She just unloaded on Ted Cruz, and it was a thing of beauty.
Watch it.
I am now adding Ms. Bee to the most sacred and hermetic order of People I Do Not Want to Piss Off.
I think that this is the first Canadian on the list.
Well, it appears that our lady of the unmanageable hair is spooked, because she has changed DNC policies to protect her own sorry political career:
Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s reputation as DNC chair has plummeted to the point where she is being challenged in the Democratic Primary for her congressional seat for the first time ever. Her poor leadership of the DNC contributed to significant losses in the 2014 midterm elections for Democrats, and the way she has handled the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries has irked both Bernie Sanders’ and Hillary Clinton’s supporters, as well as many of her colleagues. Just a few weeks ago, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, one of five DNC vice chairs, resigned from her position to support Mr. Sanders.
To help save her public image, Ms. Wasserman Schultz has authored desperate Op-Eds for various news outlets in attempts to come off as relatable. “Having a perspective of a working mother has helped in the role as a legislator,” the Florida congresswoman wrote (poorly) for US News. Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s explanation of how being a mother in government poses challenges fails to mention her privileged financial status. Most working mothers do not have the salary of a U.S. congresswoman plus a husband’s banker income to pay for things like childcare.
And now, to help rig her own election in the Democratic primaries, Ms. Wasserman Schultz is blocking any challenger to a Democratic incumbent from accessing the voter file database—a vital campaign tool for any election.
“Last week, I called the Florida Democratic Party to request access to the voter file database and software known as VAN that is routinely used by Democratic candidates across the country,” wrote Tim Canova, Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s primary challenger, in an article on Medium. “I was told that our campaign would be denied access to this database because I am running against an incumbent Democrat, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I was also told that any Democratic candidate running against an incumbent Democrat would be denied access — even a lifelong progressive challenging an out-of-touch incumbent.”
Actually, it’s especially for an out of touch incumbent hack.
BTW, the DNC is not supposed to choose sides in a contested primary.
Seriously. She ……… Needs ……… To ……… Be ……… Fired, both from the DNC, and from Congress.
She shouldn’t be elected dog catcher.
I am beginning to think that Hillary Clinton has another bleeder in her brain:
Hillary Clinton on Monday defended the intervention in Libya that she championed as secretary of state, telling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that the United States “didn’t lose a single person.“
Didn’t lose a single person?
Seriously?
She then followed up with, “Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
“Libya was a different kind of calculation. And we didn’t lose a single person. We didn’t have a problem in supporting our European and Arab allies in working with NATO,” the former secretary of state said during an MSNBC town hall on Monday night.
Clinton may have been referring strictly to the U.S.-backed overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, which indeed saw no loss of American lives and cost just around $1 billion. But her comments ignore the 2012 attacks at the U.S. mission and CIA outpost in Benghazi, which killed four people including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens.
Ousting Qaddafi was worth it, Clinton said.
“Now, is Libya perfect? It isn’t. But did they have two elections that were free and fair where they voted for moderates. Yes, they did. So you know, changing from a dictator who has hollowed out your country to something resembling a functioning state and even hopefully more of a democratic one doesn’t happen overnight,” she said. “And we’ve got to continue to support the Libyan people, to give them a chance, because otherwise you see what has happened in Syria, with the consequences of millions of people flooding out of Syria, with more than 250,000 people killed, with terrorist groups like ISIS taking up almost — huge blocks of territory, as big as some of the states in that area.”
Isis is in Libya now.
It wasn’t before we destroyed the country.
They had a sophisticated irrigation system that allowed them to feed themselves.
We blew it up.
Free healthcare for everyone. Gone.
Free education. Gone
A right to decent shelter. Gone.
We also have a genocide of black Libyans in the north of the country.
We destroyed the country.
And we also helped Saudi Arabia and Turkey create the Syrian civil war under her watch.
And that coup that we fomented in the Ukraine? It’s going swimmingly.
Arguably, the most important issue for the President is war and peace, it is the one that they have the most control over, and as I’ve said before, Hillary is nearly as bellicose as Dick Cheney.
In an article outlining he rather fraught relationship between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, Politico drops this fascinating anecdote:
It’s an illustration of the extent to which the two political outsiders, once allies, have parted ways. Nader has known Sanders for decades and the Vermont socialist once referred to him as “a good friend” during a committee hearing, but he said Sanders hasn’t returned his phone calls for the past 15 years. During his time in Washington, as Sanders has fostered congenial relations with Clinton, said Nader, “He’s totally cut people like me out.”
Gee, what did Ralph Nader do about 15 years ago?
What has he never offered the most perfunctory expression of regret for?
It appears that Sanders hasn’t forgiven Ralph Nader for his exercise in narcissistic nihilism that was his 2000 campaign, which was calculated to provide maximize the benefit to George W. Bush, because, as Alfred Pennyworth says, “Some men just want to see the world burn.”
Good on Sanders for recognizing what Nader has become.
Q: What is better than Trump winning?
A: These people losing pic.twitter.com/imdNxh0rzA— Coach Finstock (@Q1776) March 9, 2016
Heh.
Among the audience members at the Democratic debate in Flint, was the Mayor of Warren.
He’s a Sanders supporter, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had him threatened by event security because he was a Bernie supporter:
After expressing vocal support for Bernie Sanders during Sunday night’s debate, the independent mayor of Michigan’s third largest city says security warned him that he would be booted from Sunday’s Democratic debate here if he did not quiet down.
Jim Fouts, the three-term independent mayor of Warren, told BuzzFeed News Monday that he attended both the Republican and Democratic debates in Michigan over the past week. The audience at the GOP debate at the Fox Theatre in Detroit Thursday was loud. But the mood in the Whiting Auditorium on the campus of the Flint Cultural Center, where Sanders and Hillary Clinton met in one of their sharpest-elbowed debates to date, was very different, he said.
“The Democratic debate is totally controlled by Hillarys [sic] good friend DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz,” Fouts wrote on Facebook Monday. “No commentary is allowed by the audience. Particularly if you are cheering Bernie Sanders. Persons who do not adhere to Hillarys [sic] rules are threatened with expulsion.”
Fouts has not officially endorsed Sanders, but he is a big fan. He told BuzzFeed News that if he does vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary, “it’s going to be for Bernie Sanders.”
At the debate, Fouts sat in the center section of the hall, directly behind Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair. Next to him was his longtime executive assistant. Fouts told BuzzFeed News that at multiple times during the beginning of the debate, he turned to his executive assistant, praised Sanders’ performance, and said the Flint debate — added to the calendar after the initial set were announced — proved that more debates were a good idea.
………
During an early commercial break, security confronted Fouts, roused him from his seat, and pulled him and his assistant off to the side of the hall. He was told there had been “complaints” about his behavior and that security had been ordered to throw him out.
“The sergeant at arms said, ‘The people that run this want you ejected, they don’t want you here,’” Fouts recalled. He said his assistant asked if the complainer was Wasserman Schultz.
“The security guy said, ‘don’t say I said it,” Fouts said.
Fouts was outraged by the evening. He called for Wasserman Schultz to step down in the Monday interview. After the conversation with security, Fouts said he returned to his seat and took extra care to be quiet.
Petty, paranoid, and stupid is no way to go through life, Ms. Wasserman-Schultz.
The police chief for the San Francisco police has announced new policies that are geared toward cops deescalating conflicts, and the President of police union’s head is exploding.
The response of the union encapsulates everything that is wrong with the current trend of military oriented policing:
San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr — already under attack from Black Lives Matter activists over the shooting death of Mario Woods — is now facing criticism from his own rank and file for what they see as appeasement of department critics.
At issue: a proposed policy change being drafted by Suhr and the Police Commission that emphasizes “de-escalation” of force when officers confront someone wielding a gun or knife. Of particular concern to the cops are instructions that officers “seek cover” and “engage in thoughtful communication” before doing anything else, unless there is an imminent threat.
The idea is to create enough “time and space” so police won’t need to open fire.
“I’m not happy with that or other provisions in the draft, because it could put our officers in harm’s way and at the same time jeopardize the safety of the community we serve,” said Martin Halloran, president of the Police Officers Association.
The union called an emergency meeting Thursday night at the Irish Cultural Center that was attended by about 200 cops — some of whom were calling for a vote of no confidence in the chief.
How can a cop object to not having to shoot someone?
It appears that Donald Trump’s shenanigans have blown up Netanyahu’s alliance with Republicans:
In their Super Tuesday speeches, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tried to use an Israel hammer to bash Donald Trump. Cruz sneeringly lambasted him for saying he would remain “neutral” while Rubio trounced Trump for trying to stay “impartial”, as his audience booed accordingly. And Trump? Trump was racking up victories, amassing delegates and laughing all the way to the top of the Republican presidential field.
In this way, the New York billionaire is decimating the conventional wisdom, one of many, that in 2016, total and unconditional support for Israel is a prerequisite for any aspiring GOP candidate wishing to run for president; that such a pledge of allegiance to Israel, in general, and to Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular, is a threshold requirement for gaining the support of Evangelicals, who set the tone during primary season; and that the flow of sympathy for Israel from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans is inevitable, perhaps even desirable, and in any case unstoppable.
But exactly a year after Netanyahu took this logic to its extreme and stood on the podium of Congress as Leader of the Republican opposition to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the conception is falling apart. The notion that the Republican Party is a monolithic bastion of support that will withstand the test of time is evaporating. The belief that any Republican president who will follow Obama will be better for Israel is eroding with each passing day. Faced with the Trump phenomenon, Netanyahu’s Fortress GOP strategy is collapsing like a house of cards.
………
Trump not only diverts the Republican leadership from uniform automatic support for Netanyahu, he is destroying the internal coalition that was the lynchpin of the party’s strong pro-Israel stance. Evangelical support for Trump has already sparked an internal rupture, which has some experts declaring the death of America’s Religious Right. Evangelical leaders and many of their supporters in the media are heartbroken that so many Believers are flocking after the thrice married, dirty-talking reality star. They are less perturbed by his deviation from the strict pro-Israel party line, however, and more by the sinful ways for which he has not asked forgiveness.
If Trump becomes their candidate, the GOP will lose its most hawkish, most neoconservative and most pro-Israel secular elements as well. They are repelled not only by his indecipherable positions on Israel but also by his harsh criticism of George Bush and the Iraq War, his undisguised adulation of dictators for Vladimir Putin to Bashar Assad, his all round belligerence and his neo-isolationist vision of making America great again within its hermetically sealed walls. “As president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world” according to public letter signed by 50 GOP national security stalwarts, many of them known for their pro-Israel positions. “We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.”
Sometimes, I worry about the future of Israel.
The two things that worry me the most is Netanyahu, who sees no further than the next election, and the Necons whose every action for at least the past two decades has served to diminish the safety and security of Israel, notwithstanding their declared support for the Jewish state.
Iraq, and Yemen, and Libya, and Syria, etc. have all been foreign policy disasters that have been created or worsened by Neocons, and all of these have been disasters for Israel.
Yes, I am a Bernie supporter, but I’ve always felt that the whole Benghazi/Email with Clinton is 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag.
I guess I have to start taking it kind of seriously, because the IT guy who set up Clinton’s email server has cut an immunity deal with the DoJ:
The Justice Department has granted immunity to a former State Department staffer, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, as part of a criminal investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information, according to a senior law enforcement official.
The official said the FBI had secured the cooperation of Bryan Pagliano, who worked on Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign before setting up the server in her New York home in 2009.
As the FBI looks to wrap up its investigation in the coming months, agents are likely to want to interview Clinton and her senior aides about the decision to use a private server, how it was set up, and whether any of the participants knew they were sending classified information in emails, current and former officials said.
I still think that the email server thing is complete crap, and the Benghazi pearl clutching is such dense crap that it risks collapsing into a bullsh%$ black hole.
Still, with the grant of immunity, this stinking sack of sh%$ just got real.
Democrats Always Prove the Commies Right
Read his whole post, but he has a list of things where his communist friend’s predictions proved right:
I’m regularly accused of believing things that I’ve never said and don’t believe. That’s largely a facet of the fact that, on the internet today, arguing with people is really a matter of misrepresenting what they’re saying and then attacking the misrepresentation. One of the most constant of these is that I say “both parties are the same.” I’ve never said that. Ever. In my life. But over time, the claims of friends who do say that have been vindicated over and over again.
By that I mean something very simple: my communist friends who really do say that the two parties are the same make predictions about politics. My Democrat friends do the same. Looking back at the times when the two groups have clashed, the commies have been right literally 100% of the time.
I get accused of being a “Naderite,” though in fact I voted for Gore in the first election I was old enough to vote in. (I’ve come to regret that decision over time.) The Democrats said that left-wing critics of the party would be welcomed into the fold; the commies told me that the Democrats hate the left and always would. The commies were right. The Democrats told me that anti-Iraq war voices would be an important slice of the party in the debates to come. The commies told me Democrats and their representatives in the media would engage in redbaiting eliminationism like we’d never seen before. The commies were right. The Democrats told me that a candidate like Howard Dean, who at the time was running as an explicitly left-wing challenger to the Democrat establishment, would have a great chance at the nomination; my commie friends said that the Democrats and their surrogates in the media would destroy Dean. The commies were right.
He’s right, but kind of depressing.
Still, it’s a good read.
Clinton talks of possibly decades-long occupations and orderly regime changes, yet somehow Sanders is the fantasist.
Clinton’s foreign policy positions are kind of like Dick Cheney’s, only without Cheney’s warmth and charisma.
Finding a Republican operative with character is like finding a Syrian moderate.
—Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism.
Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who is generally considered someone to watch in the Democratic Party, has resigned from the Democratic National Committee to endorse Bernie Sanders:
Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Democrat of Hawaii, resigned as a vice chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee on Sunday in order to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for president.
The endorsement came a day after Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in South Carolina by a huge margin — she captured nearly 74 percent of the vote — in a signal of her support in the South right before several other Southern states vote in Tuesday’s primaries.
Ms. Gabbard explained her decision in a video on YouTube in which she said that, as a military veteran, she wanted the United States to avoid “interventionist wars of regime change.”
“As a veteran of two Middle East deployments, I know first hand the cost of war,” said Ms. Gabbard, one of the first female combat veterans to serve in Congress. “I know how important it is that our commander-in-chief has the sound judgment required to know when to use America’s military power and when not to use that power.
This is a harsh, and IMNSHO justified critique of Clinton’s blithely bellicose foreign policy, but I have to think that a lot of this is that she no longer wants to deal with Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Just to remind you, Wasserman-Schultz banned Gabbard from the debate audience for calling for more debates, so I am inclined to think that part of this is being driven by her no longer wanting to work with the hacktacular DWS.
Based on various statements from the Beltway media, I get the sense that it is not only Representative Gabbard who is getting sick of Wasserman-Schultz.
The DNC chair appears to be high handed, self absorbed, and threatened by competence around her, and that is a toxic mix in any organization.
It appears that during the last Republican debate, when everyone was calling everyone a c*cksucker, whoever was doing the closed captioning threw up his hands in despair:
Last night’s Republican brawl at recess was best summed up by some anonymous soul working at the closed-captioning desk at CNN who clearly was completely fed up with the idiotic proceedings on stage and decided to let the hearing-impaired citizens of the United States of America know that he was. (In fact, I hope that the hearing-impaired citizens of the United States of America know how lucky they were last night.) This wasn’t a political debate. This was a pissing contest among men who are worried about the size of their dicks.
(Unintelligible yelling)
Would you have trusted any of these clowns with the nuclear codes? (Maybe John Kasich, but only if there were absolutely no other option, Curly Howard being dead and all.) I wouldn’t trust any of them to park my car.
(Unintelligible yelling)
What was your favorite moment? Was it Dr. Ben Carson’s contention that the “fruit salad of their lives” are dangling precipitously on “the abyss of destruction? What did he mean? Who knows? The mind of Dr. Ben Carson is not the mind of an ordinary man. The mind of Dr. Ben Carson is on loan from a curiosity shoppe somewhere on the moons of Saturn.
Perhaps I should start playing the Republican Debate Drinking game, because it does sound entertaining, if not particularly informative.
Another email dump, and now we have proof that the Governor’s senior staff knew of the problems with Flint’s water over a year before they acknowledged the problem
Two top advisers to Gov. Rick Snyder urged switching Flint back to Detroit’s water system in October 2014 after General Motors Co. said the city’s heavily chlorinated river water was rusting engine parts, according to governor’s office emails examined by The Detroit News.
Valerie Brader, then Snyder’s environmental policy adviser, requested that the governor’s office ask Flint’s emergency manager to return to Detroit’s system on Oct. 14, 2014, three weeks before Snyder’s re-election.
Mike Gadola, then the governor’s chief legal counsel, agreed Flint should be switched back to Detroit water nearly a year before state officials relented to public pressure and independent research showing elevated levels of lead in the water and bloodstreams of Flint residents.
“To anyone who grew up in Flint as I did, the notion that I would be getting my drinking water from the Flint River is downright scary,” Gadola wrote. “Too bad the (emergency manager) didn’t ask me what I thought, though I’m sure he heard it from plenty of others.”
………
Brader’s email alludes to festering concerns about how the chlorine used to kill the bacteria outbreak was causing the formation of a harmful disinfection byproduct known as trihalomethane, a carcinogen that can increase the risk of cancer, liver, kidney and central nervous system problems.
“Specifically, there has been a boil water order due to bacterial contamination,” Brader wrote. “What is not yet broadly known is that attempts to fix that have led to some levels of chlorine-related chemicals that can cause long-term damage if not remedied (though we believe they will remedy them before any damage would occur in the population).”
Two months later, the Department of Environmental Quality issued a Safe Drinking Water Act violation to Flint for the high levels of trihalomethanes in the water. Flint violated the law twice more until coming into compliance on Sept. 2, 2015, state records show.
Despite the staff concerns about the city’s brownish water quality, Snyder’s staff never took a recommendation to him that Flint be switched back to Detroit water until the following October.
The Governor was not told because he made it clear that he did not want to be told.
We need to see some depraved heart murder prosecutions.
The Walt Disney Company has a reputation for lobbying hard on copyright issues. The 1998 copyright extension has even been dubbed the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” by activists like Lawrence Lessig that have worked to reform copyright laws.
This year, the company is turning to its employees to fund some of that battle. Disney CEO Bob Iger has sent a letter to the company’s employees, asking for them to open their hearts—and their wallets—to the company’s political action committee, DisneyPAC.
In the letter, which was provided to Ars by a Disney employee, Iger tells workers about his company’s recent intellectual property victories, including stronger IP protections in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Supreme Court victory that destroyed Aereo, and continued vigilance about the “state of copyright law in the digital environment.” It also mentions that Disney is seeking an opening to lower the corporate tax rate.
“With the support of the US Government we achieved a win in the Supreme Court against Aereo—an Internet service claiming the right to retransmit our broadcast signals without paying copyright or retransmission consent fees,” writes Iger. “In the coming year, we expect Congress and the Administration to be active on copyright regime issues, efforts to enact legislation to approve and implement the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, tax reform, and more proposals to weaken retransmission consent, to name a few.”
The source who provided the letter to Ars asked to remain anonymous, and they were bothered by the assumption that anyone who worked for Disney would agree with the company’s political positions on tax, trade, intellectual property, and other matters.
“It just seems insensitive to folks that support the company but don’t necessarily support all of its priorities,” the source said. “Especially for something like TPP, which I view as particularly controversial. We do have a company position, but there’s going to be a wide variety of opinion [within the company].”
………
The Disney letter has language explicitly reassuring employees that their jobs won’t be affected by their decision whether or not to give to DisneyPAC.“Your contribution is important to all of us, but I want to emphasize that all contributions are voluntary and have no impact on your job status, performance review, compensation, or employment,” writes Iger. “Any amount given or the decision not to give will not advantage or disadvantage you.”
If you believe that Disney won’t be making a list and checking it twice, you still believe in Santa Claus.
This isn’t a United Way drive, this is a demand to employees that they give to an organization promulgating Disney’s interest.
As I said at the start, f%$# the mouse.
How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable by the invaluable Matt Taibbi.
If Mark Ames’ 2004 essay, “Spite the Vote,” gave us the big picture on Trump’s appeal in a moment of prognostic brilliance, Taibbi’s article explains the specifics, and the specific dangers.
He also makes a very good argument that Clinton is precisely the sort of candidate who will lose to him in the general.
I gotta look into Alyiah to Israel for my family and me.
President Trump.
I do not like that, Sam I Am.
Honestly, it makes his savaging of Tom Friedman look like a walk in the park.
Go read.
It appears that Obama’s attempt to spelunk his way into a supreme court nominee has failed, because Republican Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval’s having none of it.
You know, this whole prenegotiating bit, where he offers concessions before negotiations start, is really pretty damn stupid.
You would have though that Barack would have learned by now that this is stupid, and all it does is demoralize your power base.
It almost makes me long for President Trump.