About a 10 point margin, and there was a generational divide, with older voters being far more in favor of the union.
Part of this is probably driven by pension concerns, which is likely not generational, but part of of this is generational, which indicates that we might be doing this all over again in 20 years.
And so, I am going to be camping in New Jersey my family.
We are driving to the Lakewood, NJ Renfaire.
Hey, don’t judge me! We are each allowed to celebrate this holiday in our own special way.
Needless to say, it will be light posting until sometime Sunday.
The fact that the right wing Christofascists are freaking out because the new Miss America worked for Planned Parenthood is positively delicious:
If you thought her less than mind-blowing performance of “Happy” had Miss America fans in a snit, wait till they find out where Kira Kazantsev used to work.
The newly crowned beauty queen has opponents of reproductive choice up in arms this week over revelations that her résumé includes a stint with Planned Parenthood. LifeNews’ Steven Ertelt fumed Monday, “The woman representing the nation as the new Miss America interned for the very organization that has killed millions of Americans in abortions.” Other conservative sites have also quickly found themselves up in arms over Kazantsev’s past – Truth Revolt gasps that “Our new Miss America once interned for Planned Parenthood and she displays it proudly for all the world to see,” while Live Action News notes that “The new Miss America is an abortion supporter who worked for Planned Parenthood” and lists “her job duties at the company that snuffs out of the lives of young baby girls.” Right on cue, the outrage has now spilled over onto social media, with various patriotic Americans declaring sentiments like, “She should’ve been disqualified for Miss America.” Because the only choice for Miss America is an anti-choice Miss America.
In her LinkedIn profile, Kazantsev mentions a three-month internship with a Hempstead branch of the organization last year. She says she “Assisted delivery of programs in local public schools, teaching children about mutual respect & self-esteem” and “Conducted research on Planned Parenthood Education.” Sounds like baby killing to me! More damningly still, she’s also interned for Kirsten Gillibrand, who notoriously holds the public position that “a woman’s medical decisions should always be made between her, her family, and her doctor – not by politicians.” And as an intern for Solidarity Strategies, Kazantsev worked on political campaigns including that of pro-choice congresswoman Annie Kuster.
Awww ……… The poor little Talibaptist’s feelings are hurt.
You like a hot cup of f%$# you with that?
Japan announced Thursday that it will restart its scientific whaling program next year in response to a new resolution adopted by the International Whaling Commission placing stricter regulations on scientific whaling.
This new nonbinding resolution—proposed by New Zealand—adopts the criteria used by the UN’s International Court of Justice earlier this year when it ruled that Japan’s current whaling program was not scientific. (See “Japan Halts Whaling Program in Response to International Court Ruling.”)
The new guidelines establish criteria for the International Whaling Commission’s (IWC) scientific committee to consider when it reviews whaling plans submitted by member countries. The criteria include consideration of whether a program needs to lethally sample whales to obtain data, how many whales a scientific program will take, and whether the number to be taken is justified.
At this week’s IWC meeting, Japan’s representatives stated the country’s intention to revamp its scientific program based on “international law and scientific evidence.” They planned to submit their proposed program to the IWC’s scientific committee this fall, with the aim of conducting scientific whaling next year.
The Japanese have years worth of whale meat stockpiled, because Japanese tastes have changed, but they insist on whaling, because ……… Well, just because.
And people wonder why the hell that everyone else in Asia has never forgiven them for their war crimes in WWII.
I’m thinking that the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society should start mounting guns and torpedo tubes on their ships.
After spending nearly a month threatening people who refused to swear to God to reinlist, the USAF has reversed itself:
The Air Force has withdrawn a requirement that all airmen who take the oath of enlistment and officer appointment conclude with “so help me God,” the service announced Wednesday.
The Air Force previously allowed airmen to omit those words, but removed that option in October based on its interpretation of 10 U.S.C. 502, 5 U.S.C. 3331 and Title 32, which contain the oaths of office. The Navy, Army and Marine Corps allow their service members to omit “so help me God,” spokesmen for all three services told Air Force Times last week.
The Air Force sought a legal review of the rule by the Defense Department’s General Counsel on Sept. 9, five days after the American Humanist Association announced it was representing an unnamed atheist airman, stationed at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, who was denied reenlistment for refusing to say, or sign a form, stating “so help me God.”
Monica Miller, an attorney with the AHA’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center said the association would give the Air Force until Sept. 19 to reverse course.
On Tuesday, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said the service was “making the appropriate adjustments to ensure our Airmen’s rights are protected.”“We take any instance in which Airmen report concerns regarding religious freedom seriously,” James said in the release announcing the change, which is effective immediately.
Translation: We never thought that anyone would notice our attempt to go all Taliban on the Air Force, and we are very sorry that we got caught.
Whichever General Officer signed off on this abomination should be fired, as in no pension.
The court ruled unanimously that Democrat Chad Taylor’s name has to be dropped from the ballot as he requested:
The Kansas Supreme Court on Thursday sided with the Democratic candidate for Senate in his attempt to drop off the November ballot, creating a tougher contest for the Republican incumbent, Pat Roberts, in a race with a strong independent candidate.
But the Kansas secretary of state, Kris Kobach, a Republican who had fought the withdrawal, said afterward that Democrats would have to pick another candidate, adding to the uncertainty about whose names would appear on the ballot.
Noticed the last bit?
Where Korbach is now insisting that the Democrats will have to nominate a replacement, something he never brought up during arguments?
I understand the electoral dynamics.
The current polls show that Pat Roberts wins in a 3-way race, and gets demolished in a 2-way race, but this is not an excuse for the secretary of state to be so blatantly corrupt.
Here is hoping that Kris Korbach ends up like disgraced former Kansas AG Phill Kline, who was disbarred.
With both the House and Senate approving funds to train “moderates” in Syria:
President Obama’s plan to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels exposed a deep rift Thursday among Democrats over waging war, with a large bloc of liberals staunchly opposed to the modest mission, fearing another long-term engagement in Iraq.
While the Senate sent the measure Thursday to the White House for Obama’s signature, votes this week demonstrated the tenuous support he has from his own party in carrying out the mission to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State forces. Several of the party’s rising stars, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, rejected the proposal, while in the House, Obama’s proposal won approval only because a vast majority of Republicans backed him.
Many rank-and-file Democrats who did support Obama said they expect a broad debate in November and December, after the midterm elections, so that legislation can be approved to place broad constraints on the U.S. military’s ability to carry out the operation and set a specific deadline for the mission’s end.
After the votes, Obama thanked Congress “for the speed and seriousness with which they approached this issue” and noted that “a majority of Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate” had voted to train and equip the rebels.
Note that 10 Democrats, and 12 Republicans voted against, and most of them did because they do not think that arming the rebels will work.
The history of the Syrian civil wars that you can characterize the participants as follows:
The union of “moderate” and “functional military force” is a null set.
The New York Times editorial board feels the same way, calling this strategy a “risky bet“.
But we will train them, because Obama has strenuously insisted that there will be no boots on the ground.
Of course, LBJ said something very similar on October 21, 1964, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”
The historical echos are not reassuring.
I would bet dollars to Navy beans that we will have troops on the ground and in combat in Iraq by the end of the Obama administration.
Eric holder is now saying that the DoJ will finally start prosecuting bankers:
The Justice Department has launched criminal fraud investigations of individuals at Wall Street firms, with the hopes of filing formal charges in the coming months, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday.
“We are making good progress in these cases, which involve conduct that has undermined the integrity of our markets,” Holder said at New York University Law School.
The nation’s top prosecutor did not go into detail about the inquiries, but people familiar with the cases say the probes involve the possible manipulation of the $5.3 trillion global foreign-exchange markets.
At least seven banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Barclays, disclosed in regulatory filings last year that “various government authorities” had requested information about their trading activities. Bank employees have turned over information to U.S. authorities about the trading scheme, according to people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigations.
If any person is criminally prosecuted, it will be the little fish, and any settlement will be small enough to be dismissed as a cost of doing business, and any admission will be minor enough that no bank will lose their dollar clearing privileges.
This is theater.
Lucy will pull away the football, again.
If Eric “Place” Holder or Barack Obama were interested in prosecuting law breakers on Wall Street, they would already have done it.
There is no interest in this administration in prosecuting the general criminality that is the US financial industry.
H/t CT at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
It has become patently transparent that even inside the beltway know-nothing Dana Milbank feels compelled to call this out:
What happened in Ferguson, Mo., last month was a tragedy. What’s on course to happen there next month will be a farce.
October is when a grand jury is expected to decide whether to indict the white police officer, Darren Wilson, who killed an unarmed black teenager by firing at least six bullets into him. It’s a good bet the grand jurors won’t charge him, because all signs indicate that the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, doesn’t want them to.
The latest evidence that the fix is in came this week from The Post’s Kimberly Kindy and Carol Leonnig, who discovered that McCulloch’s office has declined so far to recommend any charges to the grand jury. Instead, McCulloch’s prosecutors handling the case are taking the highly unusual course of dumping all evidence on the jurors and leaving them to make sense of it.
McCulloch’s office claims that this is a way to give more authority to the grand jurors, but it looks more like a way to avoid charging Wilson at all — and to use the grand jury as cover for the outrage that will ensue. It is often said that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich if a prosecutor asks it to. But the opposite is also true. A grand jury is less likely to deliver an indictment — even a much deserved one — if a prosecutor doesn’t ask for it.
McCulloch has done this before:
……… During his tenure, there have been at least a dozen fatal shootings by police in his jurisdiction (the roughly 90 municipalities in the county other than St. Louis itself), and probably many more than that, but McCulloch’s office has not prosecuted a single police shooting in all those years. At least four times he presented evidence to a grand jury but — wouldn’t you know it? — didn’t get an indictment.
This is rather unsurprising.
DA’s don’t want to prosecute cops in the first place, they have to work with them, and McCulloch has a particularly bad record in terms of prosecuting police misconduct .
The fix is in.
I don’t know who got pictures having sex with a billie goat, but the Kansas secretary of state has capitulated on the withdrawal of the Democratic candidate for Senate, and will send out absentee ballots without a Dem in that race:
In an apparent reversal, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office is instructing election officials in the state to send out overseas military ballots without Democratic Senate nominee Chad Taylor or any other Democratic Senate candidate listed.
Kobach spokeswoman Samantha Poetter confirmed to TPM that the ballots would be sent out by Saturday, the deadline under state and federal law.
“Our ballots are going out without Chad Taylor (or any Democratic candidate) for U.S. Senate,” Poetter said. “They’ve been ordered to send them out as soon as possible.”
TPM obtained a copy of the official order sent to local election officials.
“The list does NOT contain the name of a Democratic nominee for United States Senate,” the order said. “There are three candidates, Randall Batson, Libertarian, Greg Orman, independent, Pat Roberts, Republican.”
They will be going out with some sort of disclaimer about the courts possibly ordering a new ballot, but this I really don’t see this particularly likely.
Here is hoping that this entire mishugas will serve to turn off the voters, Korbach is up for reelection, and the race is close.
Understand that I come from a long line of failed prognosticators.
I don’t know who is going to win. I don’t have a clue.
However, I believe that it will not be as close as the recent polls.
I expect at least a 5% margin for the winning side.
It appears that for this election cycle a lot of Republican are keeping their wallets closed.
My guess is that the euphoria following the Citizens United decision has dissipated, and they have realized that, following the very expensive debacle of 2012, many of the Republican operatives are more about separating wealthy donors from their money than they are about getting Republicans elected:
Two things may be keeping Republican strategists up at night: money and the Democratic ground game. Perhaps the biggest untold story of this election is how so many Republican and conservative donors, at least those whose last name isn’t Koch, have kept their checkbooks relatively closed. In many cases, GOP candidates are not enjoying nearly the same financial largesse that existed in 2012, and in some races, they are well behind Democrats. While Republican candidates, national party committees, and super PACs are hardly starving, their Senate and House campaign committees have not been able to keep pace in fundraising with their Democratic counterparts. Their super PACs do not have nearly the funding that they had in 2012 (even allowing for the absence of a presidential race this year). And, in a number of key races, Democratic candidates, party committees, and their allied groups have been on the air significantly more than Republicans. GOP strategists have privately said that if it were not for spending by organizations affiliated with the Koch brothers, they might well be in really bad shape.
Many Republican and conservative donors appear to be somewhat demoralized after 2012. They feel that they were misled about the GOP’s chances in both the presidential and senatorial races that year, and/or their money was not well spent. In short, they are giving less if at all, and it has put Republican candidates in a bind in a number of places.
Republican donors realize that they are having smoke blown up on their ass, and they have yet to determine a way to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Who knows, maybe Karl Rove will need to find honest work.
Have you read the story about the hedge fund that criticized the Olive Garden restaurants for how they boiled their pasta and complained that they served too many bread sticks?
Read further, past the cute suggestions about food prep, and it becomes clear that the Starboard Value hedge fund was interested in srtip mining the real casual dining chain and leaving nothing behind but its bleached bones:
Last week, you may have noticed a kooky story about a hedge fund named Starboard Value chastising Olive Garden for handing out too many unlimited breadsticks at a time, and failing to salt its pasta water. The snarky 294-page presentation highlighted everything wrong with Olive Garden, along with recommendations to fix it. And there was much laughter.
………
Except Starboard Value does not spend its time crusading for better mid-market Italian meals for no reason. It owns a bunch of shares in Olive Garden’s parent company, Darden Restaurants, and wants to take control of the company’s board. The scheme it’s concocted to increase its share price has little to do with breadsticks and pasta water. It really wants to steal Olive Garden’s real estate, and make a billion dollars in the process.
Starboard Value doesn’t try to hide this. Right in the executive summary, it talks up Darden’s real estate holdings the way a starving man sizes up a steak. Darden, owner of LongHorn Steakhouse, Capital Grille and other chains, “has the largest real estate portfolio in the casual dining industry, owning both the land and buildings on nearly 600 stores and the buildings on another 670,” Starboard Value writes. “We believe that a real estate separation could create approximately $1 billion in shareholder value.” Here’s the actual slide:
This is a more common technique than you might realize. Private equity firms often buy businesses with lots of real estate assets, like nursing homes, restaurants or retail outlets. They then split the company in two: one owns all the real estate, and one manages the rest of the business. The operating company now has to lease back the real estate from the property company, paying rent on what it used to own. The private equity firm, meanwhile, can take profits from the lease payments or by selling the entire real estate portfolio, making back its initial investment. The more expensive the leases, the more the private equity firm makes.
………
A sale-leaseback arrangement may make sense for a company with lots of real estate holdings, if it needs quick cash to make investments and cannot access a loan. Think of it like a company making a reverse mortgage. But Eileen Appelbaum of the Center for Economics and Policy Research, co-author of a recent book called “Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street,” explains the key difference. “If the company does this themselves, they get to keep the money from the sale,” Appelbaum told Salon. “And they get to spend it to make improvements. In this case and the private equity case, the shareholders see the value.” Basically, Starboard Value wants to strip Darden’s assets, the Wall Street equivalent of pocketing the silverware.
Starboard Value has a history of asset-stripping. Earlier this year, it forced Wausau Paper to change CEOs and consolidate mills, moving out of the century-old headquarters that gave the company its name. Starboard Value demanded the company use some of those savings from laying off workers to pay Starboard a dividend.
In May, Starboard Value forced Darden to sell another of its chains, Red Lobster, to private equity fund Golden Gate Capital for $2.1 billion. The same day, Golden Gate sold the real estate of 500 Red Lobster locations to a real estate investment trust (REIT) for $1.5 billion. Darden used proceeds of the sale to give dividend payments to shareholders like Starboard Value. And Golden Gate made back most of the investment in a blink with the real estate sale. But Red Lobster now has to pay exorbitant rents on its restaurants. “The sale-leaseback will cut their net earnings roughly in half,” Eileen Appelbaum estimated.
If Olive Garden has to cut its earnings in half to pay rent on properties it previously owned, you can forget about upgrading the menu or making any of the other improvements Starboard Value suggests. The restaurants will barely be able to keep afloat. But Olive Garden’s continued existence is of minimal importance to Starboard Value. “These are shareholders, they don’t really care what happens once they make their money,” said Eileen Appelbaum.
Note here that the ratf%$S who want to dismantle the chain, and sell it for parts, much like an chop shop for stolen cars.
This is what tools like Timothy Geithner call financial innovations. It’s not. It’s a pernicious form of parasitism.
As the old saying goes, “The best way to rob a bank is to own one.”
While a modern economy need a way to get capital from people who have it to people who need it, this has nothing to do with that.
I’m not sure what the whole solution is, but a Tobin Tax on financial transactions would be a good start.
Locking up some of these crooks would be nice too.
After thinking about it, and analyzing my feelings on this matter, I support the secession referendum.
Basically, I think that the current political situation in the UK, where the Neoliberal consensus and the banksters in the City of London rule will continue to control the political discussion in England, and hence in the UK as a whole.
What this means is that, when in power, the Tories will continue to engage their efforts to do things like gradually privatize the social contract in Britain, and when the “new” (Blairite) Labour is will simply accept the new status quo, and so the policies will ratchet to a Dickensian society, particularly with the cross-party support of things like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which largely makes privatization irreversible.
The path England has taken is pretty clearly toward continued deindustrialization and further finanacialization, at least until the Vampire Squid finishes sucking what remains out their society, and moves on.
The Tories are pushing inexorably in that direction, and Labor never moves the needle back, they just slow the deterioration for a few years.
In the process, it is clear that the National Health Service (NHS) will move to something very much like the American model for healthcare.
I would consider inflicting our system of healthcare on anyone else to be tantamount to a crime against humanity, and crimes against humanity are a justification for secession.
It appears that Mr. Norris, aficionado of martial arts, coarse acting, and promulgating historical myths, accuses President Jimmy Carter of appeasing the Ayatollahs in Iran.
Charlie pierce is having none of it:
You know what appeasing the ayatollahs looks like?
Promising them if they hold the hostages, they’ll get a better deal from another president. Unfreezing the assets almost as soon as you take the oath. Secretly selling them advanced weaponry because you had use for the profits of this illegal arms sale to fund an illegal war.
That’s what appeasement looks like.
And that wasn’t Carter.
That was the next guy.
That is an epic take-down.
Needless to say, I am adding Mr. Pierce to the serene order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.
In the Ukraine, a member of the parliament was accosted by an angry crowd and thrown in the dumpster.
Now I do understand that the intersection of “Ukrainian Politician,” and “Perfectly Good White Boy” is a null set, but how often does one get to quote the cult favorite teen movie Better off Dead?
I will note, however, that what the crowd did is wrong.
They should have pantsed him.
In this case, it is patents, where the Supreme Court ruling in Alice v. CLS Bank has created a new legal landscape, which has seen regular reversals of “do it on a computer” patents:
The Supreme Court’s June ruling on the patentability of software — its first in 33 years — raised as many questions as it answered. One specific software patent went down in flames in the case of Alice v. CLS Bank, but the abstract reasoning of the decision didn’t provide much clarity on which other patents might be in danger.
Now a series of decisions from lower courts is starting to bring the ruling’s practical consequences into focus. And the results have been ugly for fans of software patents. By my count there have been 11 court rulings on the patentability of software since the Supreme Court’s decision — including six that were decided this month. Every single one of them has led to the patent being invalidated.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that all software patents are in danger — these are mostly patents that are particularly vulnerable to challenge under the new Alice precedent. But it does mean that the pendulum of patent law is now clearly swinging in an anti-patent direction. Every time a patent gets invalidated, it strengthens the bargaining position of every defendant facing a lawsuit from a patent troll.
Until the supreme court slapped down the patent court, it had been routing for people to get patents for existing processes by adding, “We are doing it through the internet,” as the magic words.
Not any more.
A typical patent being overturned was, “A patent on the concept of using a computer to help users plan meals while achieving dieting goals.”
Because using a notebook to diet is so completely unlike using a computer, I guess.
In any case, it’s nice to see the patent trolls on the wrong side of this trend.
Obama is sending 3000 soldiers to Africa to deal with the Ebola outbreak in Africa.
Am I the only one who thinks that it might be a better idea to send doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and construction workers?
The Obama administration is ramping up its response to west Africa’s Ebola crisis, preparing to assign 3,000 US military personnel to the afflicted region to supply medical and logistical support to overwhelmed local healthcare systems and to boost the number of beds needed to isolate and treat victims of the epidemic.
Seriously? We need to send in the military to deal with an epidemic?
I am coming to believe that no one in Washington believes that any agency but the Pentagon can do anything, ever!
Jon Stewart cut Lindsey Graham a new one for his constant, and constantly hysterical, fear mongering over, basically everything.
He describes Graham’s, “Panic for 13 years,” and said that, “The poor man lives his entire life trapped in ‘The Blair Witch Project,” and that he’s, “Seen chihuahuas in handbags who are less fretful and shaking.”
Of course, craven abject fear has been a dominant theme of movement conservatism for decades, as I observed when involuntarily forced to watch Fox News.
Republican politics thrive on fear and panic, so it’s not surprising that they advocate for it, but I also think that they are really that scared of well, everything.
Guess what, our pet rebels in Syria have made a non-aggression pact with ISIS:
Syrian rebels and jihadists from the Islamic State have agreed a non-aggression pact for the first time in a suburb of the capital Damascus, a monitoring group said on Friday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the ceasefire deal was agreed between IS and moderate and Islamist rebels in Hajar al-Aswad, south of the capital.
Under the deal, “the two parties will respect a truce until a final solution is found and they promise not to attack each other because they consider the principal enemy to be the Nussayri regime.”
Nussayri is a pejorative term for the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam to which President Bashar al-Assad belongs.
Obama’s war just lost one of its cornerstones.
There is no credible moderate rebel force in Syria, and Obama’s truly Kafkaesque suggestion that Syrians firing at planes bombing them would be considered a hostile act, he has, “Vowed to retaliate against President Bashar al-Assad if Syrian forces shot at American planes,” won’t solve that.
ISIS beheaded the journalists and that aid worker because they want to entangle the United States in yet another war in the hope of bleeding us dry, and Obama, and the “bomb everything” caucus, have proved remarkably accommodating to their plans.
