Category: Politics

Interesting Point

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Patrick Durusau makes a very interesting point, which I will reduce to bullet points: (Read the whole thing)

  • The NSA wants to arm up for offensive cyber war.
  • This means that hacking tools are a weapon.
  • If they a weapon, then they are covered by the 2nd amendment.
  • That being the case, join the NRA, and lobby against the NSA taking away our weapons.

The NRA has been a long term and successful advocate for Second Amendment rights. And they have political connections that would take years to develop. When was the last time you heard of the NRA winning symbolic victories for someone after they had been victimized? Or do you hear of victories by the NRA before their membership is harmed by legislation? Such as anti-hacking legislation.

Since the NRA is an established defender of the Second Amendment, with a lot of political clout, let’s work on expanding the definition of “arms” in the Second Amendment to include computers, knowledge of how to break encryption and security systems, etc.

The first step is to join the NRA (like everybody they listen to paying members first).

The second step is educate other NRA members and the public posed by unchecked government cyberpower. Current NRA members may die with their guns in hand but government snoops know what weapons they have, ammunition, known associates, and all of that is without gun registration. A machine pistol is a real mis-match against digital government surveillance. As in the losing side.

The third step is to start training yourself as a hacker. Setup a small network at home so you can educate yourself, off of public networks, about the weaknesses of hardware and software. Create or join computer clubs dedicated to learning hacking arts.

This is f%$#ing brilliant.

Your Periodic Chris Christie Corruption and Hypocrisy Dump

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First, we have the gift that keeps on giving, Bridgate, where we now learn that David Wildstein, the architect of the bridge closure, who Christie said that he barely knew, turned out to have extensive and frequent contacts with the Governor’s office:

The political operative who helped mastermind the notorious lane closures at the George Washington Bridge – and is now cooperating with a federal investigation of the Bridgegate scandal – had more extensive contact with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s inner circle than the governor has acknowledged.

 That is the conclusion of a WNYC examination of calendars maintained by David Wildstein during his four years at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, along with a review of more than 1,000 photographs provided by the Port Authority and thousands of pages of documents released by the governor’s own legal team and the New Jersey Legislature.

Christie has insisted he had little to do with Wildstein, his former $150,000-a-year appointee at the Port Authority with whom he attended Livingston High School in the 1970s.

 “I don’t even remember in the last four years even having a meeting in my office with David Wildstein,” Christie said at his marathon two-hour press conference in January 2014, after the legislature released Bridgegate records including the now infamous email to Wildstein declaring, “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.” Christie told reporters: “I may have, but I don’t remember it.”

 But the documents, corroborated by current and former Port Authority and Trenton staffers who requested anonymity because of the ongoing federal investigation, paint a new picture of Wildstein’s role in the Christie Administration. That view chips away at Christie’s and his lawyers’ portrayal of Wildstein as a rogue employee largely isolated from the governor who acted with one staffer in closing lanes and causing epic traffic jams on the roadways of Fort Lee for four morning commutes in September 2013.

Well that guy that Christie barely know also appears to be singing like a canary to investigators:

The political operative who helped mastermind the notorious lane closures at the George Washington Bridge – and is now cooperating with a federal investigation of the Bridgegate scandal – had more extensive contact with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s inner circle than the governor has acknowledged.

(emphasis mine)

And then we have his shenanigans on pensions, which, if anything are even more egregiously awful.

First it appears that Chris Christie routinely steered pension money to campaign contributors firms:

Two years ago, as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pursued re-election, his administration found itself mulling investment options for the state’s $80 billion pension fund. In one deal in May 2013, officials settled on a subsidiary of U.K.-based foreign financial conglomerate Prudential plc. With little fanfare, state pension overseers quickly endorsed the deal.

Weeks later, a Hong Kong–based executive director and board member of Prudential plc delivered a maximum $3,800 contribution to Christie’s gubernatorial campaign, followed by a maximum $32,400 donation to the Republican National Committee, which was about to launch a get-out-the-vote effort for Christie. Two months after that, New Jersey began moving public employees’ retirement savings into two funds managed by the Prudential subsidiary as part of the state’s new $300 million investment commitment to the company.

State and federal rules are designed to prevent firms that manage public pension money from contributing to the campaigns of public officials who have the authority to influence pension investments. The sequence of transactions in New Jersey, campaign finance experts say, is troubling.

“Pay-to-play laws are intended to stop the potential conflicts of interest and appearance of corruption that arises whenever executives at a financial firm make large political contributions to a governor and his political party around the time the state is picking the firm to handle pension system investments,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission who now works for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, a research group in Washington, D.C. “These situations undermine the public’s confidence in the integrity of government contracting.”

………

Pension investment experts interviewed by IBTimes were disturbed by the chronology of New Jersey’s Prudential deal, and the fact that Stowe’s donations closely followed the Christie administration awarding pension contracts to Prudential’s subsidiaries.

“This is about as blatant as I think I’ve ever seen in terms of timing,” Andrew Silton, who served as the chief investment officer of the $90 billion North Carolina Retirement System, said. “Forgetting whether or not it violates New Jersey’s state rules or the SEC’s rules, just from the perception of public integrity, it is just such an obvious quid pro quo that the political organizations are working Prudential plc for contributions and simultaneously the New Jersey pension division is processing the paperwork on a major investment.”

It’s gotten so bad that New Jersey state house Democrats have finally stopped fellating Jabba the Governor, and passed a law against allowing campaign contributors to his Presidential campaign to manage pension money: (A well deserved knifing)

Chris Christie may have to change the way he does business. New Jersey lawmakers have sent a bill to the Republican governor’s desk that would keep state pension money from going to firms whose executives make donations to federal political organizations — including, potentially, Christie’s presidential campaign.

The Christie administration has invested millions of dollars of New Jersey pension money with firms whose executives donated to the Republican Governors Association and the Republican National Committee, both of which spent heavily in New Jersey in support of Christie’s gubernatorial campaigns. The bill, which would effectively deter such campaign contributions from those firms’ executives, passed both legislative chambers by large majorities.

More significantly from a political perspective is the recent judicial ruling that Christie broke his own law by underfunding pensions:

In a major blow to Gov. Chris Christie, a New Jersey judge ruled on Monday that he violated state law when he declined to make the full payment into the state’s pension system for public employees last year and ordered him to find a way to fund it now.

The decision further complicates Mr. Christie’s hopes of reviving his presidential ambitions, which have suffered in recent weeks as his approval ratings in New Jersey have sunk to the lowest point of his tenure, and Republican donors have moved to other contenders for the party’s nomination.

It came on the eve of his annual budget proposal to the Legislature, which already presented him with the challenge of finding $2.9 billion to make next year’s pension payment. The challenge is steep, with the state’s economy lagging well behind its neighbors’ and the nation’s, the state surplus dried up, and the governor loath to raise taxes.

Mr. Christie will now be scrambling also to find the $1.57 billion the judge ordered him to pay.

This might be the most politically damaging part, as his Presidential campaign.  Fiscal probity, and cutting taxes, along with that whole shouting at people bit, are supposed to be at the core of his appeal.

And then there is the Exxon pollution deal, where it appears that he settled for pennies on the dollar, because of a section of a law that he pushed that would allow him to use the money for the general fund rather than cleanup:

For more than a decade, the New Jersey attorney general’s office conducted a hard-fought legal battle to hold Exxon Mobil Corporation responsible for decades of environmental contamination in northern New Jersey.

But when the news came that the state had reached a deal to settle its $8.9 billion claim for about $250 million, the driving force behind the settlement was not the attorney general’s office — it was Gov. Chris Christie’s chief counsel, Christopher S. Porrino, two people familiar with the negotiations said.

One of those people, Bradley M. Campbell, was the commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2004 when the lawsuits against Exxon were filed. Mr. Campbell, in an Op-Ed article appearing in The New York Times on Thursday, wrote that “even more troubling” than the decision to settle the lawsuit were “the circumstances surrounding the decision.”

He goes on to say that former colleagues of his in the state government told him that Mr. Porrino “inserted himself into the case, elbowed aside the attorney general and career employees who had developed and prosecuted the litigation, and cut the deal favorable to Exxon.”

………

Much of the criticism has focused on the lack of a public rationale for why the state would choose to settle a lawsuit that it had invested so much effort and time in trying to win; environmentalists fear that Mr. Christie, a Republican, wants to use the money for other budgetary needs. Indeed, a state appropriations law, proposed by Mr. Christie last year, says that any funds beyond the first $50 million collected in damages or other environmental recoveries shall go to the state’s general fund.

When state lawmakers tried to amend the proposal to steer more money back toward environmental restoration, Mr. Christie vetoed the effort.

And then we have what appears to be a coverup of the details of a deal with Jerry Jones following the Dallas Cowboys owner flying him out to a playoff game and hosting him in the owner’s private box:

After New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently accepted free football tickets and travel from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, two key questions emerged at the center of the controversy: Did the gifts have anything to do with Christie’s appointees to the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey giving Jones’ firm a contract to manage operations at the new One World Trade Center in New York City? And how did Christie arrive at his decision to endorse that contract?

Christie officials have publicly denied any connection between the gifts from Jones and Jones getting the contact, but there is no way to verify those denials. That’s because on Monday, Port Authority officials formally blocked the release of correspondence — if it exists — between themselves and Christie’s office about the transaction with Legends Hospitality, the Jones-owned firm in question.

Finally, we have the metastasizing scandal about how the Governor’s office intervened against a corruption investigation in Hunterdon County that implicated political allies, and the disasterous privitization of the management of the New Jersey lottery. (No surprise, the company managing the NJ Lottery has made donations to Christie run organizations.)

When is this guy going to be doing the perp walk into federal court?

Astonishingly Chickensh%$

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Illinois representative Aaron Schock, a rising star who faces several ethics inquiries into expensive trips and an elaborately decorated Downton Abbey-themed office, will resign from Congress, Politico reported on Tuesday.

………

“Today, I am announcing my resignation as a Member of the United States House of Representatives effective March 31,” Schock said in a statement to Politico. “I do this with a heavy heart. Serving the people of the 18th District is the highest and greatest honor I have had in my life. I thank them for their faith in electing me and letting me represent their interests in Washington. I have given them my all over the last six years. I have traveled to all corners of the District to meet with the people I’ve been fortunate to be able to call my friends and neighbors.”

………

Schock’s fall from grace began with a seemingly harmless report in the Washington Post that his office on Capitol Hill was decorated in the likeness of a room in the PBS drama Downton Abbey.

But when Schock refused to answer questions about the office, questions quickly surfaced over whether he had violated congressional ethics rules.

………

The final blow appeared to occur on Monday, when details surfaced of a sweetheart property deal Schock purportedly received from a group of his campaign donors. The report claimed that a shell company linked to Schock paid $300,000 to a political donor for a warehouse in Peoria, Illinois, and subsequently took out a $600,000 mortgage on the property from a local bank also run by Schock donors.

His downfall was dropping 40 grand on an Edwardian interior decorating?

Seriously. You cannot make this up.

Shoot Me! I Agree with Rand Paul………

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In a speech at HBCU Bowie State, Rand Paul has declared that the current criminal justice is structured to keep the poor and minorities down:

………

The content more than made up for that.* Paul has sharpened his pitch to black audiences over many visits and roundtables, some well-covered and some more private; he’s also re-introduced sentencing reform bills that give him more to talk about.

“Those of us who have jobs and have lived fairly privileged lives don’t know what it’s like to pay fines and penalties on top of other fines, and how someone’s life can spiral out of control,” said Paul, leaning on a podium and wearing a plaid shirt and jeans. “As I’ve learned more about criminal justice system, I’ve come to believe it’s something that’s going to keep the two Americas separate.”

Paul ran through data and examples, from Ferguson to the novels of Tom Wolfe, to demonstrate the tragedy of over-criminalization. Some of his examples had clunked when he debuted them on TV or radio appearances. “What reason do we have for telling the police that they have to take someone down for selling cigarettes that aren’t taxed?,” asked Paul. “Couldn’t we give them a ticket?”

He was referring (though not by name) to the Eric Garner killing in New York, and while that analysis had been a brief outrage last year, it made no ripple in the Bowie State auditorium. That was likely because he put everything in the context of laws discriminating against non-whites and the poor. The effect of current de jure criminal codes, said Paul, was “somewhat like segregation.”

I guess that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but I really feel profoundly uncomfortable agreeing with him.

I would also note that I am far more sanguine regarding Paul’s putative Presidential campaign.

I cannot imagine another Republican out there who could make these sorts of statements.

I still think that Senator “Aqua-Buddha” is a nut case, but the ability to depart from Republican dogma when required, and this gives him the opportunity to make adjustments to his campaign message that his rivals cannot.

Pass the Popcorn

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Pass the Popcorn

Glenn Beck is on a Jihad to expel Grover Norquist from the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association for ties to the Muslim Brotherhood:

The war is raging between the rabid Islamophobe Republicans and the Tax-Hating Republicans, with Glenn Beck acting as the provocateur.

Earlier this week, Beck threatened to pull all of his support from the NRA if Grover Norquist was allowed to retain his seat on the board, calling Grover a “very, very bad man.”

 I might be inclined to agree with the “very, very bad man” pronouncement, but not for the same reasons Beck has. Glenny has allowed his pal Frank Gaffney to convince him that Grover Norquist is really a secret agent for the Muslim Brotherhood. Therefore Grover must leave the NRA board before he infiltrates it with secret Muslim cooties.

“I will tell you that I am so concerned about this,” Beck said, “and I hope that the leadership of the NRA hears this and every member of the NRA hears this, that if this man is elected, or re-elected, and confirmed on the board of the NRA, I may drop my membership in the NRA. I am that concerned that he is a very bad influence and a very bad man that if this is who the NRA decides to put on their board of directors, I don’t think I can be associated with them.”

After tossing the lit match onto the haystack, the NRA was inundated by outraged wingnuts demanding to know why they had an Agent of Evil on their board. To appease Beck and his insane viewers, Wayne LaPierre agreed to hold an ethics investigation. Oh, the blind leading the blind.

Glenn Beck is wrong, of course.

Grover Norquist is not a secret agent for anyone. 

He’s a whore for whoever has the money,  so unless the Muslim Brotherhood had gotten together enough scratch for his 6 figure retainer, there is no possibility that he will do anything for them.

Fallout from German Intransigence with Greece

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Iceland has been trying to join the EU for the past few decades.

Not any more:

Iceland has announced it is dropping its bid to join the European Union in line with pledges made two years ago by its then-new eurosceptic government.

Iceland first applied for EU membership in 2009 but its foreign minister, Gunnar Bragi Sveinsson, said in a statement that the centre-right government had informed current EU president Latvia and the European Commission of its decision to annul the application.

“Iceland’s interests are better served outside the European Union,” the minister wrote on his website.

Iceland first applied for EU membership under a leftist government in 2009, when the country was badly shaken by an economic crisis that saw the Icelandic krona lose almost half its value, making eurozone membership an attractive prospect.

But the thorny issue of fishing quotas was seen as a key obstacle to joining the bloc, although it was never brought up in the accession talks.

Clearly, a lot of this was a worry about fishing rights, which had in the past resulted in hostilities between Iceland and the UK, and another part of this is the dispute between the UK and Iceland over insurance guarantees for their failed banks, as well as the UK using an anti-terror law to seize the assets of Icelandic banks.

I think that a bigger part is that the people of Iceland saw what was done to Ireland and Greece, and realize that EU accession doesn’t give them much beyond a loss of sovereignty to Germany, which has used its position to exert hegemony over Europe since the financial crisis.

When did Evan Bayh Piss in Ezra Klein’s Cheerios?

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I’m not sure when Ezra Klein decided that Evan Bayh done him wrong, but his latest in the Washington Post, titled, “The sad, hypocritical retirement of Evan Bayh, which details the former Senator going deep into the K-Street lobbying scene:

………

But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.

………

In our last interview, Bayh complained of the poor opinion the public had of him and his colleagues. “They look at us like we’re worse than used-car salesmen.” Yes. They do. And this is why.

It’s taken Mr. Klein at least 4 years to recognize Bayh as a self absorbed snake oil salesman peddling himself.

I had this figured out well before his abortive 2008 Presidential run.

Still, I wonder why Klein finally notices.

It Ain’t Treason. It Does Not Come Close

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So, someone has set up a petition at Whitehouse.gov asking for the 47 Senators* be charged with treason:

More than 155,000 people by Wednesday had signed a petition to the White House urging charges be filed against 47 Republican senators who they say committed “treasonous” offenses by writing Iran’s leaders about ongoing nuclear negotiations.

Lawmakers caused a political furor with their controversial letter Monday that warned an international nuclear deal with Iran could be scrapped by the next US president, particularly if Congress does not give its seal of approval.

The White House has said it responds to such petitions when they reach the 100,000-signature threshold, providing President Barack Obama’s administration with another opportunity to slam a letter that it considers inflammatory.

According to the petition, the 47 senators “committed a treasonous offense when they decided to violate the Logan Act, a 1799 law which forbids unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments.”

Critics argue that the lawmakers, including at least three potential Republican 2016 presidential candidates, broke the law, or at least violated the traditions of Congress, by directly engaging a foreign power on US foreign policy.

This is a pet peeve of mine.

Because of hundreds of years of abuse of the treason charge by the British Crown, treason is the ONLY crime defined in the constitution, specifically Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

The letter to Iran is stupid, and is clearly a case of placing sensibilities the Republican primary voter above the interests of the United States, but this is not treason, under US law.

Treason charges, and the abuse of treason charges by the sovereign, has a long and ignominious history, and calling for treason charges runs directly counter to US values and the founding beliefs of our republic.

*People keep saying, “47 Senators,” and I keep hearing, “47 Ronin”. There is something profoundly wrong in my head

And When the Democrats Get Back into Power, They Won’t Reverse This

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Koch sucking Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, just signed so called right to work legislation:

For decades, states across the South, Great Plains and Rocky Mountains enacted policies that prevented organized labor from forcing all workers to pay union dues or fees. But the industrial Midwest resisted.

Those days are gone. After a wave of Republican victories across the region in 2010, Indiana and then Michigan enacted so-called right-to-work laws that supporters said strengthened those states economically, but that labor leaders asserted left behind a trail of weakened unions.

Now it is Wisconsin’s turn. On Monday, Gov. Scott Walker — who in 2011 succeeded in slashing collective bargaining rights for most public sector workers — signed a bill that makes his state the 25th to adopt the policy and has given new momentum to the business-led movement, its supporters say.
“This freedom-to-work legislation will give workers the freedom to choose whether or not they want to join a union, and employers another compelling reason to consider expanding or moving their business to Wisconsin,” Mr. Walker said.

Seeing as how well Walker’s Koch Brothers inspired agenda has worked in Wisconsin (Hint: not at all, compare it to Minnesota, which has taken pretty much the opposite policies), we should not expect to see much job growth in Wisconsin relative to its neighbors.

The obvious question here though is what happens when the Democrats take control of the state house and governor’s mansion again?

If the past is precis, there will be no repeal.

In both the recall campaign, and in Walker’s reelection campaign, the Democratic candidates eschewed calling for a repeal of his law stripping state workers of union rights, so, at least until the pathetic Wisconsin state Democratic party establishment can be put out of its misery, I would expect that both these laws will stay in place.

Basically, Wisconsin Democrats continue to believe that portraying themselves as non or post partisan is a winning electoral strategy, even though it is clear that the modern Republican party has, to quote Digby, “Gone insane and that every incentive and structural political edifice out there made it impossible for them not to be insane.”

Running on PPUS (Post Partisan Unity Schtick) is the same as running on nothing, and the voters will almost always choose a bad something over nothing.

Sedition Anyone?

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A group of 47 Republican senators has written an open letter to Iran’s leaders warning them that any nuclear deal they sign with President Barack Obama’s administration won’t last after Obama leaves office.

 Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber’s entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.

 “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the senators wrote. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”

Foreign policy scholar Daniel Dresner notes that this goes well past what is garden variety trolling by political partisans: (And yes, he uses the world “troll”)

Now, on the one hand, I get what Senate Republicans are trying to do here. They don’t like the contours of the deal that’s being negotiated, and they really don’t like Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for bypassing a truculent Congress via executive actions on Iran. So if the Senate GOP can signal to Iranians that an executive agreement isn’t that much of a credible commitment device, maybe they can scuttle a deal they dislike with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns. It’s certainly a better gambit than, say, this ad.

That said, there are still a few confusing aspects about this. First, there’s the question of the law. I don’t think an open letter from members of the legislative branch quite rises to Logan Act violations, but if there’s ever a trolling amendment to the Logan Act, this would qualify.

For those of you who are not up on obscure federal legislation, the Logan Act was passed in 1799(!) and makes it a felony for private citizens to “freelance” in American diplomatic relations:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

So, Nixon queering the peace talks with Vietnam in 1968 would qualify as well, but let’s be clear, no one is going to be prosecuted over this, any more than someone would be prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition acts, which were passed in 1798.   (Most of them have expired, anyway)

They also got schooled by the Iranian FM over the finer points of international law:

Iranian foreign minister and the country’s Chief nuclear negotiator said the recent open letter by a group of Republican senators about Iran’s nuclear talks has no legal value and is just a propaganda ploy.

Asked about the open letter of 47 US Senators to Iranian leaders, the Iranian Foreign Minister, Dr. Javad Zarif, said, “In our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy. It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history. This indicates that like Netanyahu, who considers peace as an existential threat, some are opposed to any agreement, regardless of its content.”

Zarif expressed astonishment that some members of US Congress find it appropriate to write to leaders of another country against their own President and administration. He pointed out that from reading the open letter, it seems that the authors not only do not understand international law, but are not fully cognizant of the nuances of their own Constitution when it comes to presidential powers in the conduct of foreign policy.

Foreign Minister Zarif added, “I should bring one important point to the attention of the authors and that is, the world is not the United States, and the conduct of inter-state relations is governed by international law, and not by US domestic law. The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations.”

The Iranian Foreign Minister added that “change of administration does not in any way relieve the next administration from international obligations undertaken by its predecessor in a possible agreement about Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.”

“I wish to enlighten the authors that if the next administration revokes any agreement with ‘the stroke of a pen,’ as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law.”

He emphasized that if the current negotiation with P5+1 result in a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, it will not be a bilateral agreement between Iran and the US, but rather one that will be concluded with the participation of five other countries, including all permanent members of the Security Council, and will also be endorsed by a Security Council resolution.

Zarif expressed the hope that his comments “may enrich the knowledge of the authors to recognize that according to international law, Congress may not ‘modify the terms of the agreement at any time’ as they claim, and if Congress adopts any measure to impede its implementation, it will have committed a material breach of US obligations.”

It’s one thing to suggest that an agreement is not valid without Congressional approval,* it’s another to directly conduct the other side in a diplomatic dispute and explicitly state the the word of the US government is meaningless.

47 members of the US Senate, particularly freshman Senator Tom Cotton have one off the f%$#ing deep end.

Welcome to today’s Republican Party, I guess.

*In this case, it appears to have been conducted under the auspices of the UN Security Council, and it appears that it will be approved by the UN Security Council, so there is room for disagreement there, which would suggest that a Security Council vote would be required to amend or abrogate the deal, and not Congress.†
†Yes, I understand how many of the black helicopter one world government nutjobs in Congress would find this objectionable, but f%$# then.  They are stupid and bat sh%$ insane.

Emmanueldämmerung* in Progress

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We have always know that Rahm Emanuel is a bully, who kisses up to his superiors and kicks down at his subordinates, or for that matter anyone he sees as unimportant, but this report seems to indicate that the long time Obama ally is seriously losing his sh%$:

They say old Rahm Emanuel came out last night—or maybe it was the real one hiding in plain sight all the time: a sneering, aggressive pol who went “nose-to-nose” with a mental-health advocate demanding, “You’re gonna respect me!”

The alleged exchange took place off-camera between Chicago’s mayor and Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a member of Mental Health Movement, a group that has been fighting the mayor over the closure of six mental health clinics across the city. Behind a door that separated the mayor from a roomful of constituents at a campaign stop in the Wicker Park neighborhood, Ginsberg-Jaeckle says, he got Rahmbo’d.

 “This is the Real Rahm,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote on Facebook. “Calm and collected in public, raging angry and self-defensive behind closed doors.”

 But Emanuel’s campaign, while not directly refuting the mayor’s alleged call for respect, said the exchange was more cordial than Ginsberg-Jaeckle’s version of events. The mayor’s office has reached out Ginsberg-Jaeckle and Delgado to address their concerns, campaign spokesman Steve Mayberry said in a statement.

“The mayor was eager to get to the substance of the residents’ concerns,” Mayberry said via email. “After respectfully listening to the residents, he asked that they respectfully listen to his point of view. As a result, the meeting ended cordially and the mayor is working with health officials to address the residents’ needs.”


Debbie Delgado, another member of the group, interrupted Emanuel, prompting the behind-closed-doors altercation.

“She told of losing her son to gun violence,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle wrote. “She told [Emanuel] how her other son was holding him as he died. She told about how the city’s Northwest Mental Health Clinic in Logan Square saved their lives, helped her and her son deal with the PTSD and depression. Then she asked why he took that clinic away from her.”

 Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”

 The mayor’s office wouldn’t address the supposed angry exchange.

 “Since it was a non-city event there were no city people there to witness it,” said Chloe Rasmas, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office.

 Rahm said he would speak with the pair, and Ginsberg-Jaeckle said they then left the room for a private conversation. That’s when Emanuel allegedly shouted: “You’re gonna respect me!”

 ………

 “We delivered 10,000 letters to the mayor’s office in October 2012. They didn’t respond. So, we started sending one email a week. No response. We held forums and protests. The day before a vote on the budget we did a sit-in outside the mayor’s office, and they forced us out by cutting off any access bathrooms,” Ginsberg-Jaeckle said, running down years’ worth of attempts to talk with the mayor.

 “I could go play by play, but long story short we could not get through to this man. Finally, the extreme we reached was crashing his events.”

 That’s what they did Wednesday night, not expecting much other than to be escorted out. Locke said Rahm told police to hold off when Ginsberg-Jaeckle and Delgado rose from their front-row chairs to confront the mayor. It was all cordial, until the trio left the room.

Demanding respect at the top of his voice.

Respect should not be demanded, it should be earned.

Why do I get the sense that Rahm Emanuel is suffering from a really bad case of “Middle Child Syndrome”?

In either case, I hope that the people of Chicago realize that they are dealing with a guy for whom a difficult reelection campaign is likely to make him an even worse mayor than he already is.

I would also one of his supporters, Republican Senator Mark Kirk, is blowing the racist dog whistle by invoking Detroit, while Republican Governor Bruce Rauner is leaning on begging 3rd place mayoral candidate Willie Wilson to endorse Rahm as well.

They wouldn’t be endorsing who is tied in the minds of their base to the “Kenyan Muslim Atheist Radical” Barack Obama unless they were pretty firmly on the same side, and they were worried about his chances.

I am so hoping that he loses the April 7 contest.

*I cannot claim credit for this bon mot. It was coined by Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism.

Normally, this Level of Incompetence at this Level of Status Results in a Promotion, not a Demotion

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But it appears that the Norwegian culture is different form ours, as former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has been demoted from his position as head of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

Norway’s Nobel peace prize committee has demoted its chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland, in a move unprecedented in the long history of the award.

The committee, which said the former Norwegian prime minister would remain as a committee member, gave no reason for its decision.

However, the renowned diplomat drew criticism shortly after becoming committee chairman in 2009 for awarding the prestigious Nobel to newly elected US president Barack Obama.

The move stunned the world and the recipient alike, as Obama had been in office less than nine months and the US was waging simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After six years at the helm of the committee, Jagland, 64, will be replaced by deputy chair, Kaci Kullmann Five, the organisation said on Tuesday.

“There was broad agreement within the committee that Thorbjørn Jagland was a good chair for six years,” Kullmann Five told reporters, but declined to comment on the discussion.

Commentators and former Nobel laureates had criticised the committee’s decisions under Jagland’s stewardship.

Hitting back at critics after Obama’s prize, Jagland said the organisation wanted to praise the US leader’s early vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and capture “the spirit of the times, the needs of the era”.

Last year, a federal study estimated that the US will spend $1tn (£649bn) upgrading its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades.

Ohhh ……… Bummer of a birthmnark, Thorbjørn.

Your award recipient is responsible for more spending on nukes than the rest of the world combined.

………

And in 2012 Jagland became the face of a body that handed the award to the European Union for its commitment to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”.

“The EU is clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in an open letter with two other former laureates.

Jagland, a former leader of Norway’s Labour party who has served as prime minister, foreign minister and speaker of parliament, spent much of his career trying to bolster support for Norway to join the EU.

So the that award appears to be an attempt to political agenda that he has personally held for years.  (And then there is the whole thing that the EU seems like the most forceful attempt at German hegemony in Europe since that bloke with the funny mustache)

It is rather unsurprising, that Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu roundly condemned the selection of the EU as, “Clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will.”

Oh Snap.

Quote of the Day

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As anti-worker as Reagan was, however, he continued to praise unions and their vital contribution to America. Ronald Reagan would be unable to win a Republican primary in any state in 2015 because he supported the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. That is how extreme his Party has become.

—William K. Black On Scott Walkers batsh%$ insane statements comparing labor unions and ISIS.

I think that Ronald Reagan was determined to muzzle labor unions, and condemn them to irrelevancy, but he felt the need from a political perspective to throw some empty rhetorical flourishes their way even as he knifed them in the back.

These days, you cannot win a primary campaign in the Republican party doing the same.  The demand for “red meat”is too strong.

This is Significant

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Donald Trump spoke at CPAC, and he was booed when he called for ground troops in Iraq to fight ISIS:

In the same question and answer period with Sean Hannity, he [Trump] embarrassed himself yet again when he outlined his strategy to fight ISIS, which was nothing more than “he’d hit them really hard.” With what? We don’t know, but when he supported sending ground troops against ISIS, the crowd turned on him.

Hannity: A, to stop Iran’s nuclear program and B, to defeat ISIS, cause I don’t hear say degrade them, I hear you say defeat them.

Trump: Defeat. Well, with ISIS, I’d just hit them really hard and that would probably and a year ago you wouldn’t have said it and nobody wouldn’t have likes it, you may have to have some boots on the ground for a period of time until you’re rid of the cancer. (boos) That’s number one, you may have to have it Look, they’re cutting off the heads of people, they’re burning at the stake, It’s like we’re living in medieval times.

(emphasis original)

Unfortunately, the video has been deleted by the user, but the fact that the crowd at CPAC, who have pretty much defined themselves as the wingnuts of wingnuts, have come to the conclusion that the John McCain school of foreign policy is without merit is significant.

If the war forever has lost the CPAC crowd, they have lost the nation.

Quote of the Day

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It’s Easier to Get Laid at CPAC Than on Spring Break

—Sam Brode at Mother Jones

To be fair, this is true of almost all conferences, and political conferences of all sorts are reputed to have sexual activities that make Woodstock look like a revival meeting.

So, it is no surprise that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) would be the site of some fairy enthusiastic “after parties.

Still, it is a great quote.

Quote of the Day

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………Because right now, we have one goal in life: don’t be the Seahawks. We are running down the clock here, and this is not the time to try for a fancy play. We want to run the damn ball over the goal line and score our touchdown. That means we all huddle together and drive for that last few inches in the final seconds.(emphasis original)

—Harold Feld on how to deal with the FCC’s upcoming vote on net neutrality

It’s a good point, and a rather topical way of using that old aphorism, “The perfect is the enemy of good enough.”

Ethics for Thee but not for Me

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It appears that the indictment of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has provided some impetus to make changes to the ethics laws in New York state.

Andrew Cuomo has a proposal, and to no-one’s surprise, the proposal specifically excludes the Governor’s office:

State legislators say they are willing to enact a number of new ethics reforms, but they argue Gov. Cuomo should subject himself to more public disclosure as well.

Republican and Democratic legislative sources say that while Cuomo has attacked lawmakers on the issue of outside income, the governor is making as much as $900,000 from HarperCollins for his recent memoir, which only sold a few thousand copies.

They also say that perhaps there should be a ban on governors giving paid outside speeches. While Cuomo during his first four years has not given such speeches, former Govs. Mario Cuomo and George Pataki did.

New Jersey bars governors from receiving “directly or indirectly” any compensation, salary, honorarium, fee or any other form of income on top of their regular taxpayer-funded salary.

An official in the New York Legislature argued there should be more public disclosure on what guests, if any, are staying at the governor’s Albany mansion.

And, in perhaps the most contentious suggestion, a number of legislative sources say Cuomo’s longtime live-in celebrity chef girlfriend, Sandra Lee, should be required to publicly disclose her income, investments and other financial information that the spouses of public officials are already mandated to reveal.

“A final negotiated package shouldn’t be just all about the Legislature,” said one high-ranking legislative official. “If you want to do something comprehensive on ethics, it should include the governor as well.”

Of course it should include the governor as well.

It’s only a problem if you are Andrew Cuomo.

Here is hoping that US Attorney Preet Bharara is going to indict him.

While the People of Chicago Tolerate a Certain Level of Corruption, the Looting was a bit too Blatant

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Last night, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel failed to secure a majority in the election, and will be forced into a runoff:

Rahm Emanuel, who was easily elected mayor of this city four years ago, was dealt a setback Tuesday. Though he came in first among five candidates, Mr. Emanuel failed to seal a second term by winning support from enough voters to avoid a riskier runoff election this spring.

 It was a serious blow after a campaign in which Mr. Emanuel had a huge fund-raising edge over lesser-known opponents, not to mention an in-person endorsement last week from President Obama in his adopted hometown.

 The outcome underscored Mr. Emanuel’s newfound vulnerability in a mostly Democratic city that had not had a mayoral runoff since it began holding nonpartisan elections 16 years ago. In 2011, Mr. Emanuel swept into office on a first balloting with more than 55 percent of the vote in his first run for mayor.

 “This makes it an entirely different ballgame — a brand new election,” said Dick Simpson, a political scientist and former alderman who has contributed to political candidates, including Mr. Emanuel’s opponents. “It becomes a real battle and it sharpens the issues.”

 Mr. Emanuel, who angered some here when his administration closed nearly 50 public schools, clashed with public schoolteachers and oversaw the city through flashes of gang violence, received 45.4 percent of the vote, with almost 99 percent of precincts reporting, not the 50 percent plus one needed to win outright. His closest competitor was Jesus Garcia, a county commissioner known as Chuy, who had important backing from the Chicago Teachers Union. He got 33.9 percent of the vote, giving him a place in a runoff against Mr. Emanuel on April 7. The rest of the votes were split among three other candidates.

I think that this is the first since the election laws in 1995 that a sitting Chicago mayor has been forced into a runoff.

Considering the fact that Rahm got about 55% in the first round in the last election, when he was running in an open seat, this is a fairly epic.

What it comes down to is the fact while the good people of Chicago expect a bit of corruption in the provision of public services, under the expectation that services will actually be delivered to those who need them.

Emanuel’s tenure as mayor has been marked by a devotion to the 1%, particularly Wall Street, makes Michael Bloomberg look like Che Guevera.

In Rahm’s Chicago though, the ordinary citizen has become little more than a profit machine for the fat cats:

Why did progressives–why do progressives–want to humble Emanuel? The answer’s been blaring from magazines like In These Times and Rolling Stone and the Nation for months. In the election-month cover story of In These Times, for example, progressive historian Rick Perlstein explained why the deal Emanuel cut with a company to remake the city’s transit cards never stopped hurting him.

The transit cards can double as debit cards, you see, promoted as a boon for Chicago’s un- and under-banked. But dig the customer fees hidden in the 1,000-page contract the city signed with Cubic: $1.50 every time customers withdraw cash from an ATM, $2.95 every time they add money to their online debit account with a personal credit card, $2 for every call with a service representative and an “account research fee” of $10 an hour for further inquiries, $2 for a paper copy of their account information, and, if you decide you’ve had enough, a $6 “balance refund fee.” This all makes mincemeat of the pro-privatization argument that “the marketplace” is more transparent than a government bureaucracy. The city might have been able to anticipate this before inking the deal had they paid attention to the fact that Money Network, the payment processing company partnering with Cubic, had received the lowest possible grade from the Better Business Bureau, and that another partner, MetaBank, was fined $5.2 million by federal regulators for a scheme to issue debit cards funded by tax refund loans at interest rates of up to 650 percent.

Mayor Emanuel is clearly cutting sweetheart deals that will encumber Chicago for years, if not decades, with the implicit promise that he will get highly remunerative do-nothing jobs in finance after he leaves office, much like he did after leaving the Clinton administration in the late 1990s.

Sh%$ like this is why “Rahmbo” has been forced into a runoff despite the fact that Barack Obama flew to Chicago to campaign for him.

I do not expect Mr. Garcia to win.

Emanuel has more money for his campaign than God, I expect that the former White House Chief of Staff to win handily, though I expect “Chuy” to do better than yesterday’s 33.9%.

As to the campaign, I expect wall-to-wall ads across the Chicago media, with a focus on driving a wedge between the Hispanic and Black communities through racist and nativist dog whistles.

In a multi-candidate campaign like the primary, negative ads tend to put voters off both the source and target of the ads.  In a 2-candidate runoff, this is not an issue, and Rahm’s millions can pump out a lot of slime.

Case in point, a Republican mega-donor, and financier, Muneer Satter, has donated big time to the Emanuel campaign:

Chicago investor Muneer Satter has spent more than $1 million in the past three years helping Republicans win. He’s so focused on the party taking back the White House that he paid for a poll assessing the 2016 Republican field, the results of which convinced him to get behind former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

 But one Democrat has managed to capture Satter’s wallet: his hometown mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who is up for reelection Tuesday.

 Satter doesn’t just scatter campaign checks to the wind, fellow Illinois Republican donor Ronald Gidwitz said in an interview. Rather, his support is both tactical and complete. “He wants to see the best person win and is putting his money where his desires are,” Gidwitz said.

 Satter and his wife, Kristen Hertel, have put more than $352,000 into Emanuel’s mayoral campaigns and supportive political committees, according to Illinois State Board of Elections records. They’re among his top-flight donors, despite having spent heavily in 2012 trying to oust Emanuel’s former boss, President Barack Obama. The mayor was White House chief of staff until October 2010.

 Although he has a robust history of Republican contributions, Satter began giving to Emanuel in 2007, when he was an Illinois congressman, and Hertel was one of the first contributors to his first campaign for mayor. It’s a reflection of donor pragmatism in Chicago, a city that last elected a Republican mayor in 1927.

 “In Chicago, as everywhere, leadership is everything,” said Lisa Wagner, Satter’s spokeswoman. “Muneer looked at all of the candidates in the mayor’s race, and Rahm was the only candidate who could effectively tackle the problems of our city.”

We have also seen an orgy of no-bid awards to has donors:

In 2006, then-Congressman Rahm Emanuel attacked his Republican colleagues for oversight failures, focusing in particular on the awarding of a $7 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton, which had for a time been headed by Dick Cheney. Yet data examined by International Business Times show that, as Chicago mayor, Emanuel, a Democrat, has used an even less transparent no-bid process, where there is not even a contract, just a payout — in many cases to some of the mayor’s largest campaign contributors.

 In all, firms that have received tens of millions of dollars’ worth of shadowy “direct voucher payments” (DVPs) from the Emanuel administration have given more than $775,000 worth of campaign contributions to the mayor’s political organizations. That’s a subset of the $1.2 million in total campaign contributions that Emanuel has received from employees of all vendors doing business with the city, according to municipal documents reviewed by IBTimes. Emanuel accepted those donations after signing an executive order purporting to ban campaign donations from city contractors.

 Chicago’s DVP process is permitted thanks to loopholes in Illinois’ procurement law that allow municipal officials to circumvent the traditional contracting process. Unlike standard government contracts, DVP payouts do not require any type of public documentation. Emanuel appointees retain substantial discretionary authority to approve DVPs. The payments are not required to go to the lowest bidder; vendors receiving the payments do not have to list their qualifications and never need to document the services they provide to the city in return for the money. The DVPs appear to have been used for everything from phone service to interest payments to financial firms, but unlike the George W. Bush administration’s no-bid contracts, DVP payments do not even require a formal contract, so it is impossible to verify what the money purchased.

 In 2010, Chicago’s inspector general issued a report that criticized the secrecy surrounding DVPs, alleged that some of the payments ran afoul of state law, and called for stronger contracting regulations. The report discourages the use of DVPs, but it does not appear to have prevented politically connected firms from benefiting from the process in a nontransparent way. The public can see which firms received the DVPs but still cannot ascertain what the citizens of Chicago received for the money — more than $38 million of which flowed to Emanuel’s campaign donors and their lobbying clients.

 ………

 Last year, IBTimes reported that Emanuel has directed tax subsidies to some of his major donors, and that he received cash from executives of firms managing city pension funds. (That disclosure prompted city lawmakers to request a Securities and Exchange Commission probe.) Emanuel also awarded coveted city-owned lakefront property to the George Lucas museum, after Lucas’ wife and Disney executives donated nearly $50,000 to Emanuel’s campaign. The Chicago Tribune has published a series detailing how millions of dollars’ worth of city contracts have gone to the mayor’s top contributors.

Finally, it appears that Emanuel  has had some serious negative coat tails, with liberal reformers out-performing in the elections as well:

Not only was Mayor Rahm Emanuel forced into a primary runoff for the first time in Chicago history, there was a strong showing by progressives across the board:

Emanuel’s weakness was felt all across the ballot. He’d created a super-PAC, Chicago Forward, to bail out 17 of his allies on the council and to beat progressive incumbents. Only seven of them won outright: Will Burns, Mike Zalweski, Danny Solis, Robert Maldonado, Margaret Laurino, Pat O’Connor, and Debra Silverstein. The rest were forced into runoffs, including Deb Mell, the sister-in-law of disgraced former Governor Rod Blagojevich. Meanwhile, Chicago Forward had lobbed mailers at two aldermen–Scott Waguespack and John Arena–who’d asked the SEC to investigate the legality of donations to Emanuel from the executives of companies managing the city’s pension funds. Arena narrowly missed a win and will head to a runoff; Waguespack won outright.

It was not all progressives wanted, but it was not what the super-PAC had wanted either. The progressive bloc was expected to expand to 12 of the council’s 50 seats.

“The good guys won Round One,” said Working Families Party national director Dan Cantor in a statement. “Forcing Mayor 1% into a run-off is a remarkable achievement. Along with the run-off, the progressive caucus on the Council is poised to make gains.”

Again, I don’t expect Rahm Emanuel to lose the runoff, but it has to be clear to his supporters, his patrons, and his various lackeys that he has been deeply damaged by his electoral performance.

As such, I cannot help but wonder if those who have hitched their star to his political career aren’t making some serious contingency plans.

A Well Deserved Burn in Less than 140 Characters

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As you are no doubt heard, Rudy Giuliani said that Barack Obama did not love the United States.

Representative Steve Cohen completely pwn35 (Owns) him in a single tweet:

Rudy Giuliani questioned how much,or even if, President Obama loves America.Maybe he thinks he loves it 3/5 as much as Giuliani & his pals
— Steve Cohen (@RepCohen) February 20, 2015

Of course, Rudy Giuliani’s entire political career has been based on demonizing “Blah people”, so this is a particularly justified critique.