Month: January 2016

Well, This is Getting Interesting

No Comments

David Brock, a proxy for Hillary Clinton has been demanding that the 74 year old Bernie Sanders release his complete medical records.

Interestingly, the Clinton campaign has done its level best to get him to STFU:

A top surrogate for Hillary Clinton is prepping a new attack in an intensifying and increasingly personal war against rival Bernie Sanders — calling on the 74-year-old to release his medical records before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.

Clinton defender David Brock — founder of the Correct the Record PAC, which coordinates directly with Clinton’s campaign — is expected to hit the airwaves this weekend from Charleston, the scene of the third Democratic debate on Sunday night, and challenge Sanders to cough up a clean bill of health and doctor’s note in the next 16 days, according to a Democrat familiar with his thinking who was not authorized to preview any strategy.

Clinton released her medical records, showing she is “fit to serve as President,” last July. A spokeswoman for the Clinton campaign declined to comment on the strategy.

But hours later, after this report was published and Brock’s planned tactics were widely criticized on Twitter, campaign chairman John Podesta distanced himself from the surrogate’s attack.

“@DavidBrockDC chill out,” Podesta tweeted Saturday night. “We’re fighting on who would make a better President, not on who has a better Physical Fitness Test.”

Podesta’s belated comment also came after the Sanders campaign issued its own fundraising plea off of this report, calling it “a new, vile super PAC attack on Bernie.”

I don’t think that it was a fundraising plea.

I think that the Clinton campaign does not want a detailed investigation of her health records.  (She is 68)

Here is the analysis from Naked Capitalism: (note that Coumadin is a brand name for the generic Wafarin)

……… People in glass houses should not throw stones! Hillary’s medical report reads as if it was written by lawyer, and it’s from an MD in the town next to Chappaqua, when you have to think her and Bill’s main doctors are big ticket MDs in Manhattan, and the local just part of the team. But most important, she’s on Coumadin, which is an anti-clotting drug used often in post stroke patients to reduce the risk of recurrence. Coumadin has to be tightly managed. And read this analysis….be sure to get as far as the discussion of the cumulative odds of death were she to be a 2 term president on Coumadin. Are there any doctors in the house who can weigh in on the article? Update: This came in by e-mail from a doctor who treats in this area that I asked to opine:

Clinton apparently had a rare type of stroke, cerebral venous thrombosis. For what it’s worth, I had never seen a patient with that kind of stroke in my career. In the blog post, Dr Cundiff analyzed the fairly minimal data available on that kind of stroke. One study showed a surprisingly high bleeding risk for patients on long-term Coumadin. But the study was apparently funded by the manufacturer of a drug that was brought out to be a supposedly safer alternative to Coumadin, the COIs affecting the study were not properly disclosed, and the design of the study was such that the likelihood it was biased is high.

And of course it’s actually very difficult to accurately predict what will happen to any patient, much less at a distance using limited information for a patient who had a relatively rare problem.

All patients on Coumadin (and other kinds of anticoagulants) have elevated bleeding risks. How elevated it may be difficult to say for many. Really good medical care and monitoring ought to decrease this risk. Falling and hitting one’s head, or having major trauma surely increase it. So I would advise Ms Clinton, from a distance, to avoid contact sports and activities with high risks of trauma (sky-diving, race car driving, working for the police, fire departments, going into military combat, etc). But that’s probably not so useful in this context.

All of this is significant because I guarantee that the Republican opposition researchers are looking to use all of this against the eventual Democratic nominee.

Whether it’s Clinton or Sanders (O’Malley is really not in the game), we are going to see health issues raised by Republican operatives.

Some History Perspective on Bank Failures

No Comments


FDIC Data


Data from 1921

The good folks at Calculated Risk have put together some very interesting on bank failure going back almost 100 years.

It should be noted that the current bank failures are dwarfed by the failures during the S&L crisis, (Also known as the bailout of the Texas banking industry) but that we routinely saw more failures than that before the creation of the FDIC.

The next time that someone complains about how excessive regulation constrains the dynamism of the US economy, show them these graphs.  (click for slide show)

Muck Ficrosoft

No Comments

It’s clear that since the clusterf%$# that was Windows 8, Microsoft has been running scared.

Now, it appears that they will be doing their best to cripple earlier versions of their operating systems with the current hardware:

Soon, when you buy a new PC, it won’t support Windows 7 or 8. Microsoft has announced a change to its support policy that lays out its plans for future updates to its older operating systems, and the new rules mean that future PC owners with next-generation Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm processors will need to use Windows 10.

It’s not usual for old PCs to fall short of the minimum requirements of a brand new operating system, but in this case, the opposite is happening. Microsoft and its partners will not be putting in the significant work necessary to make new hardware work with older versions of Windows. The old operating systems, at best, will merely lack the latest updates. At worst, they might not function properly.

Policy starts with Intel’s current processors, Skylake

“Going forward, as new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support,” Microsoft notes in a blog post published on Friday. “Windows 10 will be the only supported Windows platform on Intel’s upcoming ‘Kaby Lake’ silicon, Qualcomm’s upcoming ‘8996’ silicon, and AMD’s upcoming ‘Bristol Ridge’ silicon.”

This new policy doesn’t mean that Windows 7 and 8.1 are no longer supported in general. The two operating systems will continue to get updates through January 14, 2020 and January 10, 2023, respectively. But that’s only if you’re using hardware that was contemporaneous with those operating systems.


For current PC owners, the detail to note is that Intel’s current, sixth generation processors, known as Skylake, are the first that won’t support either of the older versions of Windows. (Intel and Microsoft say that the platform and Windows 10 were designed for each other.) Microsoft is phasing in the policy now.

When juxtaposed with Microsoft’s attempts to move to software as a service, it’s yet another reason to move to Linux.

“If They Want the Germans to Accept Arab Women Wearing Headscarves Then They Must Accept Germans Sunbathing and Swimming Naked in Public Parks and Rivers.”

No Comments

One of the reasons that there are problems integrating immigrants into European societies is because there is very little effort to actual integrate them into society.

So this course in Europe is a very positive step:

Skinny-dipping, gay relationships and parenting all form part of Magdi Gohary’s crash-course introduction to a strange new home, Learn to Understand Germany, given at a huge refugee camp on the outskirts of Munich.

 Many of those who join his seminars headed to the country in search of security and gave little thought to what else awaited them there, says the 74-year-old, a retired chemist who left his native Egypt for Munich half a century ago.

 “We talk about homosexuality, which a lot of my course members tend to see as criminal. I go on to explain to them that Germans don’t see it that way and that they will have to accept that if they want to live here,” he says.

 They are warned that their children will have more independence if they grow up German than they might have expected in the Arab world.

 “Arabs are often shocked here when they see the Bavarians go swimming naked in the River Isar. But I tell them that if they want the Germans to accept Arab women wearing headscarves then they must accept Germans sunbathing and swimming naked in public parks and rivers.”

 In the wake of mass assaults on women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve – which police believe were largely carried out by men of Arab and North African backgrounds, including several asylum seekers – Germany is being pushed into a public debate about the challenges of integration.

 The conversation is a delicate one. Refugees, those who work with them and the millions of Germans who support chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming new arrivals are all very wary of giving more ammunition to far-right groups who have already made political capital from the attacks. But many are also frustrated by assumptions that it would take little more than a change of clothes and passports for new arrivals to settle in, and say the conversation is a very necessary one for Germans and refugees alike.

There is very little effort to make immigrants in Germany, France, Italy, Holland, etc. into Germans, French, Italians, Dutch, etc.

Instead, Europe has tacitly accepted the creation of segregated ghettos, with little meaningful integration into the surrounding culture.

Taking a Prank That Necessary Extra Step

No Comments

As you are no doubt aware, the terrorists occupying the Malheur sanctuary offices in Oregon have been asking for people to send them stuff so that they can maintain their presence.

They’ve asked for things like food and warm clothing, what they have been getting is dildos and other sex toys.

Well, Max Temkin, co-creator of the game Cards Against Humanity, saw this as problematic, so he sent the protesters a 55 gallon drum of Passion Natural Water Based Lubricant.

Epic.

Misquoting Deming

No Comments

It turns out that a common argument for expanded school testing is based on a selective quote of the efficiency expert Edward Deming which reverses its meaning:

………

If challenged, test fans often quote the late Dr. W. Edward Deming, the world-famous quality guru who showed Japanese companies how to build better stuff than anybody else. In his book, “The New Economics,” Deming wrote, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Here’s the whole sentence as he wrote it: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.”

This full Demings quote is not a surprise.

One of the central conceits of his theories statistical quality control is that testing is a sign of faulty process and faulty product.

Of course accurate quotes do not matter to the educational reform community. Mendacity is at the core of their modus operandi.

The school reform movement is largely driven by two things, the desire to crush teachers’ unions, and the desire to turn public tax dollars into private profit.

Truth is not, nor has it ever been, a meaningful part of their process.

Jimmy McMillan Was Right

No Comments

The divergance becomes


A convergence when rent is removed

Over at the Wall Steet Journal, they note that reason for the divergence between the CPI and PCE when juxtaposed wit the PPI is that the PPI does not include rent:

Prices in the U.S. are either rising or falling, depending on how you measure them.

The best-known measure of consumer inflation, the Labor Department’s consumer-price index, rose 0.5% from a year earlier in November. The Federal Reserve prefers to use the Commerce Department’s personal-consumption expenditures price index, which rose 0.4% on the year in November.

So why did another Labor Department inflation yardstick, the producer-price index, decline 1.1% on the year in November? The answer may be simple: Housing costs are rising faster than pretty much anything else, and they’re not part of the PPI.

A little background first. The PPI tracks price changes at the business level, and it was overhauled two years ago to cover a broader base of goods and services. In some cases, it can reveal inflationary pressures in the pipeline before they show up in consumer prices.

It also happens to be first broad inflation gauge released each month, earning it extra attention from economists and investors. The December PPI report will be released Friday morning, while the CPI won’t be out until next Wednesday and the PCE price index won’t be available until Feb. 1.

The PPI has generally moved in tandem with the two consumer-facing price gauges, but it has diverged from both measures over the past year. All three inflation gauges fell toward zero after oil prices began to tumble in mid-2014. The PPI kept going, dropping into negative annual territory and staying there, while the CPI and PCE measures have stabilized at low levels.

The likely culprit: rising rents. The cost of shelter, as measured by the CPI, rose 3.2% in November from a year earlier for the third consecutive month—the fastest growth in eight years. But while rent (and its equivalent for homeowners) makes up nearly a third of the CPI basket and a smaller but still substantial share of the PCE index, it’s absent from the PPI. That may explain why the path for PPI looks a lot like the path of CPI if you exclude shelter costs from the latter index.

There are a number of take aways here.

First, and most obvious is (of course) that the rent is too damn high.

The second is that an increasing proportion of our economy is going to rents of various forms rather than productive activities, which does nto indicate an economy that is progressing.

The third, and most important take away is that we are actually in a deflationary economy, like the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The reason that our economic recovery doesn’t feel like an economic recovery is because it really isn’t one.

We are in a deflationary spiral.

Populism Done Right, UK Edition

No Comments

By being the first Labour leader in a generation to actually take that whole “labo(u)r” bit seriously, Jeremy Corbyn has presided over an explosion in interest and members:

Jeremy Corbyn’s hopes of remoulding Labour have been boosted by a detailed Guardian survey into the party at grassroots level that shows overwhelming support for him, a decisive shift to the left and unhappiness with squabbling among MPs.

 The Guardian has interviewed Labour secretaries, chairs, other office holders and members from more than 100 of the 632 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales. Almost every constituency party across the country we contacted reported doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling membership, and a revival of branches that had been moribund for years and close to folding.

 100 Labour officials from across Britain tell of the new members surging to join the party, some young idealists, some returning prodigals – and one who was last a member when Harold Wilson was prime minister

 Reflecting increased interest among the young, university cities and towns recorded some of the biggest rises, with Bath jumping from 300 to 1,322 members (911 full members, 120 affiliated supporters and 291 registered supporters) and Colchester from 200-250 to almost 1,000. Neither are traditional Labour seats.

 The survey findings are borne out by Labour’s national figures, released to the Guardian in a break with party tradition of keeping them secret. Membership jumped from 201,293 on 6 May last year, the day before the general election, to 388,407 on 10 January.

The Blairites, of course, of course are apoplectic, because they think that the “Wrong Sort” are joining, even at a 10:1 ratio of joiners to leavers.

But if the strikingly good membership numbers have the Blairites freaking out, then Corbyn’s proposals to limit excessive executive pay has their heads exploding:

Companies would be banned from paying senior executives vastly higher wages than junior employees, and would not be allowed to hand out dividends until all staff were earning the Living Wage, under plans signalled today by Jeremy Corbyn.

The Labour leader, who is setting out proposals to close the gap between top earners and low-paid staff, will commit the party to act to “institutionalise fairness”.

He also repeated his support for bringing the railways back into public ownership and for “democratic control” of the energy giants.

Mr Corbyn’s critics, both inside and outside the party, will seize on his plans as evidence that he is trying to drive its platform to the left. Any move to intervene in company pay is also bound to face fierce criticism from business.

But the Labour leader’s allies insist his commitment to tackling inequality will strike a chord with the public who are dismayed by the excesses of company bosses.

Mr Corbyn told a Fabian conference in London: “Too much of the proceeds of growth have accumulated to those at the top.”

He argued: “Everyone benefits when companies succeed. One proposal is pay ratios between top and bottom, so that the rewards don’t just accrue to those at the top.

………

Mr Corbyn also floated a plan to ban or restrict firms from distributing dividends to shareholders if they are not paying the Living Wage to all staff. “Only profitable employers will be paying dividends. If they depend on cheap labour for those profits, then I think there is a question over whether that is a business model to which we should be turning a blind eye.”

He pointed to research by the OECD which concluded that failure to distribute wealth more evenly hinders economic growth. “A more equal society is not only fairer, it does better in terms of economic stability and wealth creation,” he said.

The Labour leader argued that train fares would fall and investment increase if the railways were returned to public ownership. “It would be governed not remotely from Whitehall, but by passengers, rail workers and politicians, local and national,” he added.

Bringing gas and electricity companies under “democratic control” would also help to reduce costs and ease the transition to carbon-free energy supplies, he claimed.

Without excessive executive compensation, how will Blairites cash in when they retire from politics?

We’ve had about 40 years of so-called liberal politicians buying into conservative framing, and the only beneficiaries are the top 1% of the top 1%.

It’s time for a change.

Oh, Snap!

No Comments

Roll Tape!

One of the issues that seems to be giving the Bernie Sanders campaign its legs is the perception that Hillary Clinton is too close to the Banksters on Wall Street.

This 2007 video of Hillary Clinton giving a speech before banksters blaming ordinary people for the mortgage crisis is not going to help her campaign:

When Clinton ran for president during her second term as New York’s U.S. Senator, she gave a tepid speech at the NASDAQ headquarters on December 5, 2007 — before the financial crisis reached a boiling point — about reforming Wall Street’s housing loan practices, largely excusing financial criminals for their behavior.

“Now these economic problems are certainly not all Wall Street’s fault – not by a long shot,” Clinton said early in the speech.

Clinton’s NASDAQ address amounted to essentially asking the financiers assembled to take voluntary action or else she would “consider legislation” to stop banks from kicking families out of their homes. But early on in the speech, Clinton placed equal blame for the subprime mortgage crisis on low-income homeowners alongside Wall Street.

“Homebuyers who paid extra fees to avoid documenting their income should have known they were getting in over their heads,” Clinton said.

One YouTube user found video of the statement and put it side-by-side with her claim at the first Democratic debate in which she said she went to Wall Street before the crisis and told them to “cut it out.”

This sort of crap is like death to her campaing, because it plays into her greatest weakness, a perceived lack of authenticity.

She is firmly in the Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner,  Barack Obama wing of the Democratic Party.

Trying to pretend that she is more of a populist than Bernie Sanders is laughable.

And Police Wonder Why Some People Call Them “Pigs”

No Comments

The sense of self-entitled hostility directed toward the public for whom they nominally work is clear when they pull this sort of sh%$:

In April 2015, the New York City television station NY1 filed a open-records request for “unedited video files from the NYPD’s body camera program” captured during five specific weeks in 2014 and 2015. Four months later, the New York City Police Department agreed to review and release the footage—but only after NY1 paid a $36,000 “copying fee.” NY1 appealed the N.Y.P.D.’s decision and, in a letter dated September 16 of last year, was once again denied by the N.Y.P.D.’s deputy commissioner of legal matters.

As the New York Post reported yesterday, the details of the N.Y.P.D.’s response, including the exorbitant fee (charged by a public agency with a budget of $4.8 billion*), were revealed in a lawsuit NY1 filed against the N.Y.P.D. in the Supreme Court of New York County on Wednesday. In it, the channel accuses the department of violating New York State’s Freedom of Information Law by inflating the cost of producing the requested body camera footage—a process that, according to the N.Y.P.D., involves copying video segments that could be withheld under certain privacy and security exemptions.

The fee does indeed come from a curious calculation of labor costs. In a letter to NY1 explaining the administrative denial of the channel’s appeal, a police official explained:

The [record access officer]’s estimate of the cost of processing a copy of the [body camera footage] was reasonable based on an estimate that the total time of footage recorded during the five weeks specified in the FOIL request was approximately 190 hours, and that in addition to the 190 hours required to view the recordings in real time, an additional 60% (or 114 hours) will be required to copy the footage in a manner that will redact the exempt portions of the [body camera footage], for a total of approximately 304 hours. The lowest paid NYPD employee with the skills required to prepare a redacted copy of the recordings is in the rank of police officer, and the cost of compensating a police officer is $120.00 per hour. Multiplying $120.00 by 304 hours equals $36,480, which closely approximates the amount estimated by the [records access officer].

It’s unclear where exactly these figures came from. A police officer is the third-lowest rank within the N.Y.P.D.’s rank structure; individuals holding that title make nowhere near $120 per hour, which is the equivalent of $249,600 per year (assuming a 40-hour workweek).

This is, of course, complete bullsh%$.

A sledge hammer needs to be taken wall that the police place between themselves and the general public.

It breeds contempt, and corruption, and abuse.

Finally, One of Those Ratf%$#S Got Arrested

No Comments

One of the terrorists in Oregon got arrested for driving a stolen vehicle, specifically a Fish and Wildlife Service truck from the Malheur refuge:

Oregon State Police on Friday arrested one of the protesters occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge after he drove into town, accusing him of having a stolen vehicle.

The man was identified as Kenneth Medenbach, 62, of Crescent. He was arrested on suspicion of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, a class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison. He was to be booked into the Deschutes County Jail in Bend with bail set at $10,000, officials said.

According to federal court records, Medenbach is currently facing federal charges in Medford and was released from custody in November. A condition of his release was that he would not “occupy” any federal land. He was accused of illegally camping on federal property.

He is the first person arrested in connection with the armed occupation of the wildlife refuge, taken over two weeks ago.

He was arrested in the Safeway parking lot in one vehicle bearing federal government license plates. A second federal vehicle was parked next to him, but the man police suspect of driving that into town already had gone into the grocery before police arrived.

Both vehicles — a pickup and a passenger van, bore door signs reading “Harney County Resource Center.” That’s the new name occupiers have given to the bird sanctuary they occupy, which is about 30 miles southeast of Burns.

“The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is grateful for the quick actions from law enforcement,” said Megan Nagel, spokeswoman for the agency, which manages the refuge. “We will continue to work with law enforcement to recover vehicles bought and paid for by the American people to care for their national wildlife refuge.”

………

In 1995, Medenbach was convicted on federal charges for illegally camping on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington state. He was ordered held in custody because of evidence that Medenbach poses a risk to the safety of other persons or the community because [he] acknowledges intimidation practices, references ‘Ruby Ridge’ and ‘Waco, Texas,’ and clearly would not follow conditions of release restraining his presence at the scene of the alleged unlawful activity,” according to a federal appellate court ruling upholding his conviction.

The appellate ruling said there was “evidence that Medenbach had attempted to protect his forest campsite with fifty to a hundred pounds of the explosive ammonium sulfate, a pellet gun, and what appeared to be a hand grenade with trip wires. The government also proffered evidence that Medenbach had warned Forest Service officers of potential armed resistance to the federal government’s continued control of the forest lands in question.”

Despite his prior record, the judge released him on bail, though he was, “Ordered not to occupy federal property as condition of his release from federal charges now pending in Medford.”

Yeah, like that order is going to be obeyed.

Well, it’s a start.

H/t Daily Kos.

Headline of the Day

No Comments

Ted Cruz Accidentally Proves Donald Trump Is Human

I’m not a fan of Donald Trump, but his response to Cruz’ “New York values” jibe is a thing of beauty:

First, he corrected Cruz—Manhattan produces conservatives, he said, “including William F. Buckley and others” (and what kind of Democrat would name-drop William F. Buckley?), and then he seemed to stand up taller.

“He insulted a lot of people,” Trump said of Cruz. “New York is a great place. It’s got great people, it’s got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York.”

The crowd applauded and, as if to admit defeat, so did Cruz.

“Everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

“You had two 110-story buildings come crashing down, thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there,” Trump said.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, and the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death and even the smell of death—nobody understood it, and it was with us for months. The smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched, and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers, and I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

Cruz just looked at the camera with a nervous smile. Suddenly his suit seemed too tight.

I really think that we saw some honest emotion from the Donald here.

Even if it was a preplanned comeback, he just force fed Ted Cruz his own shit.

It was brilliant.

Bought and Paid for by the Vampire Squid

No Comments
It appears that during his first campaign for the Texas Senate, Ted Cruz got a million dollar loan from Goldman Sachs, and then in contravention of campaign finance laws, did not report it to the Federal Election Commission:


As Ted Cruz tells it, the story of how he financed his upstart campaign for the United States Senate four years ago is an endearing example of loyalty and shared sacrifice between a married couple.

“Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign,” he says he told his wife, Heidi, who readily agreed.

But the couple’s decision to pump more than $1 million into Mr. Cruz’s successful Tea Party-darling Senate bid in Texas was made easier by a large loan from Goldman Sachs, where Mrs. Cruz works. That loan was not disclosed in campaign finance reports.

Those reports show that in the critical weeks before the May 2012 Republican primary, Mr. Cruz — currently a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination — put “personal funds” totaling $960,000 into his Senate campaign. Two months later, shortly before a scheduled runoff election, he added more, bringing the total to $1.2 million — “which is all we had saved,” as Mr. Cruz described it in an interview with The New York Times several years ago.

A review of personal financial disclosures that Mr. Cruz filed later with the Senate does not find a liquidation of assets that would have accounted for all the money he spent on his campaign. What it does show, however, is that in the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low-interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before being paid down later that year. There is no explanation of their purpose.

Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders. There is no evidence that the Cruzes got a break on their loans.

He should take a hit for this, particularly because much of his personal story is about how he risked it all to run for the US Senate, but it won’t make a difference in the primaries, because the Republican Party base has drunk too much Flint municipal tap water.

Oh Snap!

No Comments

Hillary Clinton has been going after Bernie Sanders’ single payer healthcare proposals, claiming that single payer would take their healthcare away, and she’s rolled out Chelsea on the campaign trail.

It is ludicrous and dishonest, and it has led to a huge spike in contributions to the Sanders campaign:

Hillary Clinton’s new barrage against Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential primary opponent she has all but ignored through most of her campaign, is having an effect — though probably not the one she intended.

Sanders’s underdog campaign said it is seeing a surge of contributions as a direct result of the new attention it is getting from the Democratic front-runner, with money coming in at a clip nearly four times the average daily rate reported in the last quarter of 2015.

………

The former secretary of state and her team have stepped up their criticism of Sanders on a variety of fronts in recent days as polls have begun to show him edging even with her in Iowa — and, for the first time, looking competitive in a national poll. But the Clinton strategy may be backfiring in some ways.

………

“As of now, we are at about $1.4 million raised since yesterday when the panic attacks by the Clinton campaign began,” Briggs said. “We’ve gotten 47,000 contributions. We’re projecting 60,000 donations. Even for our people-powered campaign, this is pretty darn impressive.”

………

Even her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, got into the act, bashing Sanders during her first campaign appearance on behalf of her mother this election season.

“Senator Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare and dismantle private insurance,” Chelsea Clinton said at a stop in New Hampshire. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era — before we had the Affordable Care Act — that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

Ludicrous, and dishonest, and more significantly, desperate.

Hillary’s strength this cycle was her aura of inevitability, and that appears to be vanishing like the mist

As I recall, inevitability was her perceived strength in 2008 as well.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?

No Comments

Normally, I pay little attention to the various awards, but I heard that Mad Max Fury Road was nominated for a best picture Oscar.

This not something I would expect from the Academy:

George Miller and Margaret Sixel were asleep in their Sydney home when, just before 1am, a torrent of text messages, emails and phone calls from well wishers lit up their phones.

The husband-and-wife filmmakers quickly discovered their film, Mad Max: Fury Road, had made Australian film history with 10 Oscar nominations.

Not only did Miller score directing and, as producer, best picture nods, but Sixel was nominated for her editing and 11 other Aussies crew members were among the nominees for their work on the post-apocalyptic action-adventure.

I gotta watch this now.

F$#@ Me, I Agree with Peter King

No Comments

You know Peter King, the Congressman from New York.

This is the guy who raised funds for the terrorist organization the IRA, called for the assassination of Snowden, Greenwals, and Poitras, and pretty much accused every Muslim in America of being a part of a 5th column.

But credit where credit is due, he just told Ted Cruz to go back under the rock he crawled out of:

New York Republican Rep. Peter King has some harsh advice for Ted Cruz: “Go back under a rock.”

“Memo to Ted Cruz: New York Values are the heroes of 9/11; the cops who fight terror; and the people you ask for campaign donations. Go back under a rock,” King said in a statement mailed to POLITICO Thursday regarding Cruz’s comments about “New York values.”

The Texas senator, who had been avoiding going after Donald Trump for much of the campaign cycle, finally hit back after Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility for the White House. Cruz suggested in an interview with “The Howie Carr Show” Tuesday that Trump “may shift in his new rallies to playing ‘New York, New York,’ because you know Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values.”

I really hate agreeing with him, but he’s right, though incomplete.

When Ted Cruz talks about “New York values”, he’s really accusing Donald Trump of being in the thrall of the secret Jewish cabal that runs the world.

It’s how Cruz is trying to appeal to the Talibaptist wing of the Republican party.

I miss the Republican Party of Richard Milhous Nixon.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Geraldo Rivera

1 Comment

On Fox News, he has stated thatthe reaction to Barack Obama’s presidency shows that the nation was not ready for a black man in the White House.

He further goes on to state that he believes that Obama shirked his duty to address these issues, which I also agree with:

Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera was Tuesday’s “One Lucky Guy” on the network’s “Outnumbered” midday hit and shared his unpopular opinion with the conservative female co-hosts ahead of President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address Tuesday evening.

………

 But Rivera argued that despite substantive policy disagreements, the real divisions made clear during the Obama presidency fall along racial lines:

When you strip away all of the gun rights and the, you know, terror all rest of it, what you have essentially is a nation divided between white people and everybody else in broad strokes. When you look at the groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats right now, the Asians, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, the Muslims, you see a nation where people have largely chosen up sides and if you strip away everything else, what you are going to find is a racial divide. It’s biggest, unaddressed issue.

………

 Rivera finally relented and charged that Obama had failed to confront race relations head-on as the first African-American president. “If I was this president,” the Fox News personality offered, “I would have said ‘I’m going to deal with this race. I’m going to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. The Civil War is over. The North/South divide — I would have made that the central focus of my president were I him.”

“He failed utterly,” Rivera concluded, and by “benign neglect made it worse.”

As I have noted many times before, Barack Obama’s public personae is all about avoiding to appear the “Angry Black Man”, and as such he has studiously attempted to avoid facing racial issues.

Still, agreeing with Geraldo?

I feel so dirty.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Chuck Hagel

No Comments

He was generally clueless as a Senator and as Secretary of Defense, but his statement that the US focus on deposing Bashar al Assad is crippling us diplomatically and militarily is spot on:

The US has backed itself into a corner by insisting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be removed from power before the Obama administration will work with Russia and Iran to fight the Islamic State group, former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said.

“We have allowed ourselves to get caught and paralyzed on our Syrian policy by the statement that ‘Assad must go,’” Hagel said at a Wednesday event hosted by the Atlantic Council.

Russia and Iran have said they are willing to join with the US in fighting ISIS, but not at the expense of Assad, a longtime regional ally for both nations. The US continues to insist that no serious discussions on working with those two nations can occur until Assad is removed.

………

The focus on Assad, Hagel indicated, has clouded the situation.

“Assad was never our enemy. A brutal dictator? Yes. There are a lot of brutal dictators out there. I’m not for brutal dictators. But we should have learned from Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi, you can take a brutal dictator out but you better understand what you may get in return,” Hagel said. “Let’s get to this platform of stability.”

Our policy is incoherent.

Arguably it has been as incoherent under Obama as it was under Bush, notwithstanding their claims of having, “Don’t do stupid sh%$,” as a central tenet.

This is not a problem of any particular Presidential administration.  It is a problem with the commonly accepted foreign policy beliefs, a sort of Council of Foreign Relations consensus, that is dysfunctional and delusional.