Adjusted for inflation, American spending to reconstruct Afghanistan now exceeds the total expended to rebuild all of Western Europe under the Marshall Plan.
—Andrew Bacevich, writing in the New York Times
Step one when you are in a hole: Stop digging.
The Simpsons have some Nostra Dumbass moments:
Geert Wilders and his right wing racist Party for Freedom massively under-performed pre election polls:
The Dutch political establishment appeared Wednesday to fend off a challenge from anti-Muslim firebrand Geert Wilders, according to initial vote counts, a victory in a closely watched national election that heartened centrist leaders across Europe who are fearful of populist upsets in their own nations.
The result was embraced by other leaders inside and outside the Netherlands as a major blow to anti-immigrant populism, breaking a streak of disruption that started with the Brexit vote and continued with the election of Donald Trump, a skeptic of European integration. Instead, as the Netherlands’ famed tulip season gets underway, Prime Minister Mark Rutte will remain in office as he tries to form a coalition.
The vote in the prosperous trading nation was seen as a bellwether for France and Germany, which head to the polls in the coming months and have also been shaken by fierce anti-immigrant sentiment.
Wilders nose-dived in recent weeks after topping opinion polls for most of the past 18 months, as Dutch voters appeared to turn away from an election message that described some Moroccans as “scum” and called for banning the Koran and shuttering mosques.
Wednesday is “an evening where the Netherlands, after Brexit, after the American elections, said no to the wrong kind of populism,” Rutte told a cheering crowd in The Hague. He said he had already spoken to other European leaders to accept their congratulations.
Note that Wilders STILL picked up a seat or two, and there is another story to this election:
With 84 percent of the voting districts reporting results early Thursday, Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy remained the largest party, but it was on track to lose nearly a quarter of its seats in parliament, forcing the prime minister to form a new, broader coalition across the political spectrum. His coalition partner, the center-left Labor Party, was wiped out as a political force, a punishing blow in response to cooperation with a longtime rival that had a sharply different approach to the core issues of working citizens.
(emphasis mine)
This is something that happens time and time again: The “Center Left” gets wiped out, and to my mind, there is a simple reason for this: as the consensus has moved rightward with the general adoption of the so called “Washington Consensus,” the Center-Left has followed this consensus, and under those conditions, it can simply not deliver.
This is worse in Europe, because the EU, and even more so the Euro, are not just conservative institutions, but reactionary institutions, which favor capital over labor and finance over all, and the mainstream “left” in Europe is so wedded to the EU that they are effectively political conservatives.
To paraphrase Harry S Truman, people will chose a real conservative over a fake one every day of the week.
My hope is that that the far left prevails rather than the far right, but betting on the left getting its sh%$ together is a sucker bet. and history shows that the center right and center left will hitch their wagon to fascists before they partner with the real left..
Coal miner thanks bernie for advocating for him more than his own senator McConnell. looking forward to how people twist this into misogyny pic.twitter.com/4GLkdRpAIO— Katie Halper (@kthalps) March 14, 2017
H/t naked capitalism
Someone has proposed an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) of corporate welfare recipients:
It stands to reason that tax-shy companies outperform, so why not create an ETF for them?
We’ve had funds for sin stocks (the Vice mutual fund which invests in tobacco, booze and gambling) and those for biblical values (The Inspire Global Hope Large Cap ETF recently launched).
Now PassiveBeat presents a new twist on the vice/not vice idea: the Corporate Welfare ETF. This putative fund is chock full of megacaps that pay no tax and have outperformed the S&P 500. What’s not to like?
We’ve taken our cue from a report released earlier this month by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (Itep) highlighting companies that have benefited from what may charitably be termed corporate welfare – tax loopholes, subsidies and so on.
Is this a joke, or is this an investment strategy. I really cannot tell.
The long-simmering war between Sens. John McCain and Rand Paul boiled over on Wednesday when the Arizona lawmaker directly accused his colleague of working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While speaking from the Senate floor in support of a bill advancing Montenegro’s bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), McCain noted objection from his Kentucky colleague, saying that if you oppose the measure, “You are achieving the objectives of Vladimir Putin… trying to dismember this small country which has already been the subject an attempted coup.”
McCain continued: “If they object, they are now carrying out the desires and ambitions of Vladimir Putin and I do not say that lightly.”
Several moments later, after the 80-year-old senator asked for unanimous consent to move the bill forward, Paul took the mic to raise his objection before dramatically exiting the room.
In response, McCain began railing against Paul, his voice trembling with anger: “I note the senator from Kentucky leaving the floor without justification or any rationale for the action he has just taken. That is really remarkable, that a senator blocking a treaty that is supported by the overwhelming number—perhaps 98, at least, of his colleagues—would come to the floor and object and walk away.”
He then directly connected Paul to the Russian government: “The only conclusion you can draw when he walks away is he has no justification for his objection to having a small nation be part of NATO that is under assault from the Russians.
“So I repeat again, the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”
Rather unsurprisingly, the Mitch McConnell chose not to cite Senate Rule XIX, which says in part, “No Senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator,” because it’s OK if you are a Republican to accuse your colleague of being a Russian mole, but it’s somehow wrong to quote Coretta Scott King from the Senate record in a debate if you are a Democrat.
May to send Article 50 letter strapped to a bulldog in a Spitfire
They owe me a screen wipe.
I haven’t watched Rachel Maddow since she gleefully revealed the straw poll of super delegates just before the California primary.
It wasn’t the revelation per se, all of NBC clearly had orders to push the story, it was the glee with which she was telling California voters that that didn’t matter.
Lately though, she has been going tinfoil hat in a way reminiscent of Mort Sahl’s decidedly unfunny fixation on the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission report, which wrecked the career of what had been the most promising comedian of the late 1950s.
It’s been Russophobic baiting that would be worthy of the late, and unlamented, Roy Cohn.
Now she’s completely jumped the shark in revealing Donald Trump’s 2005 1040 form, both pages, no details, and it reveals that he paid about 25% of his income in taxes.
It’s been described as a, “Cynical, self-defeating spectacle,” and the reporter who obtained the document, David Cay Johnston, said that he could not be sure that Trump hadn’t leaked the tax returns himself.
Think about it: After over a year of allegations that he was basically broke, and that he paid no taxes, we discover, at least in 2005, he earned over $150 million, proving that he’s really rich, not fake rich, and that he actually paid a tax rate that makes him look honest.
It really is pathetic, as Stephen Colbert’s devastating parody of her clearly shows.
My theory is that Hillary supporters know that the f%$#ed up, but are unable to admit their guilt, and it’s driving them cray-cray, but I’m an engineer, not a psychiatrist, dammit!*
*I love it when I get to go all Dr. McCoy!
The issue isn’t that one small rate hike will destroy the economy, it’s that rate hikes like this are the Fed’s way of signalling that they will never let wages go up again.
—Duncan “Atrios” Black on the Federal Reserve’s 250 basis point (¼%) rate hike.
He is absolutely correct.
It is the official policy of the Fed, and much of the US government, to suppress wages of working people.
Either inflation or deficit concerns are the excuse.
Personally, I think that the whole “they are just training forces” dodge is a canard.
That being said, when you move in artillery units with their guns, you are involved in the ground war, period, full stop:
The Pentagon has deployed several hundred Marines to northern Syria, the Washington Post and CNN reported this week. Their mission: firing long-range artillery to help recapture Raqqa, ISIS’s self-proclaimed capital city.
The Marines are equipped with M777 howitzers, which can fire GPS-guided explosives up to 25 miles.
That’s a big change from the “train, advise, and assist” role U.S. forces have been playing so far — although as with many previous troop deployments to Iraq and Syria, it was not debated, let alone authorized, by Congress.
But the White House press secretary brushed off a question about the move, saying that sending “several hundred advisers” did not amount to “hostile action.”
Right-wing radio host John Fredericks asked Sean Spicer on Thursday whether Trump was committed to seeking congressional authorization for new deployments.
“I think there’s a big difference between an authorization of war than [sic] sending a few hundred advisers,” Spicer replied. “And I think most in Congress would probably agree with that as well. I think that’s a big difference between a hostile action and going in to address some certain concerns, whether it’s certain countries in the Middle East or elsewhere.”
Spicer referred the question to the Department of Defense. But when reached by The Intercept, a Pentagon spokesperson disputed Spicer’s characterization.
“This is fire support,” said Maj. Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a public affairs officer for the Marine Corps, explaining that the new deployment would fire long-range artillery in an assault on Raqqa. “They will be providing partner support for the Syrian Democratic Forces.”
This is unequivocally a combat role. This is boots on the ground.
This if f%$#ing artillery, aka the “King of the Battlefield.”
We are in for a world of hurt here.
This video details how the Democrats are devoid of any guiding principles, because it has been, “hollowed out by corporate money.” (Warning, frequent use of the s-word and the f-word)
Ht JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the video.
The Congressional Budget Office (has scored Paul Ryan’s Obamacare replacement bill, and says that it would strip health insurance from 24 million people.
Rather predictably, the Republicans completely lose their sh%$, and attack the CBO chief that they themselves appointed:
An hour after the Congressional Budget Office released its dire assessment of the GOP Obamacare plan, Donald Trump’s top health official went on the attack.
“We disagree strenuously with the report,” Tom Price said. “The CBO report’s coverage numbers defy logic.”
That initial Republican assault on Monday was the first of many that amounted to dismissing their own scorekeeper.
Left unmentioned by Price, Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary: When he was in Congress, he recommended the CBO’s current director, Keith Hall, for the job. Hall took the helm at the CBO in April 2015, chosen by Republican House and Senate leaders to provide advice to a GOP-controlled Congress.
Obamacare sucks, the Republican proposal sucks even more, and the pre-2009 state of affairs sucked even more.
This might explain why the ACA hasn’t created a groundswell of political support for the Democrats, “We suck a little bit less,” which these days seems to be the motto for the Dems, just does not motivate voters these days.
The objections of the Lords were turned back, and Parliament has authorized Theresa May to negotiate Brexit with a largely free hand:
Parliament has passed the Brexit bill, paving the way for the government to trigger Article 50 so the UK can leave the European Union.
Peers backed down over the issues of EU residency rights and a meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal after their objections were overturned by MPs.
The bill is expected to receive Royal Assent and become law on Tuesday.
This means Theresa May is free to push the button on withdrawal talks – now expected in the last week of March.
This is not going to the path to prosperity that the Brexit supporters, nor the disaster that Brussels, Berlin, and Paris hope it to be, but will be a clusterf%$#, and it is going to be a mess.
In 5 years it will have sorted itself out, and, and other EU members will see that the UK isn’t a post apocalyptic wasteland, and they might consider edging for the door, particularly if the Germans continue to run things.
Here’s how to fix this, don’t be a bigot in the first place:
Former Gov. Pat McCrory says the backlash against House Bill 2 is making some employers reluctant to hire him but he’s currently doing consulting and advisory board work.
McCrory has been appearing frequently in interviews with national media outlets to defend the controversial LGBT law, but he hasn’t announced what’s next for his career. In a podcast interview recently with WORLD, an Asheville-based evangelical Christian news website, McCrory talked about his challenges on the job market.
The former Republican governor says HB2 “has impacted me to this day, even after I left office. People are reluctant to hire me, because, ‘oh my gosh, he’s a bigot’ – which is the last thing I am.”
McCrory explained more about his current situation in an interview Monday evening with The News & Observer.
“I’ve currently accepted several opportunities in business to do work that I’d done prior to becoming governor in consulting and advisory board positions, and I’ve also been exploring other opportunities in academia, nonprofits and government,” he said. “And I’ll hopefully be making some of those decisions in the near future.”
McCrory declined to name the companies he’s working for. But the former governor said that he’s been considered for part-time university teaching positions – he wouldn’t say where – but that academic leaders “have shown reluctance because of student protests.”
HB2 was bigotry, and you endorsed it, and supported it at every opportunity.
You are a bigot, perhaps tyh best known bigot in North Carolina, and these days, people don’t want to be publicly associated with bigots.
You had a choice, and you went with folks who hate.
Live with the consequences.
In the annals of White House press corps(e) there has been a lot of whining.
Now it appears that some of this “august” assemblage is wonder if Donald Trump is just f%$#ing with them.
If this is the case, I cannot conceive of a more deserving group of dissolute reprobates.
It appears that the administration is not respecting the sacred seating chart:
………
The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, in the West Wing, has seven rows of seven seats. The Associated Press, Reuters, and the biggest TV networks have reserved seats in the front row; blogs like Politico and Real Clear Politics are near the middle; BuzzFeed and the BBC are in the back. The seating chart is the purview of the White House Correspondents’ Association, an independent board of journalists who, with the sombre secrecy of a papal conclave, assess news organizations according to factors such as regularity of coverage and centrality to the national discourse.
There are also correspondents who might be called floaters—those who have White House credentials but no assigned seat. Some floaters work for outlets that are too new to have been included in the most recent seating chart; others work for outlets that are marginal or disreputable. When press briefings are half empty, floaters can find vacant seats. In the early days of the Trump Administration, when each day’s briefing is oversubscribed, floaters pack the aisles, angling for a spot visible from the podium. The paradigmatic example of a floater is Raghubir Goyal, an amiable, somewhat absent-minded man in his sixties. Goyal claims to represent the India Globe, a newspaper that, as far as anyone can tell, is defunct. Nevertheless, he has attended briefings since the Carter Administration, and has asked so many questions about Indo-American relations that his name has become a verb. “To Goyal”: to seek out a reporter who is likely to provide a friendly question, or a moment of comic relief. All press secretaries get cornered, and all have, on occasion, Goyaled their way out. But no one Goyals like Spicer.
Until recently, the more established White House correspondents have regarded floaters as a harmless distraction—the equivalent of letting a batboy sit in the dugout. Now they are starting to see the floaters as an existential threat. “It’s becoming a form of court-packing,” one White House correspondent told me. Outlets that have become newly visible under the Trump Administration include One America News Network, which was founded in 2013 as a right-wing alternative to Fox News; LifeZette, a Web tabloid founded in 2015 by Laura Ingraham, the radio commentator and Trump ally; Townhall, a conservative blog started by the Heritage Foundation; the Daily Caller, co-founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, now a Fox News host; and the enormously popular and openly pro-Trump Breitbart News Network. Most of the White House correspondents from these outlets are younger than thirty. “At best, they don’t know what they’re doing,” a radio correspondent told me. “At worst, you wonder whether someone is actually feeding them softball questions.” He added, “You can’t just have a parade of people asking, ‘When and how do you plan to make America great again?’ ”
For years, the first question of each press briefing has usually gone to the Associated Press, whose reporters sit in the middle of the front row. In Spicer’s first briefing, on January 21st, which lasted five and a half minutes, he uttered several verifiable falsehoods—“This was the largest audience to ever witness an Inauguration, period”—then left without taking any questions. For the first question of his second briefing, he called on the New York Post, whose reporter, sitting in the fifth row, was clearly surprised. He asked, “When will you commence the building of the border wall?” In Spicer’s third briefing, his first question went to a reporter from LifeZette, who wondered why the Administration hadn’t taken a harder line on immigration. Many of Spicer’s early briefings were unusually short—about half an hour, with ten minutes of prepared remarks in the beginning. He often escapes from the podium without facing many tough questions from mainstream journalists. (This month, perhaps hoping to foreclose public scrutiny, or to starve “Saturday Night Live” of material, Spicer did his briefings off-camera for a week.)
Major Garrett, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News, sits in the front row. “Historically, the way the briefing room has been organized is, the closer you are, the farther you’ve come,” Garrett said. “And the person at the podium has tended to recognize that.” More experienced reporters, he said, “ask questions that are sharper, more informed. Not, ‘What’s your message today?’ Not, ‘Here’s a paintbrush—would you paint us a pretty picture?’ ” If established reporters got fewer questions relative to the floaters, I asked, would this be good or bad for democracy? “We’ll see,” Garrett said. “We’re engaged in a grand experiment.”
A TV correspondent told me that calling on front-row reporters first isn’t just about appealing to their egos: “It’s also about maintaining a sense of predictability, a sense that eventually the substantive questions will be answered. Throwing that into chaos—‘Maybe you’ll get a question, if you shout loud enough, who knows?’—makes everyone desperate and competitive and makes us look like a bunch of braying jackals. Which I don’t think is an accident.”
………
A longtime Washington reporter from a mainstream network echoed that sentiment. “I don’t mind them bringing in conservative voices that they feel have been underrepresented,” he said. “Personally, I don’t even mind them f%$#ing with the front-row guys, the Jonathan Karls of the world. Those guys are a smug little cartel, and it’s fun to watch them squirm, at least for a little while. But at what point does it start to delegitimize the whole idea of what happens in that room? When does it cross the line into pure trolling?”
(%$# mine)
I hope that Trump and his Evil Minions™ are trolling the press.
It’s long overdue, and it is an indication that perhaps those smug guys in the front to stop preening at press briefing, and return to shoe leather journalism.
It’s clear that the Bob Woodward model of context free access journalism simply does not cut it these days.
It hasn’t for decades.
Governor Ratf%$# just declared a snow emergency, and it’s March f%$#ing 13th!
This is Maryland, not International Falls, Minnesota!
Remember when connecting factual dots without proving an explicit quid pro quo was considered unacceptable? That was only a few months ago.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) March 13, 2017
Pretty much my take on the red baiting going on among the incompetents who want to avoid culpability for losing the Presidential election to an inverted traffic cone.
H/t naked capitalism
Trump to Meet the ‘Other’ World Leader Wiretapped by Obama.
It is a reference to the upcoming meeting between Trump and Merkel, and it is marvelously droll.
H/t naked capitalism
the map is pretty staggering. pink is poor areas, green is areas where AT&T provides decent internet. almost no overlap. pic.twitter.com/ay9Jw7KR0J— libby watson (@libbycwatson) March 10, 2017
The Wonders of the Market
There is a (soon to be canceled by the Trump administration, no doubt) federal program that requires that low cost internet be provided to poor people where broadband is available.
AT&T’s way of dealing with this was to scrupulously ensure that there was no broadband available to the poor so that they could over charge them:
It’s no secret that ISPs can make more money from network upgrades in wealthy neighborhoods than low-income ones, and a new analysis of Cleveland, Ohio, by broadband advocacy groups appears to show that AT&T is following that strategy. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and a Cleveland-based group called Connect Your Community alleged in their report today that “AT&T has systematically discriminated against lower-income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies over the past decade.”
Last year, the NDIA brought attention to AT&T’s refusal to provide $5-per-month Internet service to poor people in areas where the company hasn’t upgraded its network. When the Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T’s purchase of DirecTV in 2015, the FCC required AT&T to provide discount broadband to poor people as condition of the merger. But the condition apparently allowed AT&T to charge full price in areas where maximum download speeds were less than 3Mbps. After the NDIA spoke out, AT&T announced it would stop exploiting the loophole and instead provide discount Internet to poor people in all parts of its network.
Today’s followup report from the NDIA and Connect Your Community analyzes FCC data on AT&T Internet deployments in Cleveland, where many residents were initially declared ineligible for the discount broadband service.
“Specifically, AT&T has chosen not to extend its ‘fiber-to-the-node’ VDSL infrastructure—which is now the standard for most Cuyahoga County suburbs and other urban AT&T markets throughout the US—to the majority of Cleveland Census blocks, including the overwhelming majority of blocks with individual poverty rates above 35 percent,” the report said.
………
AT&T DSL speeds are often extremely slow when service is delivered entirely over copper telephone wires from central offices that can be nearly three miles from individual homes. Data speeds degrade with distance over copper, so AT&T boosts speeds in many areas by bringing fiber deeper into each neighborhood with its fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) technology. AT&T’s fastest speeds of all involve bringing fiber all the way to each home.
“AT&T apparently chose not to install fiber-to-the-node infrastructure anywhere in the areas served by its four Cleveland central offices with the greatest concentration of high-poverty neighborhoods,” the advocacy groups wrote. “The absence of FTTN in these lower-income neighborhoods, and the overall disparity in FTTN deployment between Cleveland and the suburbs, can be traced largely to AT&T’s failure to deploy FTTN anywhere in the service areas of four ‘central offices’… with large lower-income customer bases: those at 6513 Guthrie, 5400 Prospect, 2130 East 107th, and 12223 St. Clair.”
By contrast, “Most of Cuyahoga County’s suburban communities are fully covered” by faster AT&T network technologies, including fiber-to-the-home, the report said.
………
The NDIA shared its findings with Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn, a Democrat, but it isn’t expecting any action from the FCC’s Republican leadership.
“The current chair of the FCC [Ajit Pai] is not likely to be interested,” Siefer told Ars. “We have shared this research with Commissioner Clyburn’s office. We do not see a path in the current climate (federally and in Ohio) to force AT&T to make the upgrades. We do see this research as proof that further deregulation is not going to reduce the digital divide. Our solutions will likely include local, state, and federal policies that encourage equitable build-out. We also need competition to bring down residential broadband costs. If AT&T is not going to serve low-income areas then we need policies and initiatives that actively recruit other broadband providers.”
Pai’s theory is that if you allow poorly regulated monopolists to gouge and charge monopoly rents, then they will invest in better service.
Reality indicates that all that if you allow poorly regulated monopolists to gouge and charge monopoly rents, they will invest in ensuring that they can maintain those monopoly rents, to the exclusion of customer service and innovation.
AT&T spent its money in Ohio on banning municipal broadband, instead of getting poor people decent internet service.
(Updated to fix typos)
A snipped of the debate vid: