He comes back from vacation, and he does a deep dive into the mythical voter impersonation problem:
This is some serious whup ass that he unleashes on the new Jim Crow.
Category: Good Writing
This is the Best Troll in the History of the Internet
Wading into the sh%$ storm that is the successor of the death of legal hack Anton Scalia, Charlie Pierce has a suggestion for Barack Obama, Anita Hill:
I am all-in for total chaos on this whole Supreme Court thing.
If the Republicans are going to invent a new constitutional tradition on the fly, I say the Republic is best served by making them choke on it. Already, Steve M. is pointing out the shitstorm that would break if the president were to nominate Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mountaineer Mike Tomasky has an interesting suggestion regarding a brilliant young jurist who also would put the GOP deeper in the ha’penny place as regards Hispanic voters. Good. All good. But let me suggest a name as well.
Anita Hill.
I am, as I said, all in for chaos, and this would be the all-timer.
This is quite literally the finest troll I have ever seen.
Mr. Pierce, you are a god among men, and I am not worthy.
The obvious point here is that this brings up Clarence Thomas’ sexual harassment of numerous women that he worked with:
Professor Hill is a widely respected scholar of the law. She would be a fine addition to any court in the land. Also, she would make the Republicans eat their own faces, one at a time. Imagine the hearings. The Republicans would have no choice but to bring up the whole Clarence Thomas matter again. Although perhaps, this time, the other women who allegedly were harassed by Mr. Justice Thomas would not be intimidated out of testifying, and the Democratic senators would not be intimidated out of calling them. (Sorry, Joe Biden. That was a bad day for you.) This would be Your Show Of Shows.
This would be so epic.
Obama needs to nominate her.
Tweet of the Day
Carly Fiorina is dropping out of the presidential race to pursue kidnapping Dalmations to use fur for coat.— Michael Blackman (@ParaComedian09) February 10, 2016
Quote of the Day
Clinton: “I know I have had a blessed life, but I also know what it’s like to stumble and fall. And so many people across America know that feeling” [WaPo]. No. Wrong. Just wrong. People don’t feel they’ve “stumbled and fallen” (note lack of agency). They feel they’ve been tripped, or had their legs kicked out from under them, or screwed over. That’s not the same thing.
Tweet of the Day
When the exact same problems crop up in separate campaigns, with different staff, at what point do the principals say, “Hey, maybe it’s US?”— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) February 8, 2016
Harsh, but Mr. Axelrod has a point, and in just 140 characters.
Quote of the Day
To understand the Saudi royal family, you don’t go to the Kennedy School of Government, you read Shakespeare!
—Bruce Riedel, former CIA national intelligence officer for the Middle East
It’s in the 2nd ‘Graph of the article linked above.
It describes the rather convoluted and dysfunctional succession politics in the House of Saud, and it’s a good read.
It appears that the current king suffers from dementia, and his two most likely successors are engaged in a death match to assume the throne.
When the House of Saud falls, and it is when, not if, it will start with a dynastic dispute, and honestly, I think that this might be the time.
Saudi family politics have always been dicey, but with the King being pretty much a figurehead, and his successors being young enough that either one would have a reign of decades, this looks to end up a complete hairball.
Quote of the Day
On one side, this elite is presumed to be a bunch of economic superheroes, able to deliver universal prosperity by summoning the magic of the marketplace. On the other side, they’re depicted as incredibly sensitive flowers who wilt in the face of adversity — raise their taxes a bit, subject them to a few regulations, or for that matter hurt their feelings in a speech or two, and they’ll stop creating jobs and go sulk in their tents, or more likely their mansions.
If So, I Approve this Camel’s Nose………
Matt Bruenig has a very interesting perspective on Bernie Sanders’ single payer program, specifically, he believes that it provide the fiscal basis for a massive expansion of social welfare programs:
Currently, total health expenditures in the US make up around 17% of GDP. The average for the OECD is 9.3%. Around half of our healthcare spending is public while the other half is private. Thus, very roughly speaking, to shift all of the current healthcare expenditures onto the public health insurance, you’d need initially to raise the tax level by 8.5 points of GDP (half of 17%).
If you believe, as I do, that switching to a single-payer healthcare system would allow us to better curb healthcare inflation and thus to control costs much more effectively than we currently do, then that means that the 17% of GDP we currently pay towards healthcare could be pushed down over time. Let’s assume that, by keeping healthcare inflation in check through single-payer, we could eventually bring health expenditures down to around 10% of GDP (slightly above the OECD average).
Under this scenario, we would initially raise the tax level by 8.5 points in order to cover the half of health expenditures that are currently paid out privately. Then, over time, we would cut healthcare expenditures by 7 points (from 17% to 10% of GDP). Assuming we didn’t lower the tax level over the expenditure-slimming period, we would be able to use those 7 points of savings towards other welfare programs (child care, child allowance, paid leave, etc.). And there is a lot of stuff you can get with 7 points of GDP.
He’s an optimist.
My guess is that these savings, will go to bombs and bullets, because ……… America!!!!
We have still not accepted the wisdom of Eisenhower’s Chance for Peace speech, while we bankrupt ourselves through military procurement and military adventurism.
Headline of the Day
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.
Ricky Gervais Is a National Treasure, I’m Just Not Sure Which Country
Withess this exchange with Mel Gibson at the Golden Globe Awards:
Ricky Gervais keeps pushing. Joking about what a loon Mel Gibson is hardly rare in Hollywood circles, but Gervais decided to do it just as he was introducing him.
“A few years ago I made a joke about Mel Gibson getting a bit drunk and saying a few unsavory things,” Gervais said. “We’ve all done it. I wasn’t judging him, but now I find myself in the awkward position to introduce him again. Listen I’m sure its embarrassing for both of us and I blame NBC for this terrible situation, Mel blames … well we know who Mel blames.” That’s right, Gervais was clearly calling out Gibson’s history of anti-semitism.
“Listen, I still feel bad about it,” Gervais continued. “Mel’s forgotten all about it. That’s what drinking does. I want to say something nice about Mel before he comes out: I’d rather have a drink with him in his hotel tonight than Bill Cosby.”
When Gibson came out, it wasn’t clear if the two were going to embrace or start throwing punches.
“I love seeing Ricky every three years because it reminds me to get a colonoscopy,” Gibson offered.
One reason I don’t watch awards shows is because 95% of the time they are boring as sh%$ to me.
The other 5% of the time, I see evidence of how they are wittier than I will ever be, and it’s depressing.
Quote of the Day
In their own distinct ways, Snyder and Emanuel are perfect examples of what happens when politicians base their entire public careers on the principle that the people who elect them can be trusted to do only that. Once they elect you, their job is to sit down, shut up, and take what comes. The difference is that Snyder seems a bit more likable than Rahm Emanuel. So is a gaboon viper. That doesn’t matter a damn any more.
—Charlie Pierce on Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
White Privilege Performance Art
That is Josh Marshall’s description of the terrorists in Oregon, and I think that it is brilliant.
And Yet More Bullsh%$ in the Criminal Justice Arena
It appears that, notwithstanding claims of the “Ferguson Effect”, and the reality of police slowdowns in places like New York City, there is no statistically significant increase in the murder rate:
As I’ve mentioned in a number of posts over the years, I believe the Late 20th Century Crime Wave was one of the two or three most politically and culturally consequential events in the US in the second half of the twenty century. It is hard to overstate the impact of this very real rise in the rates of all violent crimes but most especially murder. And one of the greatest mysteries about it is that that for all the studies, theories and attempts to control it, we simply do not have a clear understanding of why it began in the early 1960s or why it ended over the course of the 1990s. I’ve noted that, somewhat against my better judgment, I’ve become increasingly open to the seemingly crude and monocausal theory that lead poisoning played a key role in driving the crime wave. Still, I think we still basically do not know. Yet, over the last year or so we’ve seen a rising chorus of commentary and political posturing which claims that increasing civil rights activism (i.e. Black Lives Matter or the so-called “Ferguson Effect”) and more permissive or cowed policing is at least starting to push crime rates back up toward where they were in the bad old days.
………
When I started looking at this I was curious to find out myself because I have heard a lot of reports of the murder rate specifically going up. That’s obviously bad news in itself. But it also confounds my assumption that the rise and fall of the murder rate over the second half of the 20th century had far less to do with policy interventions of any sort than we’d like to think. So if a mild ramping back of aggressive policing can shift the scales in the other direction, that changes the whole story significantly. If crime is on the way back up, I’d still be suspicious that it is tied to differences in policing. My assumption would be that the underlying trends, about which we understand little, have shifted. In any case, what I found was quite different from what I’ve been hearing and reading.
From the beginning of 2015 there has been what can only be called a relentless desire to find a spike in the crime and murder rates. So for instance, back on March 3rd, The New York Daily News ran “Murders up 20% in 2015 in year-to-year comparison, NYPD says“. Needless to say, when you’re only going on 2 out of 12 months the statistics can be very volatile. Then there was a less hyperbolic story that ran in The New York Times, “Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities, which noted a 9% increase in the murder rate for New York City. Then on September 21st, USA Today published ‘Bloody weekend in NYC puts rising murder rate in spotlight‘ which noted that “A bloody weekend in New York that saw eight shooting deaths could signal that out-of-control gun violence may return to the city” and then went on to say …
The number of homicides is up slightly over last year, and if the trend continues New York City may see its first uptick in the homicide rate after 25 years of decline.
Now, this last claim is worth zeroing in on. I’ve gone back and recompiled the number of homicides in New York City going back to the peak year of 1990. And whatever gloss, interpretation or prediction about the future one may make from these numbers, this point about a “first uptick” is simply false. Since 1990, even as the murder rate has gone down consistently, the number has actually gone up on a year over year basis 6 times: 1999 (6%), 2000 (.3%), 2003 (1.7%), 2006 (10.6%), 2008 (5.9%) and 2010 (13.8%).
As late as one week ago, Newsday predicted that the city murder rate would end up at just over 5%, with 350 homicides for the year. But as of Christmas Day, the number stood at 339 homicides for 2015, which would amount to an increase over 1.8% over 2014.
………
The Times itself touched on this point yesterday with a very different article “Anxiety Aside, New York Sees Drop in Crime,” which notes that while New Yorkers seemed to feel less safe, over all crime actually fell by 2%.………
The simple reality is that we won’t really know the story until the 2015 FBI statistics are released. And even then we will only know about a single year, which means very little. For the moment, what seems clear is that there is a public mood of panic, menace and fear. And at least in New York City, that seems to be the case even though it’s totally belied by the actual crime statistics.
What a surprise. The reports of skyrocketing crime appear to be at best statistical noise, and more likely a juxtaposition of bias in reporting, and efforts by law enforcement to push the meme.
Bernie Sanders Nails It
Writing in the New York Times, Bernie Sanders talks about the elephant in the room, that the Federal Reserve has been completely captured by the financial industry:
Wall Street is still out of control. Seven years ago, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department bailed out the largest financial institutions in this country because they were considered too big to fail. But almost every one is bigger today than it was before the bailout. If any were to fail again, taxpayers could be on the hook for another bailout, perhaps a larger one this time.
To rein in Wall Street, we should begin by reforming the Federal Reserve, which oversees financial institutions and which uses monetary policy to maintain price stability and full employment. Unfortunately, an institution that was created to serve all Americans has been hijacked by the very bankers it regulates.
The recent decision by the Fed to raise interest rates is the latest example of the rigged economic system. Big bankers and their supporters in Congress have been telling us for years that runaway inflation is just around the corner. They have been dead wrong each time. Raising interest rates now is a disaster for small business owners who need loans to hire more workers and Americans who need more jobs and higher wages. As a rule, the Fed should not raise interest rates until unemployment is lower than 4 percent. Raising rates must be done only as a last resort — not to fight phantom inflation.
What went wrong at the Fed? The chief executives of some of the largest banks in America are allowed to serve on its boards. During the Wall Street crisis of 2007, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive and chairman of JPMorgan Chase, served on the New York Fed’s board of directors while his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed. Next year, four of the 12 presidents at the regional Federal Reserve Banks will be former executives from one firm: Goldman Sachs.
Just read it.
Quote of the Day
I’m sure there are a lot of “good cops.” The people I knew from high school who became local cops were bullies and assholes in high school. Maybe they became good cops, too. None of us were exactly perfect in high school. That they were assholes then doesn’t mean they stayed assholes. Still, the high school asshole to cop career trajectory was telling.
To the degree that I recall what lines of work that my high school classmates went into, I concur on this observation.
Not sure how to fix the fact that police work tends to attract bullies, though.
Quote of the Day
Here’s what U.S. state and city pension funds are getting this year for the hundreds of millions of dollars in fees they’re forking over to hedge funds: almost nothing.
Private equity and hedge funds have earned lots of money capitalizing on the panic of underfunded public pensions seeking higher returns to deal with chronic under-funding.
There have been no higher returns, but Wall Street has gotten its vig, some of which, of course, gets recycled back to the campaign funds of politicians who might otherwise provide oversight of the pension funds.
As Yves Smith is wont to say, It’s a, “Self licking ice cream cone.”
Don’t Get J.K Rowling Angry. You Wouldn’t Like Her When She’s Angry.
It appears that the author of the Harry Potter series has taken umbrage at everyone comparing Voldemort to Donald Trump:
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has rejected the comparison of US presidential candidate Donald Trump to the villain in her seven-part book series, saying on Twitter that “Voldemort was nowhere near as bad”.
How horrible. Voldemort was nowhere near as bad. https://t.co/hFO0XmOpPH— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 8, 2015
The author was tweeting in response to a BBC report on the number of tweets comparing the Republican politician with the Dark Lord.
Trump made headlines on Tuesday when he called for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders to Muslims, in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. Trump has targeted Muslims in previous speeches, calling for surveillance of mosques across America and claiming Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a claim he refused to retract despite fact-checkers debunking it.
We live in Bizarro World.
That is Going to Leave a Mark………
Tervor Noah had a very special guest on The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been obstructing a bill to pay for the health coverage for the first responders at the Twin Towers because he wants to hold it hostage to a change in oil export policy.
Jon Stewart came out of retirement, and appeared as a guest.
He also went down to Congress to harangue what were clearly uncomfortable Senators and Representatives.
Watch the whole thing, particularly the round table toward the end.
It sucks to be Mitch McConnell on even the best of days, this makes it suck even more.
Because Comedy Central vids autoplay on some platforms, I have put the video after the break
Why Is This News? Isn’t There One in Every Walmart?
It isn’t often that you read a story about a, “homeless couple found living in Walmart attic with hot plate, meth lab, and 42″ LED TV,” but when you think about it, it is a juxtaposition that seems to fit that retail establishment.
Of course, the link is a parody site, Now8News, but it is the sort of story that should be true.
In a word this story is dripping with truthiness, even if it isn’t true:
Being homeless has to be very difficult, especially in the colder times of the year. But not for this Tennessee couple who had been “living in the lap of luxury” above a Tennessee Walmart store. The ‘homeless’ man, 48-year-old Wilbert Thomas, admitted to police that he and his girlfriend 54-year-old Ingrid Malone, had been living above the store for over two years. What they did to the attic, baffled police and store employees.
It’s a brilliant bit of parody, because it sounds so true.