Category: History

One Less Reason to Go to Cleveland

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I no longer have the slightest desire to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

It used to be that the Grammys came up with the most irresponsible assessment of popular music, overlooking important artists during their best years (and sometimes apologizing with belated lifetime achievement awards). Recently, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has surpassed the Grammys dubious track record, and this year brings the group to what may be a new low. The Hall’s new slate involves turning down several worthy nominees for the sake of inducting Steve Miller, Deep Purple, and Chicago. If these are the bands most suitable for honoring, the hall should just fold itself up and go home.

I want to have nothing to do with any organization that has the Steve Miller Band as a member.

I See that You Have Jumped C. Megalodon*

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C. Megalodon. One Big Shark

While there are some very valid reasons for students to make protests, but the protesters of Lebanon Valley College have lost their f%$#ing minds:

Lebanon Valley College administrators were presented a “list of demands” Friday, after a heated week of equality-driven student demonstrations and calls to action that gripped the predominantly white institution.

 It was against this backdrop that a standing room-only crowd gathered inside a lecture hall in the school’s Miller Chapel Friday, and organizers delivered demands meant to bring about greater diversity in faculty and student ranks, as well as a greater sense of inclusiveness on campus.

 The demands — announced at the end of Friday’s meeting and promptly handed to the university’s president, Dr. Lewis Thayne — include calls for a more diverse curriculum; removing or altering the name “Lynch” in the college’s “Lynch Memorial Hall” due to the word’s racial connotations; more sensitivity training for staff; diversity workshops; regular surveys of the racial climate on campus; facilities recognizing varied gender identities and disabilities; and clearer protocols for officials in responding to allegations and acts of bias.

As an FYI, the hall is not named after the practice of extrajudicial murders by hanging or burning, it’s named after a former president of Lebanon Valley College, Clyde A. Lynch, who among other things, kept the college going during the depression.

I guess we should fire the current Attorney General of the United States, a black woman named Loretta Lynch, because these delicate little flowers feel vaguely uncomfortable.

You know, there are statues to actual racists, and defenders of racism, all over the couintry, see Lee, Robert E. and Forest, Nathan B., and you are going after this?

Here is a counter proposal:  Get your head out of your collective asses.

*The largest shark, and likely largest predator fish ever. It died out some 1.5 million years ago. The Genus is still in dispute, between either Carcharodon (Great White) or Carcharocles (broad toothed Mako). But in either case, you are jumping C. Megalodon, you have jumped the biggest shark ever.

First, Kudos to the New York Daily News

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Their cover is magnificent:

The lede, “God isn’t fixing this: As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes:

Prayers aren’t working.

 White House hopefuls on the Democratic side of the aisle called for stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting in San Bernardino that left at least 14 dead.

 But after yet another mass shooting in America, GOP presidential contenders were conspicuously silent on the issue of gun control.

 Instead, the Republicans were preaching about prayer.

 ………

 Democrats — even those not running for office — slammed the GOP presidential candidates for offering prayers instead of action.

 “Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn) posted on Twitter. “Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing — again.”

 Some critics accused Murphy of religious insensitivity, but he didn’t waver in a statement later Wednesday.

 “My heart aches for the people of San Bernardino,” he said. “I cannot express the profound sadness I feel each time a new community grieves and endures the same pain that brought Newtown to its knees three years ago this month.”

In addition to the Daily News‘ magnificent statement on Republicans resort to religious hypocrisy as an alternative to action.

I would like to add three bits of information to provide some perspective.

First, and second, there were two other mass shootings that day, in Savannah, GA and Houston, TX.

The third bit is a some historical perspective: Twice as many people were murdered in San Bernardino as were killed in the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

And still, the Republican response to a call for action is, “I’m too busy praying.”

F%$# that.

More IP Idiocy

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The Swiss charity the Anne Frank Fonds will be atempting to add her father as co-author to the book in an attempt to expand the copyright term, which has the effect of preventing public posting of the work which otherwise would have happened on 1 January:

When Otto Frank first published his daughter’s red-checked diary and notebooks, he wrote a prologue assuring readers that the book mostly contained her words, written while hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex of a factory in Amsterdam.

But now the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright to “The Diary of Anne Frank” is alerting publishers that her father is not only the editor but also legally the co-author of the celebrated book.

The move has a practical effect: It extends the copyright from Jan. 1, when it is set to expire in most of Europe, to the end of 2050. Copyrights in Europe generally end 70 years after an author’s death. Anne Frank died 70 years ago at Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp, and Otto Frank died in 1980. Extending the copyright would block others from being able to publish the book without paying royalties or receiving permission.

This sort of sh%$ is getting out of hand.

IP protections have become more and excessive, and they have nothing to do with the intended purpose of IP protections, which is to encourage innovation and creativity.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Bill O’Reilly

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Over the weekend, George Will and Bill O’Reilley got into it over whether or not Reagan was show signs of Alzheimers in his first term, and whether his shooting by John Hinkley might have accelerated the progress of the condition.

Bill O’Reilly is right about this, and so does Charlie Pierce. (I just threw up in my mouth)

It’s a medical fact that trauma can accelerate the progress of dementia, and there are numerous accounts of of the Gipper checking out in his first term, his first debate performance against Walter Mondale being one.

​One of our top commenters suggested that my account Monday morning of the dust-up between George Effing Will and Bill O’Reilly was incomplete because I failed to mention the precise casus belli. The Top Commenter is absolutely correct, and my omission is all the more odd because it involves a personal tin drum that I’ve been pounding since I wrote my Alzheimer’s book in 2000. It also involves one of the most serious of all history’s Unspoken Truths. What set Will’s chilly blood aflame apparently was the fact that, in his book, Killing Reagan, O’Reilly pretty baldly states that Ronald Reagan was a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient for most of his presidency, and that having been shot was trauma enough to start what AD researchers call a “cascade” of symptoms that accelerated the progress of his disease.

(As it happens, O’Reilly’s speculation is on solid scientific footing. Alzheimer’s researchers and caregivers have known for years that physical trauma can worsen the effects of the disease. Certainly, the recent  research into the connection between head trauma and dementia backs this up, and I remember a fascinating Japanese study at an Alzheimer’s research conference that I attended in Osaka that studied the effect of a massive earthquake in that country on Alzheimer’s patients in the affected regions. In almost all cases, the disease accelerated.)

I am not willing to go as far as O’Reilly apparently does, but I have believed—and written—for years that Reagan was a symptomatic AD patient at least throughout his entire second term. My initial concern in this regard arose in 1984, during Reagan’s first debate with Walter Mondale, when he plainly did not know where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. At the time, my father was beginning a slow slide into Alzheimer’s himself. I knew what I was looking at on TV—and so, I learned later, did Dr. Dennis Selkoe, a prominent AD researcher in Boston. Since then, accounts of Reagan’s curiously vacant episodes have popped up all over various historical accounts, and personal memoirs, of the Reagan presidency. In the latter case, everybody from Ollie North to Lawrence Walsh mentions at least one moment in which the person who was Ronald Reagan disappeared right before their eyes. In an interview in 1999 for this magazine, John McCain told me of his experience at a White House dinner, when Reagan lapsed into some middle space of his own.

Seriously, while I have no problem with disagreeing with George will, the fact that this involves me agreeing with Bill O’Reilly makes me feel a bit sick.

Henry A. Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism

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I just came across an OP/ED from 1944 by then Vice President Henry Wallace on the nature of Fascism, and what the face of American Fascism might look light:

  1. On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:
    1. What is a fascist?
    2. How many fascists have we?
    3. How dangerous are they?

  2. A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

  3. The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

    4. ………

  4. If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

  5. American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

    6. ………

  6. The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

  7. Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

Wallace is generally consigned to the footnotes of history, except perhaps when it is noted that some of his staff were likely Soviet intelligence assets.

He does seem to have been rather prescient though.

H/t naked capitalism

Finally, Someone Goes There

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Rather it is “The Donald” who maked the observation that that has this far eluded the rest of the Presidential candidates, that 9/11 happened under Bush’s watch:

Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump implied that George W. Bush bore some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in a Friday interview with Bloomberg.

“He was President,” Trump said. “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”

Trump asserted that unlike the George W. Bush, he would be “a leader” who could command the United States during national crises.

“I think I’m much more competent than all of them,” Trump said, referring to George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.

“Say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Trump told Bloomberg.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush took to Twitter to criticize his GOP presidential rival for the remarks, writing that his brother “kept us safe.”

911, the Anthrax attacks, anti-abortion terrorists, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, DC Sniper, LAX attack on El Al, Jewish Federation of Seattle, Jewish Federation of Freemont, and that’s just limiting myself to attacks in the United States.

“Kept us safe,” my ass.

Son of the PT6

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Click for slide show


The PT6 Bass Ackwards Air Flow


No connection between the gas generator and power turbine


Note the adjacent engines


The reverse flow prevents one engine failure from taking out another

In my pre-engineering school days, I always wondered why the Pratt & Whitney PT6 turboprop had its intake in the rear, and its exhaust in the front.

I also could not understand why this arrangement, which has the airflow reversing course was so popular. as it seemed to add a lot of complexity, as well as losses into the system.

After the my time in engineering school, I actually understood that this.

The reverse airflow scheme allowed for the use of a free turbine, where the meant that the power turbine is not attached to the compressor, etc.

It makes for a simpler layout. You don’t need any concentric shafts, and starting the engine requires much less “oomph”.

Well, it now looks like a very similar arrangement for advanced airliner configurations. (Yes, this is a few months old. I came across this while doing digital housecleaning)

Not bad for an engine design that is over 50 years old:

As designers of future airliners look increasingly beyond traditional tube-and-wing configurations to meet the high efficiency goals of the 2030s and beyond, new territory is being carved out in the critical area of airframe-engine integration.

 Unusual features ranging from recessed inlets to pylon-mounted upper-surface engines have become familiar sights in wind tunnels, but even seasoned researchers are surprised by a new engine architecture proposed by Pratt & Whitney. The concept not only physically separates the propulsor from the gas generator, but also mounts the core backward and at an angle. This novel arrangement is aimed at overcoming installation challenges in new configurations like the D8 double-bubble airliner concept under study by NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

 Aimed at NASA’s N+3 performance goals for an airliner that could enter service around 2035, the D8 is designed to burn at least 60% less fuel than the current generation of narrowbody airliners. The secret behind this leap in performance is a configuration that clusters the engines together atop the wide tail of a flattened fuselage. Besides providing a clean high-aspect-ratio wing for low drag, this enables the engines to reenergize to slow-moving boundary layer flow over the fuselage, increasing efficiency.

 But such a configuration creates several issues. The engines lie so close to the upper surface of the fuselage their fans must be sufficiently robust to cope with flow distortion from ingesting the boundary layer. Fan size will also be large because the engines envisioned for the D8 will have a bypass ratio of at least 20:1, and be targeted at extremely low noise levels of -52 EPNdb below current Stage 4 limits. Scale tests conducted at NASA of a distortion-tolerant fan developed by United Technologies Research Center show the boundary-layer challenge has been met, but other key questions remain.

 Because engine cores are becoming more efficient and operating at higher pressure ratios, they are also shrinking and becoming disproportionately small compared to the propulsor section as bypass ratios increase. This leads to blade heights of 0.5 in. or less at the exit of the high-pressure compressor. At this small scale, tip clearances not only become harder to maintain, but there is little space within the core through which to run the driveshaft connecting the fan to the low-pressure turbine. Additionally, because the core is proportionately longer and thinner, designers face the issue of backbone bending which further affects clearance control.

 “So that’s when we had the breakthrough idea of turning the core backward,” says Pratt & Whitney Technology and Environment Vice President Alan Epstein. Air enters the engine through the fan as normal, but instead of continuing directly into the compressor, it is ducted around the side and back of the core to enter from the opposite direction. In an arrangement similar to Pratt & Whitney Canada’s PT6, in which air flows forward through the engine, hot gas will be discharged forward through a power (low-pressure) turbine connected to the fan via a gear system. The turbine, gearbox and fan will be connected via “a really short shaft, and because the core is not connected to the power side, you can take the core off easily for maintenance,” Epstein explains.

 The concept also overcomes another challenge. The idea of nested engines, as in the D8, does not meet current FAA certification criteria under the “1 in 20” rule. This states that there should be only a 1 in 20 chance of debris from an uncontained engine failure causing a second engine to fail. However, because the core and propulsor are no longer mechanically linked, “the designers have come up with an extraordinarily clever arrangement in which the cores are angled relative to each other,” Epstein says.

 “We cant them at around 50 deg. and the exit from the core turns via a 50-deg. duct to go into the power turbine. So now they are more than 90 deg. off from each other. It’s simple geometry,” he says. “It enables you to have a large bypass ratio, and you are not turning much of the airflow if you are turning just the core flow, so pressure losses are low.”

I love it when advanced technology goes all retro.

I Wish that You Had Said This in 2009, Motherf%$#er

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In a Greenspanesque attempt to rehabilitate his reputation, Ben Bernanke is now saying that we should have jailed more (really any) bankers following the financial meltdown:

………

With publication of his memoir, The Courage to Act, on Tuesday by W.W. Norton & Co., Bernanke has some thoughts about what went right and what went wrong. For one thing, he says that more corporate executives should have gone to jail for their misdeeds. The Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies focused on indicting or threatening to indict financial firms, he notes, “but it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything what went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm.”

If he had said this in 2009, maybe some of the big name banksters would have seen the inside of a prison cell, and maybe the industry, and the Congress, would have made meaningful reforms to prevent a repeat of the orgy of fraud and greed that led to the last meltdown.

Too late, dude.

What Happens When Your Intelligence Service Thinks Itself a Breed Apart………

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It turns out that the CIA’s unwillingness to play nicely with other US Agencies left a trail of bread crumbs that the KGB used to identify covert operatives:

As the Cold War drew to a close with the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, those at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, finally hoped to resolve many long-standing puzzles.

The most important of which was how officers in the field under diplomatic and deep cover stationed across the globe were readily identified by the KGB. As a consequence, covert operations had to be aborted as local agents were pinpointed and CIA personnel compromised or, indeed, had their lives thrown into jeopardy.

………How could these disasters have happened with such regularity if the agency had not been penetrated by Soviet moles?

The problem with this line of thought was that it did not so much overestimate CIA security as underestimate the brainpower of their Russian counterparts.

A name soon emerged from the KGB undergrowth: that of Yuri Totrov, a veritable legend who soon became known with grim humor as the shadow director of personnel at CIA.

The Cold War over, a senior and very experienced officer was dispatched to Japan to seek out Totrov and offer him a vast sum of money for his “memoirs.” Totrov’s retort was typically blunt. “Have you not read what is on my file at Langley? It says, ‘Not to be Pitched.’”

………

So how, exactly, did Totrov reconstitute CIA personnel listings without access to the files themselves or those who put them together?

………

What Totrov came up with were 26 unchanging indicators as a model for identifying U.S. intelligence officers overseas. Other indicators of a more trivial nature could be detected in the field by a vigilant foreign counterintelligence operative but not uniformly so: the fact that CIA officers replacing one another tended to take on the same post within the embassy hierarchy, drive the same make of vehicle, rent the same apartment and so on. Why? Because the personnel office in Langley shuffled and dealt overseas postings with as little effort as required.

The invariable indicators took further research, however, based on U.S. government practices long established as a result of the ambivalence with which the State Department treated its cousins in intelligence.

Thus one productive line of inquiry quickly yielded evidence: the differences in the way agency officers undercover as diplomats were treated from genuine foreign service officers (FSOs). The pay scale at entry was much higher for a CIA officer; after three to four years abroad a genuine FSO could return home, whereas an agency employee could not; real FSOs had to be recruited between the ages of 21 and 31, whereas this did not apply to an agency officer; only real FSOs had to attend the Institute of Foreign Service for three months before entering the service; naturalized Americans could not become FSOs for at least nine years but they could become agency employees; when agency officers returned home, they did not normally appear in State Department listings; should they appear they were classified as research and planning, research and intelligence, consular or chancery for security affairs; unlike FSOs, agency officers could change their place of work for no apparent reason; their published biographies contained obvious gaps; agency officers could be relocated within the country to which they were posted, FSOs were not; agency officers usually had more than one working foreign language; their cover was usually as a “political” or “consular” official (often vice-consul); internal embassy reorganizations usually left agency personnel untouched, whether their rank, their office space or their telephones; their offices were located in restricted zones within the embassy; they would appear on the streets during the working day using public telephone boxes; they would arrange meetings for the evening, out of town, usually around 7.30 p.m. or 8.00 p.m.; and whereas FSOs had to observe strict rules about attending dinner, agency officers could come and go as they pleased.

It is very interesting to see that many of the CIA’s failures during the cold war appear not to be the result of treason, or of individual incompetence.

They are the result of a toxic and dysfunctional organizational culture, and the events since then, torture, spying on congressional staffers investigating them, etc. has indicated that if anything, the problem has gotten worse.

Oops!

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Someone is getting fired

On the Chicago TV station WGN, they did a story on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, and their likely soon to be fired graphics guy called up the badge that the Nazis forced Jews to wear in concentration camps:

The news director of a Chicago TV station apologized after a staff member mistakenly chose a symbol of Nazi Germany to illustrate a story about Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.

“Regrettably, we failed to recognize that the artwork we chose to accompany the story contained an offensive symbol,” the director, Jennifer Lyons, said in an apology on Wednesday. “This was an unfortunate mistake. Ignorance is not an excuse.”

The apology came the morning after Tom Negovan, an anchor with WGN-TV Chicago, read a 20-second description of the holiday. Over his shoulder, viewers could see a graphic of a Star of David badge emblazoned with the German word “Jude,” or Jew, on striped material of the kind used in Nazi prisoner uniforms.

Un-dirtyword-believable.

Get a Brain, Morans

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Some inbred white bigots who don’t know how to use a spell checker have decided that enough is enough, so they took to flying pro confederate banners over various monuments:

Community activists and historic preservationists got help from an unusual source to draw attention to their protest Saturday of statues of Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue during the first day of training for the UCI Road World Championships.

 A small plane carrying a banner with a Confederate battle flag and the phrase “Confederate heros matter” circled above Monument Avenue, where the protest had gathered at the statue of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

 The Virginia Flaggers, who took credit for the banner on their Facebook page, said the misspelling of “heroes” was “Pilot error. We sent the right spelling. We think the point was still made.”

 “This is the first time he’s ever messed up,” Grayson Jennings, a spokesman for the Virginia Flaggers, said of the pilot in an interview. “I don’t think half the people even knew he messed up.”

(emphasis mine)

Trust me, people know.

This is going to end up a major meme, kind of like this pic:

The stupid, it burns us.

Remember Last Night, When I Used the Phrase, “Bush Crime Family?”

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Well today, we learn of the orgy of political payback and cronyism in the next generation of the Bush family, we have George P. Bush turning the office of Texas Land Commissioner into an opportunity for his buddies to profit while ignoring state law that requires public notice of open positions:

Less than a year after being elected to lead the oldest state agency in Texas, Land Commissioner George P. Bush has dramatically remade the General Land Office by ousting most of its longtime leaders and replacing many with people with ties to his campaign and family.

Eleven of the top 18 officials on the agency’s organizational chart a year ago have been fired or forced out or have quit, and more could leave soon in an overhaul that Bush has described as a “reboot.”

In their place, Bush, a former Fort Worth resident, has given top jobs to two of his law school classmates, two relatives of members of two Bush presidential administrations and at least three others with ties to the family or other political leaders.

In all, Bush has hired at least 29 people who worked on his campaign or have political connections, according to a review of thousands of pages of personnel records. The agency did not advertise any of the openings publicly.

………

State law requires all agencies considering external candidates for a job to post the opening with the Texas Workforce Commission. Newly elected statewide officials often ignore the requirement for some core positions. Attorney General Ken Paxton and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller have been publicly criticized for doing it a few times this year.

But Bush’s hiring differs because it is so far-reaching, with hires ranging from a temporary transition director to five campaign veterans hired permanently for the new position of “regional outreach coordinator.”

Bush made many so-called appointment hires before even taking office but has continued them well into this year.

The General Land Office, established in 1837, oversees all state public lands and also leases mineral rights to oil and gas companies, generating billions of dollars for schools. Bush, the grandson and nephew of presidents and the son of current presidential candidate Jeb Bush, was elected in November.

………

“Any agency, board, bureau, commission, committee, council, court, department, institution, or office in the executive or judicial branch of state government that has an employment opening for which persons from outside the agency will be considered shall list the opening with the Texas Workforce Commission,” the law says.

Commission spokeswoman Lisa Givens said she did not know who was responsible for enforcing that law. The commission does not check to ensure that jobs are posted, she said.

The attorney general’s office referred questions about the law to the workforce agency.

Personnel records show that Bush directed at least 40 external hires from November to July but listed only four of those with the Workforce Commission.

The average salary for those four was about $65,000. The average salary for the 36 unposted jobs was $90,000.

Ten jobs went to campaign aides, including temporary transition director Trey Newton, who made $17,500 per month, and the five regional outreach coordinators, who are making $55,000 a year. Newton, the campaign engineer Bush once called “our Karl Rove,” left in January. He did not return a call seeking comment.

Another campaign strategist, Ash Wright, and his wife, Patty Wright, both got unposted jobs in December with annual salaries of $120,000 and $48,000, respectively. Both have left, with Ash Wright returning to Bush’s campaign.

The campaign’s spokesman, J.R. Hernandez, got a more permanent job as Bush’s chief of staff, with an annual salary of $110,000. Hernandez, the son of George W. Bush adviser Juan Hernandez and a 2008 college graduate, started the job exactly a week after the election. The application in his personnel file is not signed or dated, and there is no offer letter, making it hard to determine a timeline of employment.

The Bush family has been engaging in this sort of entitled privilege since my dad was in elementary school.

H/t Atrios.

This is a Night for Weird History

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I just discovered that Prescott Bush, George H.W.’s dad, and George W’s and Jeb’s grand dad, was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood:

Can you name any historical figures who helped Planned Parenthood kick off its first fundraising campaign back in 1947? If you first guessed some progressive liberal icon, you’d be wrong.

The die-hard public pro-life bona fides of George W. Bush and his brother and current GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush are undeniable. Jeb has repeatedly said that he would defund Planned Parenthood if he’s elected, and it’s been a promise he’s been making long before the Center for Medical Progress launched their viral undercover video campaign attacking the non-profit, claiming the organization was “selling baby parts.”

But a little known fact — first resurfacing in a 2005 article in SFGate — reveals that the grandfather and father of the last two Bush presidents, Prescott Bush, was the treasurer of the organization in its early years.

But even then, supporting a woman’s right to control over her own reproductive system was politically dangerous.

The political repercussions hit hard. Prescott Bush was knocked out of an expected victory for a Senate seat in Connecticut in 1950 after syndicated columnist Drew Pearson declared that it “has been made known” that Bush was a leader in the “Birth Control Society” (The old name of Planned Parenthood had been the Birth Control Federation of America.) Recall that contraceptives were controversial in those days — and remember that a constitutional right to use them wasn’t established until 1965, when the Supreme Court affirmed an implied right to privacy in Griswold vs. Connecticut.

Prescott Bush won a Senate seat two years later, and his son George and daughter-in-law Barbara continued to support Planned Parenthood even after George’s election to Congress from Texas. In fact, he was such an advocate for family planning that some House colleagues gave him the nickname “Rubbers.”

If I believed that there was an ounce of integrity in the Bush Crime Family, my head would hurt, but Poppy Bush made it patently clear that this was not the case when he turn his back on both his father’s legacy and own his lifelong support of reproductive rights to become Vice-President.  (And let us not forget that Prescott Bush’s investment firm was shut down for acting as an agent of Nazi Germany in 1942.)

I don’t think that this family would walk a straight line if their lives depended on it.

In Addition to Scoring a Remarkable Electoral Triumph, It Appears That Jeremy Corbyn Has the Power of Prophecy

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In 1993, he predicted that the Maastricht Treaty, which converted the European Community into the European Union, would lead to an institution run by and for bankers, to the detriment of the most vulnerable of society:

Jeremy Corbyn predicted that the formation Euro would lead to the imposition of a “bankers’ Europe” on its members, according to parliamentary records.

Ahead of the 1993 adoption of the EU’s founding Maastricht Treaty Mr Corbyn warned that the creation of the currency’s European Central Bank would undermine European countries’ ability to set their own policy.

“The whole basis of the Maastricht treaty is the establishment of a European Central Bank, which is staffed by bankers, independent of national governments and national economic policies, and whose sole policy is the maintenance of price stability,” he said.

“That will undermine any social objective that any Labour Government in the United Kingdom—or any other Government—would wish to carry out.”

(emphasis mine)

Credit where credit is due.  Corbyn nailed this.

This Is a Seriously Cool Person Who Knows Where Their Towel Is*

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An anonymous donor has agreed to foot the bill for the removal of four Confederate-related statues, the city announced in a letter this week to the New Orleans City Council.

It will cost an estimated $144,000 to remove and transport the statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis, as well as a monument to the Battle of Liberty Place, according to the letter. The donor agreed to pay for the entire operation.

“These four statues stand in direct contradiction to the ideal of freedom enshrined in our Constitution and their presence in our city was meant to perpetuate a false history that literally puts the Confederacy on a pedestal,” Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin said in the Sept. 14 letter. “True remembrance is required, not blind reverence.”

 I would very much like to shake the hand of whoever is behind this.

*It is a reference from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Go read the book.