Month: October 2016

So Not a Surprise

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Even Bayh is running for Senate again.

In February 2010, the day before the deadline for appearing on the primary ballot, he announced that he was not running for reelection, which was a complete surprise and made what would have been a difficult Senate campaign in a difficult year absolutely impossible for the Democrats.

Well, someone has looked his unexpected retirement, and has determined that he was furiously looking for rather significantly lucrative position before he announced, which raises some serious ethical questions.

This is not a surprise, given that his wife’s sitting on a lot corporate boards when he was in the Senate:

Evan Bayh spent substantial time during his last year in the Senate searching for a private sector job even as he voted on issues of interest to his future corporate bosses, according to the former Indiana lawmaker’s 2010 schedule, obtained exclusively by The Associated Press.

The Democrat had more than four dozen meetings and phone calls with headhunters and future corporate employers over the months, beginning days after announcing his surprise retirement from the Senate on Feb. 15, 2010, through December of that year as his term came to an end. Bayh is now running to get his old seat back and help his party regain Senate control.

Announcing his retirement, Bayh claimed he was fed up with the gridlock and that it was time for him to “contribute to society in another way.” His announcement stunned party bosses; Democrats lost his Senate seat in the midterm elections later that year.

Two days after that announcement, on Feb. 17, Bayh was on the phone with a job headhunter, Jim Citrin of the Spencer Stuart firm.

What Bayh did may have been perfectly allowable under the Senate’s self-policing rules.

………
“It’s outrageous,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with Public Citizen who helped Democrats write the ethics language intended to eliminate conflicts of interest. “What we were unaware of at the time was how Congress would manipulate the rule so that they really don’t abide by it.”

In June 2010, Bayh was among a small group of Democrats who helped kill a tax increase on private equity gains known as carried interest that was opposed by Apollo Global Management. That fall he stayed overnight three times at one Apollo executive’s Central Park South residence in Manhattan, and met twice with the company’s chief executive, Leon Black.

Weeks after Bayh left the Senate, Apollo announced he had been hired as a senior adviser.

In May 2010, Bayh lunched with a Marathon Oil board member. Then in June, he and a minority of Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that would have eliminated billions in tax deductions and exemptions for oil and gas companies.

Marathon Petroleum Corp., a new Marathon spinoff, announced Bayh had been elected to its board in July 2011.

………

The schedule shows many other meetings with top Wall Street and corporate officials throughout the months, even as the Senate debated and voted on major legislation including the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and an extension of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts. Bayh supported extending the Bush tax cuts and also voted for Dodd-Frank, while pushing to soften up some of the more onerous requirements on Wall Street.

………

Consider Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010.

The day begins with Bayh in Nantucket, staying at the Massachusetts waterfront mansion belonging to financier David Rubenstein, who once worked for Bayh’s father, former Sen. Birch Bayh.

Evan Bayh then flies to New York, his Senate account picking up the tab, and heads to Aron’s apartment to drop his bag.

Bayh meets with Rob Shafir, then the chairman of Credit Suisse, before taping an appearance with journalist Katie Couric on the topics “Reasons for your retirement from the Senate, the state of our politics (why are our politics so broken), fixing and reforming the institution of the Senate,” according to his schedule.

Bayh goes on to meet with Deutsche Bank chief executive Seth Waugh before having dinner at a steakhouse with Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein. Bayh returns to Aron’s apartment for the night.

This time around, the Democratic Party Establishment got the winner of the primary to drop out in June when Bayh decided to throw his hat into the ring.

Bad move, and they should have learned this when he f%$#ed them for a payday in 2010.

You Poor Delicate Flower, They Ignore Your Dazzling Brilliance!

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Numerous prominent economists living and working in the UK are incensed that the current government will not consult foreign economists on how to manage the Brexit:

Leading foreign academics from the LSE [London School of Economics] acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked to contribute to government work and analysis on Brexit because they are not British nationals.

The news was met with outrage by many academics, while legal experts questioned whether it could be legal under anti-discrimination laws and senior politicians criticised it as bewildering.

“It is utterly baffling that the government is turning down expert, independent advice on Brexit simply because someone is from another country,” said Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ EU spokesman.

“This is yet more evidence of the Conservatives’ alarming embrace of petty chauvinism over rational policymaking.”

Sara Hagemann, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics who specialises in EU policymaking processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments and the consequences of EU enlargements, said she had been told her services would not be required. Hagemann tweeted on Thursday:

UK govt previously sought work& advice from best experts. Just told I & many colleagues no longer qualify as not UKcitizens #Brexit @LSEnews

— Sara Hagemann (@sarahagemann) October 6, 2016

………

It is understood up to nine LSE academics specialising in EU affairs have been briefing the Foreign Office on Brexit issues, but the school was informed by a senior FCO official that submissions from non-UK citizens would no longer be accepted.

The staff concerned were then made aware of the instruction in an email from the head of the LSE’s European Institute, Kevin Featherstone, which said the Foreign Office planned to approach academics to contract staff for a Brexit advisory panel – but that those to be contracted “must be UK passport-holders.” 

These are arguably the most delicate negotiations for the UK in at least a generation.  The idea that the details of negotiations would be classified as a “NoForn” (No Foreigners) is not a particularly surprising.

The resultant hissy fit is both unseemly and thoroughly predictable.

She Should Have Released the Transcripts in July

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It appears that someone hacked some of Clinton’s emails, and included in these documents were excerpts of her obscenely remunerated speeches to Wall Street:

In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.

 The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had they become public.

 Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.

 In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

 The passages were contained in an internal review of Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches undertaken by her campaign, which was identifying potential land mines should the speeches become public. They offer a glimpse at one of the most sought-after troves of information in the 2016 presidential race — and an explanation, perhaps, for why Mrs. Clinton has steadfastly refused demands by Mr. Sanders and Donald J. Trump, her Republican rival, to release them.

 Mrs. Clinton’s campaign would not confirm the authenticity of the documents. They were released on Friday night by WikiLeaks, the hacker collective founded by the activist Julian Assange, saying that they had come from the email account of John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

………

But Clinton officials did not deny that the email containing the excerpts was real.

The leaked email, dated Jan. 25, does not contain Mrs. Clinton’s full speeches to the financial firms, leaving it unclear what her overall message was to these audiences.

But in the excerpts, Ms. Clinton demonstrates her long and warm ties to some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures. In a discussion in the fall of 2013 with Lloyd Blankfein, a friend who is the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Mrs. Clinton said that the political climate had made it overly difficult for wealthy people to serve in government.

“There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Mrs. Clinton said. The pressure on officials to sell or divest assets in order to serve, she added, had become “very onerous and unnecessary.”

We know the content of Hillary’s speeches to Wall Street.

We know her history, we know her associates, we know what sort of support she has received from Wall Street, and we know that if she had actually talked tough to Wall Street, she would have released the speech transcripts at the beginning of the campaign, so the general shape of the contents of her speeches are known.

The contents are not a surprise, and so are not a hugely significant bit of news.

What is significant is that Clinton has had more than 2 months since the end of Democratic National Convention to release the contents on her own terms in a way that would minimize the impact on the campaign.

That she chose to continue sitting on this information IS significant though, because this sort of behavior amplifies the damage caused by the inevitable missteps that are an inevitable part of being a public figure.

While the recent Trump revelations might mitigate the impact of this particular incident, or any further outbreaks during the campaign, the furtive paranoia that characterizes Clinton’s public life might very well prove disastrous as President.

As Richard Nixon proved, “It ain’t the crime, it’s the cover-up.”

Linkage

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John Oliver opens a can of whup ass on the standard excuse used by police, that any misconduct is the fault of a few “Bad Apples.”

Be Still My Beating Heart

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Testimony in the Bridgegate trial implicates Andrew Cuomo in the coverup of the political retaliation by the Christie administration:

A onetime top ally of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the governor and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo discussed releasing a false report to tamp down questions over the George Washington Bridge lane-closure scandal, the prosecution’s key witness testified Tuesday.

David Wildstein, who pleaded guilty in the gridlock scheme and is cooperating with prosecutors, said former Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Chairman David Samson told him the governors discussed the idea in October 2013. The report would have attributed the lane closures to a traffic study, covering up the true reason for the closures: political retribution against the mayor of Fort Lee for failing to endorse Christie’s 2013 re-election, Wildstein testified.

………
 

Baroni, who served as Christie’s top appointed staff aide at the Port Authority, and Bridget Kelly, Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, are on trial facing wire fraud and civil rights charges. They have pleaded not guilty.

………
 

“My understanding was that (Republican) Gov. Christie and (Democratic) Gov. Cuomo had discussed this,” Wildstein said under cross-examination Tuesday, according to the Bergen Record, adding he was told the information by Samson. “My understanding at the time was that it would put an end to this issue.”

Wildstein also testified Tuesday that Port Authority executive director Patrick Foye, a Cuomo appointee, was to “sign off” on the false report. Through an attorney, Foye declined to comment.

I so hope that this is true, and that additional supporting information could be down.

If Bridgegate were to take down that sh%$heel Cuomo as well as Christie, it would be delicious.

Yeah, Right!

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The White House is now accusing Russia of employing hackers to acquire embarrassing information from the DNC and to influence US elections, because, “Based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

Because as we all know, the only reason that computer geeks would attempt to extract humiliating information from poorly secured servers of a political party is because the leader of a sovereign nation told them to.

I get it:  The Clinton campaign has decided that a (slightly) modernized campaign of red baiting will help them get votes, and the Obama administration is joining in this farce.

The fact is that if Putin wanted to sabotage the US political process, he would structure his intervention in a way that would minimize the legitimacy of whoever won the election.

The fact that Clinton and Obama seem determined cast aspersions on the legitimacy of this election would imply that either they are sacrificing the health of the body politics at the altar of their own electoral success or electoral legacy, or Putin is the smartest man on the face of the earth,* and he has successfully manipulated the entire infrastructure of the Democratic Party to do his bidding.

I’m inclined to believe the first theory, because the second one is batsh%$ insane.

*Or, to invoke a John Frankenheimer’s magnum opus, “Vladimir Putin is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

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The Department of Justice has dropped charges against a man accused of illegal weapons transfers to Libyan rebels because it raises uncomfortable questions about Hillary’s role in the Libya clusterf%$#:

The Obama administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer it had accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels.

Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.

The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.

Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.

A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants.

“They don’t want this stuff to come out because it will look really bad for Obama and Clinton just before the election,” said the associate.

How convenient.

My Life is Effectively Over

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Such is the nature of my doing contract work that I need to find a new job on a fairly regular basis.

My new position is not transit accessible, so I had to get a car for commuting.

It’s a used Prius, so now we own both a minivan and a Prius.

I am now suffering from terminal automotive dullness.

As an aside, the Prius is a pleasant car to drive, though I find it disconcertingly quiet, and the animated displays take some getting used to.

The outside visibility is excellent, which is a surprise given the spoiler midway up the rear windows.

Also, I am not sure why, but it feels huge, more like a full size car than the midsize that it is technically listed as.

This is not a handling thing, it’s just the sense I get sitting in it.  It feels really big.

It’s handling is rather crisp though.

Deep Thought

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My son, Charlie watched the tail end of the Vice Presidential debate with me, and made the following observation:

Tim Kaine looks like a cartoon villain, and Mike Pence looks like a Bond villain.

It’s true.  You can see Kaine saying, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids.,” and you can see Pence saying, “No Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.”

Seriously, look at the side by side pictures:

 

My wife has raised a very wise young man.

Grownups in the Room, My Ass!

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It appears that our state security apparatus has been thoroughly captured by the House of Saud:

Russia has now managed twice to shame the U.S. into action against Jihadis by publicly demonstrating that the U.S. is not really committed to its promises.

During 2014 and 2015 the U.S. did very little to attack the Islamic State. U.S. strikes hit irrelevant targets like an “ISIS excavator” or some lone truck. Meanwhile ISIS was making millions per day from pumping oil out of the Syrian desert and selling it to Turkish contacts. Hundreds of Turkish tanker trucks assembled near the oil wells in south-east Syria waiting to load. No airstrike would hit them.

The Russians saw this and were appalled. The loudmouth U.S. spoke about its big coalition and attacking ISIS but did essentially nothing. The Russian President Putin then decided to shame the U.S. and Obama personally. On November 15 2015 at the G20 meeting in Turkey he walked around the table and showed satellite pictures to his international colleagues. Hundreds of trucks waiting in the Syrian desert for loading without fear that anyone would harm them:

“I’ve demonstrated the pictures from space to our colleagues, which clearly show the true size of the illegal trade of oil and petroleum products market. Car convoys stretching for dozens of kilometers, going beyond the horizon when seen from a height of four-five thousand meters,” Putin told reporters after the G20 summit.

The very next day on November 16 U.S. airplanes, for the first time, hit truck assemblies near ISIS oil wells in south-east Syria:

………

Something similar happened Friday and today. First the Russian Foreign Minister accused the U.S. of complicity with al-Qaeda:

The Russian foreign minister said Russia has “more and more reasons to believe that from the very beginning the plan was to spare Al-Nusra and to keep it just in case for Plan B or stage two, when it would be time to change the regime.”

At the daily State Department press briefing on Friday, State spokesman Toner was grilled by multiple reporters over Lavrov’s accusations and the lack of U.S. attacks on al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra aka Jabhat Fateh al-Sham):

 ………

 State spoks Mark Toner admits that no U.S. strike had hit Nusra since March this year. His excuses are paltry and in the end he punts to the Pentagon. He really got his balls squeezed.

But that pressure, initiated by the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, created results. The U.S. was shamed into action and today killed some Nusra number 2: Pentagon: US targets ‘core al-Qaida’ member in Syria strike.

Al-Qaeda confirmed the strike:

Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, former Nusra Front, says Egyptian alQaeda cleric Abu al-Faraj al-Masri killed in #US led coalition strike in #Idlib

— LBCI News English (@LBCI_News_EN) October 3, 2016

This is the very first strike on al-Qaeda in Syria, a UN designated terrorist organization which the U.S. vowed to fight, since March 2016. It comes a weekend after Lavrov accused the U.S. of not striking Nusra and a grilling at the State Department briefing.

The Russian shaming has again worked.

And in the context of all this, now there are reports  that U.S. has abandoned even the pretense of working with the Russians to fix the situation:

U.S.-Russia relations fell to a new post-Cold War low Monday as the Obama administration abandoned efforts to cooperate with Russia on ending the Syrian civil war and forming a common front against terrorists there, and Moscow suspended a landmark nuclear agreement.

The latter move, scuttling a deal the two countries signed in 2000 to dispose of their stocks of weapons-grade plutonium, was largely symbolic. But it provided the Kremlin with an opportunity to cite a series of what it called “unfriendly actions” toward Russia — from Ukraine-related and human rights sanctions to the deployment of NATO forces in the Baltics.

The United States, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, has “done all it could to destroy the atmosphere encouraging cooperation.”

Of far more immediate concern, the end of the Syria deal left the administration with no apparent diplomatic options remaining to stop the carnage in Aleppo and beyond after the collapse of a short-lived cease-fire deal negotiated last month.

The State Department announced that it was withdrawing U.S. personnel who have been meeting in Geneva over the past several weeks with Russian counterparts to plan coordinated airstrikes against al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorists in Syria. The coordination was to start as soon as a cease-fire, begun Sept. 12, took hold and humanitarian aid began to flow to besieged communities where civilians have borne the brunt of Russian-backed President Bashar al-Assad’s response to a five-year effort to oust him.

The House of Saud wants Assad gone, so the US wants Assad gone, even though it it’s clear that this would be a complete disaster for the US, NATO, and the Syrian people.

You know that a situation has been well and truly f%$#ed when Bashar al-Assad is the best alternative available.

At every single stage of this catastrophe,  the Obama administration has made the worst possible choices.

This is why there is no good alternative.

China Working on a Conventional Aircraft Carrier

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Note the towbar on the front gear

They are already in the process of developing a CATOBAR variant of the Flanker:

China has stepped up development of Catapult-Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery (CATOBAR) operations for its carriers, with the appearance of a Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark carrier-borne fighter with CATOBAR apparatus and continued construction of supporting land-based infrastructure.

 In mid-September photos surfaced online of a J-15 with what appears to be a catapult launch bar on its nose wheel. These are used to couple the aircraft to the catapult of the carrier during the launch sequence, and would be the latest indication that China’s rumored third aircraft carrier will utilize the CATOBAR system of aircraft launch and recovery.

 It is not clear whether this aircraft is a new-build prototype for the CATOBAR J-15, or one of the six original J-15 prototypes modified with a new nose wheel. Also noteworthy is that this J-15 is powered by the indigenous Shenyang-Liming WS-10 Taihang turbofan. Although already in widespread use with China’s land-based J-11 fighters, the Chinese engine has never gone to sea during trials and operations on China’s current sole aircraft carrier, Liaoning.

This is not a surprise.

While getting the operations right (an aircraft carrier deck is a dangerous place) is a non trivial matter, the basic technology of steam catapult launches is over 60 years old.

As an aside, the Chinese are proceeding on this incrementally, so I would rather expect that their 1st carrier with a catapult to be in the size range somewhere between the Clemenceau (25,000 T) and the Charles de Gaulle (48,000 T) size, much smaller than a typical supercarrier (~100,000 T).

I would expect China to field a CATOBAR carrier as a part of a full carrier group in the next 7-12 ears.

Further Adventures in Charter School Corruptions

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ECOT online charter school has just been caught bilking the state of Ohio out of money with phantom students:

A judge today denied a request by the state’s largest online charter school to stop the state from requiring that it produce attendance records to justify the $106 million it got last year in state funding.

 Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jenifer French ruled in favor of the Ohio Department of Education, rejecting a preliminary injunction request by the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow that would have immediately blocked the state from using log-in records and other data to determine how many full-time students actually attend the school

 The department has already completed its attendance audit on ECOT for last school year. The ruling means ECOT could be forced to repay tens of millions of dollars based on recent state calculations that its enrollment numbers last year were heavily inflated.

This is a feature, not a bug.

The charter school industry was created in a way that makes it a petri dish for fraud, and rather unsurprisingly, fraud flourishes there.