lie.

My guess is that this is an attempt to generate some perceived gravitas as a tactic to be used in bureaucratic, though much like Bernie Sanders, I find this a positive development. (Hillary Clinton is on record as not a big fan of breaking up the big banks)

The House of Saud Surrenders………

No Comments

Russia and Saudi Arabil have cut a deal to limit the supply of oil.

Unfortunately, the ball is still rolling downhill:

Several top OPEC producers made headlines with Russia on Tuesday, revealing that a secret meeting between their respective energy ministers led to a deal to “freeze” production in an effort to boost oil prices.

The agreement is monumental in the sense that OPEC and Russia are poised to agree to cooperate, the first OPEC and non-OPEC deal in 15 years. At the same time, the deal is a half-measure and will likely be inadequate to substantially rescue oil prices from their rock bottom lows.

………

The real problem for this deal, though, is with Iran, who is unlikely to sign on to a production freeze when its output is still close to sanctions-era levels. With substantial gains in production expected for this year, the deal would be harder to swallow than it would for other OPEC members. Saudi Arabia would be willing to freeze its output if it meant burdening its rival Iran. As a result, Iran’s acquiescence is an open question. “We have not yet reached our level of pre-sanctions production. So when we get there, we will be on an equal level, then we can talk,” a senior source told Reuters, pouring cold water on the deal. Venezuelan officials believe they can bring Iran on board, but that remains to be seen.

In short, despite Tuesday’s announcement, implementing the deal will be trickier than it sounds.

The current low oil prices are largely an artifact of a Saudi decision to overproduce in an attempt to drive more expensive fracked oil off the market.

Unfortunately for them, with interest rates being near zero, the frackers can still make payments on their loans, and now we have any number of oil producer nations who continue to overproduce because they are too dependent on oil revenues.

It’s a vicious circle.

Today’s Must Read

No Comments

In The Grauniad,* Thomas Frank makes the obvious point about Hillary Clinton.

Specifically, he notes that Hillary is not a corrupt thrall of the malefactors of wealth, she is a malefactor of wealth herself:

Stunned by the rise of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has been at pains to assure the Democratic rank and file that she too understands their concerns; that just like her rival, she is capable of denouncing wealthy interests, of promising to break up big banks and even of hinting that she might prosecute powerful financiers.

After her landslide defeat in New Hampshire last week, she conceded that “the way too many things were going just wasn’t right”. There was a difference between her and the senator from Vermont, however: she was the candidate who would get things done, who could “actually make the changes that make your lives better”.

………

These are noble sentiments. Unfortunately, what voters are rejecting is not Hillary the Capable; it is the party whose leadership faction she represents as well as the direction in which our modern Democrats have been travelling for decades.

………

Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the president’s few failings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one”.

That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.

Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.

………

In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas – that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization – than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of “intelligent design”. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity. Changing what the Democratic party stands for may ultimately require nothing less than what a certain Vermonter is calling a “political revolution”.

Notwithstanding her prodigious abilities and accomplishment, Hillary Clinton is part of a package with Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was not just a member of the (not thankfully defunct) right wing Democratic Leadership Council, he is one of its founders.

It’s not that they are bought and paid for by people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, it’s that they ARE the people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and unlike, for instance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they are not willing to separate themselves from those people.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

AFL-CIO Declines to Endorse Clinton

No Comments

For a while, at least:

In a win for Bernie Sanders, the AFL-CIO is delaying making it’s endorsement in the surprisingly close Democratic presidential primary.

………

“Following recent discussion at the AFL-CIO’s Executive Committee meeting and subsequent conversations with many of you, I have concluded that there is broad consensus for the AFL-CIO to remain neutral in the presidential primaries for the time being and refrain from endorsing any candidate at this moment,” Trumka said in the email.

Oh to be a fly on the wall for that Executive Committee meeting.

My guess is that committee did not want to deal with a pissed off rank and file, particularly when they want to energize them in the general election.

Also, I think that they are beginning to doubt her inevitability.

The NSA’s Whiz Bang is Short on the Whiz, and Long on the Bang

No Comments

The NSA has a metadata analysis program in South Asia that it used to make up a kill list. It is rather unironically called called SKYNET.

Analysis of the results now indicates that it doesn’t work, but drone based terror continues to rain down on innocent civilians:

In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that “we kill people based on metadata.” Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

 Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA’s SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan’s mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person’s likelihood of being a terrorist.

 Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA’s methods as “ridiculously optimistic” and “completely bullsh%$.” A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET’s machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

 Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as “extremists,” the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of “20070108” on one of the SKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.

 In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that “scientifically unsound” algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.

(%$ mine)

This is why our roving army of flying killing machines is such a bad idea:  If most of the people you kill are innocent, they will have relatives looking to avenge their cowardly assassination.

It’s basic human nature.

Mount St. Mary’s Update: This Is What Happens When You Trust a Finance Guy

No Comments

William Agee, former CEO of Bendix is a man of many failures, but his destruction of Morrison Knudson is particularly instructive on the skill set of finance types:

………

 Mr. Agee further estranged insiders by quietly moving the CEO’s office to his Pebble Beach estate, and worse, scoffing at the company’s engineer-oriented culture. “You construction guys have been trying to run the company for 75 years,” Keith Price, who headed Morrison Knudsen’s MK Ferguson unit until he retired in April 1991, recalls Mr. Agee telling him. “Now I’m going to show you how the financial guys do it.”

 The November letter pointed out just how the financial guy did his numbers. Using numbers available from earnings reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the letter writers pointed out that the percentage of the company’s pretax income from nonoperating sources such as asset sales and interest for the five years ending 1993 averaged 43%. In other words, Mr. Agee was sweetening profit reports by selling Morrison off piece by piece, and investing Morrison’s cash.

 Meanwhile, lease obligations had rocketed. During the five years ended 1993, they had jumped, to $266 million at the end of 1993 from $38 million at the end of 1988. (To shore up cash, Mr. Agee had begun selling assets, such as equipment, and leasing them back, Morrison executives say.)

This is how finance works.  Find out a loophole, and use it to benefit personally, the future be damned.

At Mount St. Mary’s, Simon Newman, the recently appointed college President, a hedge fund type, decided to try to expel 5% of the freshman class to create the illusion that the retention rates.

When people complained, he fired them including a tenured professor with no due process.

We are now seeing the push back, with the faculty calling for his resignation by a vote of 87 to 3, which he promptly ignored.

Additionally, the alumni are freaking out, and the The Washington Post condemned the behavior of the President and the Board of Directors in no uncertain terms:

Mr. Newman has only himself to blame for the mess at “the Mount,” as the university is known, despite his and the board of trustees’ despicable efforts to deflect fault to what they regard as a cabal of infidels among the faculty and alumni. It was Mr. Newman who, in a conversation with professors, said that struggling freshmen should be culled in order to improve Mount St. Mary’s student retention rate, which affects its standing in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities.

(Emphasis mine)

When I first posted about this, I jokingly suggested that Newman’s plan was to burn down the university for the insurance money.

More and more, it seems like my joke is reality.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We’ll Be Lucky to Live through It.

No Comments

Syria, looks to be going to be going completely pear shaped.

With advances by the Syrian government and by the Kurdish YPG threatening to cut off Turkey’s Islamist proxies in Syria, Ankara is shelling the Kurds, attacking what are (for now, at least) US Allies:

France’s foreign ministry has urged Turkey to end its assault on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

 In a statement (in French) it said it was “worried about the continued worsening of the situation”.

 On Saturday, Turkey began shelling the militia, which it says is linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

 The fighters, the YPG militia based in Syria, have rejected Turkey’s demand to leave areas it has seized, saying Islamists would return if it left.

 Turkey’s assault is a new thread in an already-complex conflict that has drawn in competing regional powers.

 Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu insisted on Sunday that Turkey “will not permit the [Kurdish militia] to carry out aggressive acts”.

 “Our security forces gave the necessary response and will continue to do so,” Mr Davutoglu said.

 Syria has also condemned the Turkish action as a violation of its sovereignty and asked the UN Security Council to intervene.

What’s more, the Turkey machinations in Syria, along with its heavy handed suppression of the Kurds in south east Anatolia has led to a renewed insurgency inside Turkey:

It was midday on a Thursday at the end of December when Rozerin Çukur left her home, supposedly to pick up class notes from a friend. She never returned.

 Rozerin wandered through the narrow streets of Sur, the tangled old town neighborhood in Diyarbakir, a city of one million in southeastern Turkey. An attractive 17-year-old, Rozerin was wearing her school uniform and carrying a book and a pen in her bag.

 “Just a few hours later,” her father says, “my daughter was inside the war.” She supposedly joined the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), a group supported by the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and which since September has been fighting against the Turkish army in the streets of Diyarbakir, using Kalashnikovs and booby traps.

 Rozerin was killed by a single shot to the head. Since January 8, her dead body has been lying in the sealed-off old town of Diyarbakir. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city’s ancient heart has also long been the hub of Kurdish resistance. Rozerin’s parents are holding a vigil in a community center in the city together with dozens of other parents whose children have been killed in the most recent civil war in southeastern Turkey. The parents say they only want one thing: to be able to provide a decent burial for their children. But the Turkish state, they say, has made it impossible to recover their children’s bodies.

 State officials view the dead young men and women as terrorists — as violent members of the PKK. Parents say they have been told that they can enter the old town in small groups, but that Turkish officials are demanding that they remove the weapons from the hands of the dead. And the parents do not want to touch the weapons. “The soldiers,” they fear, “would shoot immediately.”

 ………

 The state is using extreme force against the PKK. Indeed, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently announced that he intended to annihilate the fighting force and promised to continue the battle “until the area is cleansed of all terrorists.” There is no “Kurdish question,” he said, just a “terror problem.”

 Bitter house-to-house fighting of the kind seen in Diyarbakir is also taking place in other surrounding cities. The PKK focused its earlier attacks primarily on military targets and police stations. But since the state has laid siege to the cities, the radical Kurdish youth movement YDG-H has taken up the fight there as well.

 Until recently, the YDG-H was seen as a collection of disillusioned youth who defended themselves from state violence with rocks and Molotov cocktails. But now that the government has set its sights on ridding the cities of PKK sympathizers, the group has armed and organized itself with the PKK’s help. They are now fighting on the frontlines while experienced PKK fighters are hiding in the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After nearly 50 years of the “Kurdish problem” Turkey seemed to have come to an accommodation with the Kurds in the late 1990s, and now Erdogan has blown it all up.

And now the Turks and house of Saud are threatening to invade Syria:

The Turkish military has hit Kurdish and Syrian regime targets as Ankara considered a ground assault with Saudi troops, further complicating efforts to end the war just days after the US and Russia agreed on a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria within a week.

………

In an interview with AFP released on Friday, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said he “doesn’t rule out” that Turkey and Saudi Arabia would intervene militarily in Syria, but said his armed forces “will certainly confront it”.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey both staunchly support rebels seeking to oust Assad, and see his overthrow as essential for ending Syria’s five-year civil war that has cost more than 260,000 lives.

They fear the west is losing its appetite to overthrow him on the assumption he is “the lesser of two evils” compared with Isis.

Neither the House of Saud nor Turkey are our allies in Syria.

Riyadh is interesting in extending repressive Sunni hegemony in Syria, and Turkey is interested in reassembling a a sphere of influence in the area of the former Ottoman Empire.

The technical term for the governments in Ankara and Saudi Arabia is f%$#ing nuts.

We should not be on their side in any way shape, or form.

This is Brilliant Politics

No Comments
Rather unsurprisingly, Bobby Jindal has left the finances of the state of Louisiana in a mess.

His successor, Democrat John Bel Edwards realized that the state needs to raise taxes to fix the mess that he inherited.

He has come up with a new way to sell revenue measures, he’s holding the LSU Football program hostage:

Louisiana’s new Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards is pushing for new tax increases to help address the severe budget deficit left behind by former Governor Bobby Jindal. The problem: Voters in Louisiana are allergic to the very word tax.

Edwards took his case to the public in a televised address on Thursday night, warning that inaction on his proposed increases could jeopardize the holiest of all institutions: LSU football.

The state’s higher education commissioner warned this week that unless the legislature acts to provide funding for the public university system, it will have to suspend some classes for the spring semester and give students grades of “incomplete.” Because of NCAA rules, no athlete may compete for his or her team with an “incomplete” on their transcript, meaning that LSU’s football players will be ineligible come the fall semester.

 Nice to know someone who understands his electorate, and is willing to use this effectively.

Trump Goes There

1 Comment

In the last Republican Presidential debate, Donald Trump noted that George W. Bush was President on 911, and that he lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction:

Jeb Bush’s campaign thinks George W. Bush is its not-so-secret weapon in next Saturday’s pivotal primary. Donald Trump couldn’t care less.

Holding a 20-point lead in the state over his nearest rival with a week to go, Trump blasted the former president for the national security record his brother’s campaign plans to tout, blaming him during a GOP debate Saturday night not just for the Iraq War but also for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that,” Trump said to the former Florida governor, prompting a long, contentious back-and-forth.

………

In fact, Trump has blamed George W. Bush for 9/11 many times before, just never on a debate stage before a television audience of millions. It started when moderator John Dickerson asked him about a past statement in which he suggested that the 43rd president should have been impeached for lying about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction in order to justify going to war.

While this position may not be popular with mainstream Republicans, with a 20 point lead in South Carolina, I don’t think that this will hurt his campaign.

Your Moment of Daily Tyranny

No Comments

The NYPD wants to make the most transparently corrupt tool of abusive police officers a felony:

On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton urged state legislators to consider increasing the penalty for resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. The change, he argued, would help New Yorkers “get around this idea that you can resist arrest. You can’t.” It would also give cops an easy way to turn victims of their own worst impulses into the worst class of criminal.

 In theory, a resisting arrest charge allows the state to further punish suspects who endanger the safety of police officers as they’re being apprehended; in practice, it gives tautological justification to cops who enjoy roughing people up. Why did you use force against that suspect, officer? Because she was resisting arrest. How do I know you’re telling the truth? Because I charged her with it, sir.

………

Anticipating criticism, Bratton told the assembled lawmakers that he already had a plan to curb abuse: the department would use its CompStat arrest-tracking system to monitor officers who make lots of resisting charges that are eventually dropped, leaving oversight of the NYPD to the NYPD itself.

Making resisting arrest a felony, which makes it far more likely that people will cop a plea, because the prospect of years in prison, which means that uncovering police misconduct becomes even less likely.

This proposal is an unalloyed evil, which is literally a blue print for a police state.

This is the Best Troll in the History of the Internet

No Comments
Wading into the sh%$ storm that is the successor of the death of legal hack Anton Scalia, Charlie Pierce has a suggestion for Barack Obama, Anita Hill:

I am all-in for total chaos on this whole Supreme Court thing.

If the Republicans are going to invent a new constitutional tradition on the fly, I say the Republic is best served by making them choke on it. Already, Steve M. is pointing out the shitstorm that would break if the president were to nominate Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mountaineer Mike Tomasky has an interesting suggestion regarding a brilliant young jurist who also would put the GOP deeper in the ha’penny place as regards Hispanic voters. Good. All good. But let me suggest a name as well.

Anita Hill.

I am, as I said, all in for chaos, and this would be the all-timer.

This is quite literally the finest troll I have ever seen.

Mr. Pierce, you are a god among men, and I am not worthy.

The obvious point here is that this brings up Clarence Thomas’ sexual harassment of numerous women that he worked with:

Professor Hill is a widely respected scholar of the law. She would be a fine addition to any court in the land. Also, she would make the Republicans eat their own faces, one at a time. Imagine the hearings. The Republicans would have no choice but to bring up the whole Clarence Thomas matter again. Although perhaps, this time, the other women who allegedly were harassed by Mr. Justice Thomas would not be intimidated out of testifying, and the Democratic senators would not be intimidated out of calling them. (Sorry, Joe Biden. That was a bad day for you.) This would be Your Show Of Shows.

This would be so epic.

Obama needs to nominate her.

Not “Flawed”, “Fraud”

No Comments

Morgan Stanley sold worthless bonds, and made a lot of money doing so, and when they got caught, they made what appears to be another “No Declaration of Wrongdoing (DOJ press release) settlement over this, the New York Times described it as Morgan Stanley to Pay $3.2 Billion Over Flawed Mortgage Bonds.

As former S&L crisis investigator notes, these bonds were not flawed, they were fraud.

Throw some banksters in gaol, please.

He Probably Choked on His Own Bile

2 Comments

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has died at age 79.

I have noted over the past few years (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) excessive levels of bile have appeared to produce neurological complications.

The Republicans are already saying that the next SCOTUS nomination should be put off until after the elections, which is no surprise.

I really do not think that they have anything to worry about though:  I cannot see the Obama administration selecting someone in less than 3 months, at which point there will not be time.

While I do understand that the friends and family of Antonin Scalia, including Justice Ruth  Bader “Notorious RBG” Ginsburg, are mourning their loss, the fact that a partisan hack who had stopped caring has left the court is a net plus for the people of the United States.