Month: May 2016

What a Lovely Family

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Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, just shuttered a hedge fund after losing 90% of his investor’s money:

Despite having Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as an investor and being Bill and Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky (and two former colleagues from Goldman Sachs who manage Eaglevale Partners hedge fund) told investors in a letter last February they had been “incorrect” on Greece, generating staggering losses for the firm’s main Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity, a/k/a the “Greek recovery” fund during most of its life. By ‘incorrect’ the Clinton heir apparent meant the $25 million Eaglevale Greek fund had lost a stunning 48% in 2014.

Which is not to say the larger fund it was part of is doing any better: as of last February, Eaglevale had spent 27 of its 34 months in operation below its high-water mark. We are confident that 13 months later the numbers are 40 out of 47, respectively.

………

Meanwhile, things went from terrible to abysmal for both the clueless hedge fund manager and his LPs, and as the NYT reports, Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law is finally shutting down the Greece-focused fund, after losing nearly 90% of its value.  Investors were told last month that Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity would finally be put out of its misery and would shutter.

The closure comes as the worst possible time: we are confident that Donald Trump will be quick to work it into his political attack routine.

While there is no indication of legal or ethical wrong doing, I guarantee that Mezvinsky made his millions in various fees out of this fiasco.

This might be ONE reason why Clinton is so dedicated to preserving the, “Heads I win, tails you lose,” ethos of  Wall Street.

Just Give them to Mexico

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Texan ‘Phants are back on the secession binge:

If the nationalists get their way, this November might be the last time Texans vote for a US president.

On Wednesday, the Platform Committee of the Texas Republican Party voted to put a Texas independence resolution up for a vote at this week’s GOP convention, according to a press release from the pro-secession Texas Nationalist Movement. The resolution calls for allowing voters to decide whether the Lone Star State should become an independent nation.

File this under, “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”

The Donald Calls Hillary a War Monger

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It looks like Donald Trump is going to be the anti-war candidate this election:

Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.

Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger.

“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”

And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.

Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”

I think that Trump is an isolationist, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

When you look at the history of US military and diplomatic interventions over the past 60 years, overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran as well as any number of Latin American nations (Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc), and interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (1963, 1990, 2003), Lebanon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, Kuwait, Somalia, Libya, the Ukraine, and Syria, you have a poor record.

At best (Kuwait) you have us propping up a corrupt, reactionary, and totalitarian state. 

At worst, you have the effective destruction of a country and its society, particularly in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq,  and Cambodia, and the death toll is in the tens of millions.

The only post Korea success that I can think of is in the former Yugoslavia.

The world would be better off if we were more isolationist.

Here is a suggestion for Hillary:  If you are making Donald Trump sound sane about anything, you are on the wrong side of history.

Something to Hide

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Purdue Pharma, best known as the manufacturer of the opiate Oxycontin, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep their marketing tactics from the public, but today a judge ordered those records unsealed:

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, lost a legal battle Wednesday to keep records and testimony about its bestselling and widely abused painkiller secret.

A judge in Pike County, Kentucky, a region hard-hit by prescription painkiller abuse, granted a motion by a news outlet to unseal records from a lawsuit by the state accusing the company of fraud, conspiracy and negligence in the development and marketing of the drug.

Purdue settled that suit in December for $24 million without any admission of wrongdoing.

Circuit Judge Steven Combs granted the request of Boston Globe-affiliated investigative health news outlet STAT to unseal the documents, writing: “The Court sees no higher value than the public (via the media) having access to these discovery materials so that the public can see the facts for themselves.”

The judge said the order would not take effect for 32 days, allowing Purdue time to appeal.

Let’s be here:  Purdue has been aware of its potential for abuse and its addictive properties for a very long time, and it is clear that they used these to increase sales.

They are no different from the corner drug pusher, and seeing their marketing exposed to the light of day, with the resulting social pressure and prosecutions, would please me no end.

Not Enough Bullets

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The pay of hedge fund managers, who have underperformed the market forever, and lost money last year, is simply obscene:

The world’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn last year – more than the entire economies of Namibia, the Bahamas or Nicaragua.

Kenneth Griffin, founder and chief executive of Citadel, and James Simons, founder and chairman of Renaissance Technologies, shared the top spot, taking home $1.7bn each – equivalent to the annual salaries of 112,000 people taking home the US federal minimum wage of $15,080.

The earnings of the best-performing hedge fund managers, published by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine on Tuesday, dwarfs the pay of top Wall Street executives who have been under fire for their multimillion-dollar pay deals. The best paid banker last year was JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who collected $27m.

The huge pay at the top comes despite a tumultuous year on Wall Street that has led many well-known hedge funds to lose billions of dollars and others to close down. Daniel Loeb, CEO of Third Point, a hedge fund that manages $17.5bn, has described market conditions as a “hedge fund killing field”.

The, “Heads I win, tails you lose,” system of remuneration in Wall Street is wrong, and creates a lot of evil in our society.

I Need to Stop Calling Him Governor Rat F%$#*

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He just jammed up the useless Baltimore Executive to force him to install air-conditioning before the start of the next school year instead of waiting for at least 3 years, and now he going to sign into a law a bill that provides free birth control to Marylanders:

Advocates say a new Maryland law will place the state at the forefront of efforts to require insurance plans to offer birth control at no out-of-pocket cost, expanding access to women and men who want to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

 The law goes further than President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which already reduced costs for women seeking birth control in many cases.

 Under the Contraceptive Equity Act, Maryland will be the first state to require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter emergency contraceptives, such so called morning-after pills, at no cost. Maryland also will be the first state prohibiting out-of-pocket costs for men who have vasectomies.

 Advocates who pushed the bill through the General Assembly say Maryland is the first state to pass such a comprehensive approach.

 “Maryland is on the forefront across the board with this act,” said Karen Nelson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Maryland.

 Other provisions prohibit co-payments for any type of contraceptive and also ban preauthorization requirements for long-acting contraceptives such as IUDs. The law allows women to receive six months’ worth of birth control pills at one time.

Did I mention that he’s a Republican?

While I am not a fan of of the governor or many of his policies, he is not the kind of batsh%$ insane Australopithecine of many other (Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Paul LePage, Bruce Rauner, Sam Brownback, Matt Bevin, Rick Snyder, Pat McCrory,Greg Abbott, etc.) Republican governors.

Credit where credit is due.  He did the right thing. 

*Full disclosure, when we had problems with health insurance exchange, we called our state senator, and we ended getting a call from Hogan’s office, where a staffer fixed the problem.

It Appears that the Stagflation of the 1970s Never Happened

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Oil Shock, Not Stagglation

We all know the story, how the “Stagflation” of the 1970s, a prolonged period of high inflation and low growth, broke our economy, and how Keynsian economics failed us, so we turned to Snake Oil Monetarist and Supply Side Economics.

It turns out that it never happened:

In a conversation with Dean Baker recently, I learned something interesting. This won’t be new to anyone deeply familiar with inflation statistics, but it was new to me. Maybe it will be new to you too.

The general subject is the stagflation of the 70s, which ushered in supply-side economics and the Reagan era. More specifically, the issue is the measurement of inflation during part of this era. Housing costs are incorporated into the CPI by measuring rents, but prior to 1982 it was done by directly measuring the price of buying a house. In an era when interest rates were steady, this didn’t matter much, but when interest rates went crazy in the mid-70s it made a big difference, overstating inflation by about two percentage points. If you correct for this, and also take a look at exactly when the worst periods of stagflation occurred, you get this:

(See picture)

If you correct the inflation figures and account for the two oil shocks of the 70s, the period from 1970-85 looks remarkably steady. Inflation and GDP growth are both running at about 4 percent for nearly the entire time.

So the sequence is:

  • Oil shock depresses economy and drives up prices.
  • Fed panics, and tightening pre-1982 erroneously drives up inflation statistics.
  • Fed continues to freak.
  • Rinse, lather, repeat.

Keynes was, and remains, right.

Primary Results

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Bernie Sanders won in both the West Virginia primary and the Nebraska Democratic caucus (Oops, over a month ago), while Trump crushed it in the West Virginia primary and the Nebraska Republican primary.

Sanders won by about 15% in both races.

And this just in, Francisco Franco the Ted Cruz campaign is still dead.

Straight from Bag Full of Cats* to Stuffing Rabid Ferrets down One’s Trousers

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The speaker of Brazil’s lower house has reversed himself and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff for excessively rosy budget predictions is back on:

The drive to oust President Dilma Rousseff is back on track after the head of the lower house reversed a decision that had earlier threatened to throw the entire impeachment process into chaos.

Lawmaker Waldir Maranhao released a statement in the dead of night revoking his own call to annul impeachment sessions in the lower house. That puts the Senate back in the spotlight, with a vote on whether to put the unpopular president on trial still slated for Wednesday. If successful, it would temporarily remove her from office. Rousseff is charged with illegally using state banks to plug a hole in the budget.

This is seriously f%$#ed up.

*Yes, I know, I’m overusing this metaphor.

Al-Gebra Terrorist Operative Uncovered on American Airlines Flight

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My bad, not Al-Gebra, Algebra.

It turns that an award winning economist of Italian descent was ethnically profiled for doing mathematics for a talk that he was going to give:

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

………

Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.

The wait continued.

Finally the pilot came by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn’t entirely sure of the agent’s affiliation, he would later say.

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

We are a nation of panicked cowards, soiling ourselves at the smallest provocation.

God Bless the 2nd Amendment

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This year toddlers have shot at least 23 people:

This past week, a Milwaukee toddler fatally shot his mother after finding a handgun in the back seat of the car they were riding in. The case drew a lot of national attention given the unusual circumstances: Little kids rarely kill people, intentionally or not.

………

 Last year, a Washington Post analysis found that toddlers were finding guns and shooting people at a rate of about one a week. This year, that pace has accelerated. There have been at least 23 toddler-involved shootings since Jan. 1, compared with 18 over the same period last year.

 In the vast majority of cases, the children accidentally shoot themselves. That’s happened 18 times this year, and in nine of those cases the children died of their wounds.

America, F%$# Yeah!!

I Gotta Find Another Metaphor, This Is the 3Rd Time in as Many Days That I Am Referring To, “A Bagfull of Cats”

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This time, I am referring to Ted Cruz, who is making noises about reentering the primary race:

Ever since Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican presidential race last week, Glenn Beck and his co-hosts have been holding on to a sliver of hope that if Cruz could still somehow manage to win today’s Republican primary in Nebraska, that would convince the Texas senator to unsuspend his campaign and re-enter the race.

Today, Cruz called into Beck’s radio program and Beck’s co-host Pat Gray directly asked Cruz about this possibility.

“If Nebraska were to somehow miraculously choose you tonight,” Gray asked, “if that happened, would you consider getting back in the race?”

Cruz responded that he would certainly be open to that admittedly slight possibility.

Please.

Make.

Ir,

Stop.

H/t Charlie Pierce.

Not a Surprise

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The Military Times conducted a survey which showed that members of the military support Trump by a large margin:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Spokane, Wash., on May 7, 2016.(Photo: Ted S. Warren/AP)

In a new survey of American military personnel, Donald Trump emerged as active-duty service members’ preference to become the next U.S. president, topping Hillary Clinton by more than a 2-to-1 margin. However, in the latest Military Times election survey, more than one in five troops said they’d rather not vote in November if they have to choose between just those two candidates.

But given only those choices, 21 percent of the service members surveyed said they would abstain from voting.More than 54 percent of the 951 troops Military Times surveyed said they would vote for Trump, the presumed Republican presidential nominee, over Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. Only about 25 percent said they would vote for Clinton in that matchup.

This is not surprising:

  • The military trends conservative.
  • Clinton is more likely to squander blood and treasure in an unnecessary war than anyone this side of Richard Bruce Cheney.

It’s unlikely that the military vote will be decisive, but I gotta figure that they are sick and tired of useless and meaningless losing wars.

    Irony is Officially Dead

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    Ashton Carter, the Secretary of State, just issued the highest civilian award that the Pentagon can issue to a civilian to Henry Kissinger:

    Secretary of Defense Ash Carter hosts an award ceremony honoring Dr. Henry A. Kissinger for his years of distinguished public service at 4 p.m. EDT, in the Pentagon.  Media interested in covering the ceremony should plan on meeting in Room 2D961 by 3:45 p.m. to be escorted to the ceremony.  Foreign journalists without a Pentagon building pass must plan on being escorted from the River Entrance Pedestrian Bridge only, or, if arriving at the Pentagon Metro Entrance Facility, must contact 703-697-5131 a minimum of one hour prior to arrival.  Please arrive no later than 45 minutes before the event if coming by Metro.  U.S. journalists without a Pentagon building pass will be picked up at the River Entrance Pedestrian Bridge or the Pentagon Metro Visitors Entrance only.  If arriving by Metro, please contact 703-697-5131 a minimum of one hour prior to arrival, and plan to arrive no later than 30 minutes before the event; have proof of affiliation and photo identification.  Please call 703-697-5131 for escort into the building.

    If you are unaware of his record, here is a quick primer:

    On Monday afternoon, at 4 pm Eastern, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter will host an awards ceremony at the Pentagon honoring one of the world’s most notorious war criminals.

    The criminal in question, Dr. Henry Kissinger, has never been charged. But the evidence that he aided and abetted war crimes during his time in the White House advising Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford is well-established and overwhelming.

    While Kissinger deserves real credit for some of America’s most important Cold War victories, including Nixon’s diplomatic opening to China, he is also responsible for some of its worst atrocities. Carpet-bombing Cambodia, supporting Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh, greenlighting the Argentinian dictatorship’s murderous crackdown on dissidents — all of those were Kissinger initiatives, all pushed in the name of pursuing American national interests and fighting communism.
    While the Obama administration might want to pretend that only the first half of his résumé exists, that doesn’t change reality. The secretary of defense is handing an award to a man whose actions belie the values Obama administration claims to stand for. It’s hardly alone in this: Kissinger has been treated as an elder statesman in polite Washington society for decades. But this is the most recent example, and one of the most high-profile, of polite Washington society rewriting Kissinger’s legacy. Let’s not forget what it really is.
     

    ………
     
    Most infamously, Kissinger masterminded a Nixon-era plan to carpet-bomb Cambodia. Nominally, the bombing — which indiscriminately hit targets in civilian-populated areas — was supposed to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases. In reality, it was designed to improve America’s strategic position before a negotiated withdrawal.
     
    ………

    American bombs killed between 150,000 and 500,000 people in Cambodia. That created a swell of public support for Pol Pot and his communist Khmer Rouge rebels, who exploited popular anger at the bombings to seize control of the government in 1975. The Khmer Rouge then slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and starved even more, ultimately killing at least a million people, about one-seventh of the country’s population.
     
    ………
     
    He pulled the US consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, from his post for questioning the policy, and blocked efforts to pressure Pakistan (a US ally) to end its slaughter. The killing only stopped after India intervened to stop it; estimates of the death toll range from 300,000 to 3 million.
     
    ………
     

    In 2014, newly declassified documents suggested that in the 1970s, Kissinger signaled to Argentina’s right-wing military leaders that the US would not object to its plans to launch a 1976 crackdown on dissent that became known as the Dirty War — which killed about 30,000 people.

    He’s kind of like Stalin, without the charm.

    This is some unbelievably f%$#ed up sh%$.

    Yeah, This Really Inspires Support for the TTIP

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    The US ambassador to Italy, a political appointee by Obama, is saying that the US and Europe need to approve the trade deal in order to prevent prosecution of the banksters at the mega-banks:

    On May 7th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or German Economic News, headlined, “USA planen mit TTIP Frontal-Angriff auf Gerichte in Europa” or “U.S. Plans Frontal Attack on Europe’s Courts via TTIP,” and reported that, “America’s urgency to sign TTIP with Europe has solid reason: Megabanks must protect themselves from claims by European investors who allege that they were cheated during the debt crisis. … The U.S. Ambassador to Italy has now let the cat out of the bag on this — probably unintentionally.”

    In this particular case, the megabank that’s being sued isn’t American but German, Deutsche Bank, which the U.S. Ambassador to Italy has cited as his example to defend, perhaps so as to appeal to Germans to protect their megabanks against lawsuits from foreign investors (such as Italians) who complain. In that case it was investors in the Italian city of Trani, population 53,000. The smallness of the city was an issue the Ambassador raised against the suit’s having been brought there.

    Reuters headlined on May 6th, “Italian prosecutor investigates Deutsche Bank over 2011 bond sale”, and reported that, “An Italian prosecutor is investigating Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) over its sale of 7 billion euros ($8 billion) of Italian government bonds five years ago, an investigative source told Reuters. A prosecutor in Trani, a town in southern Italy, is investigating because Deutsche Bank allegedly told clients in a research note in early 2011 that Italy’s public debt was no cause for concern, and then sold almost 90 percent of its own holding of the country’s bonds.” The U.S. bond-rating agencies are also subjects in this suit, because Trani had relied upon their ratings of those bonds.

    The Obama Administration (through its Italian Ambassador) seems thus to be saying, in effect, that unless TTIP is passed into law, Europe’s megabanks (and the U.S. bond-rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s and Fitch) will be able successfully to be sued by cheated investors, just as has been happening with such American banks as JPMorgan/Chase and Goldman Sachs in the United States, which — since TTIP hasn’t yet been in force anywhere, including in the U.S. — were forced to pay billions to cheated investors. Apparently, Obama would be happier if those suits had been impossible in the U.S. The argument here, though only implicitly, seems to be that TTIP is the way to protect megabanks and the bond-rating firms. It concerns specifically the selling of sophisticated derivative investments.

    I didn’t think that there was any bit of news that would make me more opposed to the TTIP or TPP.

    I was misinformed.

    Meet the Old Boss, Same as the Old Boss

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    Hillary is now actively courting Bush donors:

    Hillary Clinton’s supporters in recent days have been making a furious round of calls to top Bush family donors to try to convince them that she represents their values better than Donald Trump, multiple sources in both parties told POLITICO.

    The moves come as Clinton and the Democratic Party try to take advantage of deep unease among establishment Republicans on Wall Street and elsewhere with Trump’s emergence as the presumptive Republican nominee.

    Top targets for the Clinton team include people like Woody Johnson, Jeb Bush’s former finance chair and the owner of the New York Jets. In recent days, Bush’s brother and father, former presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, have said they plan to skip Trump’s nominating convention.

    One person close to Clinton said supporters of the former secretary of state drew up a list of Wall Street donors who supported Jeb Bush and other unsuccessful Republican candidates months ago but wanted to wait until Trump locked down the nomination before beginning to make the calls.

    Yeah, now THERE’S a staunch defender of the Democratic Party’s liberal traditions, campaigning as the best Republican in the race.

    At the rate that this is going, Jill Stein is going to qualify for federal matching funds.

    What a Bunch of Hypocritical Pearl Clutching

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    Over at the former Kaplan Test Prep company, now a division of Amazon, Dana Milbank is having the vapors over Donald Trump’s sometimes salty language.

    This from the guy who joked about Hillary Clinton drinking Mad Bitch Beer.

    Seriously? If there is anyone in the Washington commentariat who is less well qualified to talk about misogyny and profanity, I haven’t read them yet:

    Here’s a serious question for Republican officeholders: WTF?

    Now that Trump has a lock on the presidential nomination, many top Republicans — too many — are moving to embrace this vulgar man for the sake of party unity. It is a real [expletive] show.

    The man who would be the Grand Old Party’s standard-bearer has said the following things (among many others) in front of thousands of men, women and children (and millions more via the media):

    On U.S. companies relocating overseas: “You can tell them to go f— themselves.”

    On China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea: “They’re ripping the sh– out of the sea.”

    On the Islamic State? “I would bomb the sh– out of ISIS.”

    Earlier, on dealing with China: “Listen, you motherf—ers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”

    And on climate change: “This very expensive global warming bullsh– has got to stop.”

    Republicans: This vulgarian speaks for you?

    Seriously Dana, go Cheney yourself.

    And Jeff (Bezos) make Dana do some useful work for his paycheck.

    Another Bag Full of Cats on the World Stage

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    This time, it’s Brazil:

    The Brazilian Senate has vowed to vote on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff despite a ruling that a vote in the lower house was flawed.

    Senate Speaker Renan Calheiros rejected the attempt by Waldir Maranhao, the lower house’s acting speaker, to halt the process.

    Mr Maranhao had called for a new vote in the lower house.

    But to boos and cheers in the Senate, Speaker Renan Calheiros called that decision illegal.

    The Senate is scheduled to vote on Wednesday on whether to start an impeachment trial.

    The president of the Senate impeachment commission also said the vote would take place as scheduled.

    If Ms Rousseff loses, she will be suspended from office, pending a trial that could last six months. She faces allegations that her government violated fiscal rules.

    In his decision, Mr Maranhao said there had been irregularities during the lower house session in which its members overwhelmingly voted in favour of the impeachment process going ahead.

    He said members of the lower house should not have publicly announced what their position was prior to the vote, and that it had been wrong of party leaders to instruct their members how to vote.

    Mr Maranhao called for a new vote in the lower house.

    ………


    Mr Maranhao, who opposed the impeachment process in the 17 April vote, only took over as the speaker of the lower house last week, after the previous speaker, Eduardo Cunha, was suspended.

    Mr Cunha, an outspoken critic of President Rousseff, led the impeachment drive against her.

    The level of dysfunction here makes makes the Lewinski affair look like a Schoolhouse Rock episode.

    Linkage

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    Cracker Jack’s Prize In The Box Will Now Be Digitized : The Two-Way : NPR (NPR) This sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.
    US Prosecutors Consider More Charges Against Ex-CEO Shkreli (Reader Supported News) I’d rather see them spending this resources going after Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon.
    Nine years of censorship (Nature) Trudeau is reversing Harper’s muzzling of Canadian scientists.
    Andrew Sullivan Is to Blame for Donald Trump (Gawker) Great hed. The thesis is that people like Andrew Sullivan, who have aggressively supported impoverishing of the masses,(He wrote glowingly of Margaret Thatcher) have created the toxic politics that gave us the Donald.
    Study Shows How Abstinence Pledges Increase Risk of Pregnancy and STDs (The Atlantic) Not a surprise. Studies have shown this for years. For an anecdote, see Palin, Bristol.
    Atlanta Mayor’s Column Ripping Bernie Sanders Drafted by Lobbyist, Emails Show (The Intercept) It really is remarkable how brazen the Democratic Party establishment is about its corruption.
    In 1983 Clinton teamed with Walmart to attack public education (Liberation News) The past is prelude.
    Who Shot First, According To The Guy Who Played Greedo (Cinema Blend) Han shot first.
    Psychiatric hospitals filling up with time travellers sent back to kill Donald Trump (News Thump) This is not a surprise.

    This is just too awesome for words:

    H/t Atomic Samba.