Category: Politics

Please Use Yiddish Responsibly

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Would someone please inform Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their subsidiary formerly known as Wisconsin as to the proper use of Yiddish:

Navigating a religion or culture you weren’t brought up in can be challenging, to say the least.

 It’s something most politicians find themselves doing at one point or another, though, whether it’s in relating to constituents or appealing to donors.

………

 As Gov. Scott Walker courts Republican mega-donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s support for a likely 2016 presidential run, he’s found himself dining with top GOP donors — but also addressing a crowd at the Republican Jewish Coalition spring meeting.

 ………

 These overtures represent a marked improvement from a letter Walker sent — also about a menorah — during his time as Milwaukee County executive.

 In an undated letter unearthed by the liberal group One Wisconsin Now during the August release of documents from the first of two John Doe investigations related to the governor, Walker responded to a letter from Milwaukee attorney and chairman of the Wisconsin Center District Franklyn Gimbel.

 Walker told Gimbel his office would be happy to display a menorah celebrating “The Eight Days of Chanukah” at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, and asked Gimbel to have a representative from Lubavitch of Wisconsin contact Walker’s secretary, Dorothy Moore, to set it up.

 The letter is signed, “Thank you again and Molotov.”

 Presumably, Walker meant to write “mazel tov” and didn’t intend to wish good tidings of incendiary weapons. Perhaps it was a case of AutoCorrect or that pesky Microsoft Word paperclip causing shenanigans.

Under these circumstances, it is clear that he intended the Yiddish version, pronounced MAW-zil-Tawf, not the Hebrew rendition, pronounced maw-ZIL-Tove, and this is always pronounced the first way in the US under similar circumstances.

In any case, while the term is used in modern Hebrew, it is not used in Biblical Hebrew, and the term originated in Yiddish.

In either case, Governor Walker, don’t even bother.

You are arguably the Whitest Guy in Wisconsin™, and you are just going to embarrass yourself.

F%$# the South

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Michael Tomansky, writing for The Daily Beast, suggests that the Democrats are wasting resources trying to win in the South:

I don’t remember a much sadder sight in domestic politics in my lifetime than that of Mary Landrieu schlumpfing around these last few weeks trying to save a Senate seat that was obviously lost. It was like witnessing the last two weeks of the life of a blind and toothless dog you knew the vet was just itching to destroy. I know that sounds mean about her, but I don’t intend it that way. She did what she could and had, as far as I know, an honorable career. I do, however, intend it to sound mean about the reactionary, prejudice-infested place she comes from. A toothless dog is a figure of sympathy. A vet who takes pleasure in gassing it is not.

And that is what Louisiana, and almost the entire South, has become. The victims of the particular form of euthanasia it enforces with such glee are tolerance, compassion, civic decency, trans-racial community, the crucial secular values on which this country was founded… I could keep this list going. But I think you get the idea. Practically the whole region has rejected nearly everything that’s good about this country and has become just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment. A fact made even sadder because on the whole they’re such nice people! (I truly mean that.)

With Landrieu’s departure, the Democrats will have no more senators from the Deep South, and I say good. Forget about it. Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off. Let the GOP have it and run it and turn it into Free-Market Jesus Paradise. The Democrats don’t need it anyway.

Actually, that’s not quite true. They need Florida, arguably, at least in Electoral College terms. Although they don’t even really quite need it—what happened in 2012 was representative: Barack Obama didn’t need Florida, but its 29 electoral votes provided a nice layer of icing on the cake, bumping him up to a gaudy 332 EVs, and besides, it’s nice to be able to say you won such a big state. But Florida is kind of an outlier, because culturally, only the northern half of Florida is Dixie. Ditto Virginia, but in reverse; culturally, northern Virginia is Yankee land (but with gun shops).

………

 But it’s not just a question of numbers. The main point is this: Trying to win Southern seats is not worth the ideological cost for Democrats. As Memphis Rep. Steve Cohen recently told my colleague Ben Jacobs, the Democratic Party cannot (and I’d say should not) try to calibrate its positions to placate Southern mores: “It’s come to pass, and really a lot of white Southerners vote on gays and guns and God, and we’re not going to ever be too good on gays and guns and God.”

Charlie Pierce disagrees strongly:

I sympathize with Mike. I truly do. But I still will stand with Governor Dean and the 50-state strategy, at least applied judiciously. To me, the key to the problem is to break the stranglehold of the Washington-based consultant class over what candidates will be run in what places. It wasn’t the Beltway crowd who found Jon Tester in Montana, or Jim Webb in Virginia. The national party should be involved in these races only as a means by which money can be shrewdly spread around, and as a means of employing some sense of party discipline. No, Mr. Breaux, we won’t be following your easily rented ass any more. We will find progressive populists, white or black, and we will run them and support them, and maybe the first five tries won’t work but, sooner or later, there will be a breakthrough, and it will not be led by the next Bill Clinton and the next DLC.

For example, Bernie Sanders is drawing big crowds in South Carolina and in Mississippi. He wouldn’t come close to winning anything in either of those states, but there is a working-class audience there that is interested in listening to him, and that is worth respecting in our politics. There always has been a kind of working-class populism in the South, and it always came to grief over race. But it’s 2014, and forging an actual alliance of working people, black and white, in the places that need it the most, is a worthwhile effort whether it fails initially or not. To abandon the people trying to forge that alliance — and, therefore, to abandon the people on whose behalf that alliance is being forged — would be political malpractice of the highest order. It would be an odd kind of confirmation of Willard Romney’s first bumbling attempts to run away from himself on health care, whereby G.I. Luvmoney averred that what worked in Massachusetts would not work in Mississippi, as though Those People were expendable because the Mississippi Republicans would have them die by the side of the road. Sometimes, the fight alone is enough.

The problem is much like the supporters of Julian Schwinger’s and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga’s competing theories of quantum electrodynamics.

They are actually saying the same thing, but they are talking past each other and arguing about notation.*

Neither one of them is actually suggesting that we not run candidates.

They are both asserting that the current campaign for seats in the south is being done by compromising Democratic Party values, and neither of them are suggesting that candidates not be run.

In order to support the clearly doomed campaigns of Landrieu in Louisiana and Pryor in Arkansas, Obama held off on an executive order to help illegal immigrants.

Over the past 6 years, Obama has engaged in the most aggressive deportation policies in our nation’s history in an attempt to support southern candidates.

It’s been bad policy and bad politics.

*I am making no claims here to my having anywhere near the intellectual heft of the man who resolved this dispute, Richard Feynman. He is way out of my league.

I So Wish She Were Running for President

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Elizabeth Warren just opened up a serious can of whup ass on the Obama toadies who are pushing for the nomination of Antonio Weiss for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made clear on Tuesday that she is not swayed by supporters of Obama administration nominee for Treasury undersecretary for domestic policy Antonio Weiss. Warren upped the ante in the unusually heated nomination fight, even mocking his defenders who point out that he supports “poetry.”

………

Warren, in her speech at an event hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, the Roosevelt Institute and Americans for Financial Reform, ticked off the most common points defenders of Weiss have made about his nomination.

“He spent the last 20 years at the investment bank Lazard and has been named to be under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department. He is focused on international corporate mergers — companies buying and selling each other,” Warren said. “Now, it may be interesting, challenging, but it does not sufficiently qualify him to oversee consumer protection and domestic regulatory functions at the Treasury Department.”

………

Weiss’s nomination contradicts the Obama administration’s opposition to bringing in personnel who won’t have conflicts of interest with Wall Street, Warren said.

“Now, this matters because at the end of the day the administration undercuts its own opposition to this practice by nominating someone who was involved in a high profile, cross boarder inversion and who, by the way, made $15 million in the last few years, working for Lazard, a firm that did three of the four major announced inversions,” Warren said “And by the way, Lazard isn’t an American company anymore either. It already moved to Bermuda to cut its taxes.”

Recent profiles of Weiss, oddly, have included the fact that he’s been involved in publishing the Paris Review in ticking off his Democratic bona fides. That wasn’t lost on Warren.

“Third, and maybe you can help me understand this argument, people say opposition to Weiss is unreasonable because, wait for it, he likes poetry,” Warren said. “I’m actually not kidding on this one. Supposedly because he helps publish a literary magazine called the Paris Review we should trust that he will zealously pursue financial reform. Now I confess, I don’t read many literary magazines but, really?”

In leaving Lazard, Warren noted that Weiss would receive a golden parachute of about $20 million.

“For me, this is just one spin of the revolving door too many. Enough is enough,” Warren said. “The response to these concerns has been, let’s say, loud. First his supporters say ‘come on, he’s an investment banker so of course he should be qualified to oversee complicated financial work at treasury. But his defenders haven’t shown his actual experience that qualifies him for this job at treasury.”

One of the more substantive arguments against Warren’s opposition to Weiss is that he’s as good as could possibly be gotten in a nominee for a top treasury position. Warren said she has supported qualified people with ties to Wall Street but that’s not what Weiss is.

“Look, when I set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau I interviewed, I hired, and I worked alongside many people with Wall Street experience and I was glad to do so. In the Senate I have voted for plenty of nominees with Wall Street experience,” Warren said. “But we need a balance. Not everyone who swoops in through the revolving door should be offered a top job without some serious examinations. Qualifications matter and Weiss doesn’t have them.”

Ouch.

Instead, I’m going to have to hold my nose and vote for some corporate Democrat.

Unless Bernie Sanders run.

Run Bernie!!! Run!!!

Nope, No Racism Here

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When activists marching from Ferguson to the state capitol, Jefferson City, Missouri, got to Rosebud, MO, they confronted with a display on the road of fried chicken, watermelon, and a 40 oz bottle of beer.

The crowd waved Confederate flags, and shouted racial epithets:

About 50 activists marching from Ferguson to Jefferson City encountered a hostile counter-protest Wednesday in Rosebud.

About 200 people met the marchers as they reached Rosebud around noon, activists said. A display of fried chicken, a melon and a 40-ounce beer bottle had been placed in the street. A Confederate flag flew. Counter-protestors shouted racial epithets.

Rhea Willis of Velda City, Missouri, said she saw a boy she estimated to be 8 years old holding a sign that read, “Go home.”

Somebody shot the window out of the back of one of the buses traveling with the march, dubbed by the NAACP as the Journey for Justice. The outer pane of glass broke. The bullet landed in the windowsill, the driver said.

Clearly, we are in a post-racial society.

After all, we have a black President, don’t we?

Euro Exit Enters Italian Political Mainstream

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There are an increasing number of people who have questioned whether the continued existence of the Euro Zone makes sense, but in the countries that are large enough to matter (i.e. not Greece or Portugal) none of the mainstream parties (i.e. not the National Front) have even begun to question the currency union, until now:

………

Many analysts have come to believe that the big danger to the Eurozone is political, not economic, that the loss of sovereignity, the continued squeeze of ordinary workers and the inability of countries to depreciate their currencies to help exports, make the benefits of Eurozone membership look questionable relative to the costs. But most political commentators have downplayed this risk, arguing that the benefits of Eurozone membership are so large that no incumbent would relinquish it. And indeed, the noise-making has come from parties like UKIP, who have no realistic odds of forming a government. Up until now, France’s Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front, has seemed like the most likely contender among Eurozone-exit-favoring party leaders, but she is seen as more able to move France’s Overton than get France out of the Eurozone.

But Wolfgang Munchau, in the German edition of Der Spiegel, argues that a real shift has taken place in Italy. Unlike other countries, where the anti-Eurozone parties are seen as fringe players, in Italy, two factions that could realistically rule are both pushing for leaving the Eurozone.

From Munchau’s article, translation courtesy Google Translate:

One of the reasons why we even have the euro, was the broad political consensus in all countries who would later take part in it. No matter whether government or opposition, they were all for it. Just the consent of the opposition parties was important because in the course of 15 years, all have times over the government – the SPD in Germany, and the Socialists in France and Spain. The euro has characterized the many changes of government since its inception nearly 16 years ago survived.

………

 Unlike in Italy. There are now all opposition parties against the euro. First, the does not mean anything. The Italian Social Democrats under its chief Matteo Renzi have a large majority in parliament. And they enjoy a great, albeit not overwhelming support in the population. But in democracies oppositions come eventually to the government. And then of course it is important to know whether such a government would implement its anti-euro policy.

 The five-star Party, the largest opposition party, had spoken before the European elections for a referendum on the euro. The party was by then EUR critical, but the positions were not then as hard as now. Party leader Beppe Grillo has revealed its stance recently. His party, the euro zone as soon as possible to leave.

 In the regional elections in the northern Italian province Emiglia Romana Although Renzis party won almost, but the Northern League came on 30 per cent, which no one would have expected. The Lega is not just for a separation of northern Italy and southern Italy. It is now also include a separation from the euro. And this position was rewarded by voters.

 Italy’s exit would be the worst of all scenarios.

 And that has now brought Silvio Berlusconi on the taste. Really friendly europe Berlusconi was of course never. Opportunistic as it is, after all, he is now the future of the euro in question. Moreover, he and his party Forza Italia, the second largest in Italy, have an elaborate plan. Berlusconi wants to win back the monetary sovereignty by introducing home a parallel currency which is freely traded against the euro. Wages and salaries and of course the prices in the shops would be enrolled in this new currency.

 One would exchange their legacy euro and the new Italian Euros first one to one. Then the new currency would be released, whereupon its foreign currency would collapse immediately, probably 30 to 50 percent. The Italian economy would be competitive again with one blow.

This is a credible scenario, even if the name Berlusconi is invoked.

The problem is and remains, as Paul Krugman trenchantly observes, the Germans, and its leaders who are approaching the economic realities as a morality play for partisan electoral benefit:

………

 The point is a simple but important one: at this point any European imbalances associated with the surge in capital flows to the periphery after the formation of the euro have been worked off via extremely painful and costly disinflation. If we look at the whole period from 1999 to the present, most of Europe has had cost growth and inflation just about consistent with the ECB’s long-standing just-under-2 percent inflation target. There’s just one big outlier:

At this point the European imbalance problem is a German problem, caused by Germany’s persistent failure to have wage and price increases in line with what the euro requires. This German undervaluation is in turn exporting deflation to the rest of Europe. By contrast, France, Spain, and even Italy have been playing by the rules.

If you want to save the Euro, you have to kick Germany out.

Finally, Someone Calls Out the House of Saud………

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Unfortunately, it’s the New Statesman, a respected but obscure publication, founded by Fabian Socialists and generally affiliated with the Labour Party, which has finally observed that Riyadh is the font from which Islamic terrorism springs:

Although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century.

………

As the so-called Islamic State demolishes nation states set up by the Europeans almost a century ago, IS’s obscene savagery seems to epitomise the violence that many believe to be inherent in religion in general and Islam in particular. It also suggests that the neoconservative ideology that inspired the Iraq war was delusory, since it assumed that the liberal nation state was an inevitable outcome of modernity and that, once Saddam’s dictatorship had gone, Iraq could not fail to become a western-style democracy. Instead, IS, which was born in the Iraq war and is intent on restoring the premodern autocracy of the caliphate, seems to be reverting to barbarism. On 16 November, the militants released a video showing that they had beheaded a fifth western hostage, the American aid worker Peter Kassig, as well as several captured Syrian soldiers. Some will see the group’s ferocious irredentism as proof of Islam’s chronic inability to embrace modern values.

Yet although IS is certainly an Islamic movement, it is neither typical nor mired in the distant past, because its roots are in Wahhabism, a form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia that developed only in the 18th century. In July 2013, the European Parliament identified Wahhabism as the main source of global terrorism, and yet the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, condemning IS in the strongest terms, has insisted that “the ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way”. Other members of the Saudi ruling class, however, look more kindly on the movement, applauding its staunch opposition to Shiaism and for its Salafi piety, its adherence to the original practices of Islam. This inconsistency is a salutary reminder of the impossibility of making accurate generalisations about any religious tradition. In its short history, Wahhabism has developed at least two distinct forms, each of which has a wholly different take on violence.

………

The soaring oil price created by the 1973 embargo – when Arab petroleum producers cut off supplies to the US to protest against the Americans’ military support for Israel – gave the kingdom all the petrodollars it needed to export its idiosyncratic form of Islam. The old military jihad to spread the faith was now replaced by a cultural offensive. The Saudi-based Muslim World League opened offices in every region inhabited by Muslims, and the Saudi ministry of religion printed and distributed Wahhabi translations of the Quran, Wahhabi doctrinal texts and the writings of modern thinkers whom the Saudis found congenial, such as Sayyids Abul-A’la Maududi and Qutb, to Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, the United States and Europe. In all these places, they funded the building of Saudi-style mosques with Wahhabi preachers and established madrasas that provided free education for the poor, with, of course, a Wahhabi curriculum. At the same time, young men from the poorer Muslim countries, such as Egypt and Pakistan, who had felt compelled to find work in the Gulf to support their families, associated their relative affluence with Wahhabism and brought this faith back home with them, living in new neighbourhoods with Saudi mosques and shopping malls that segregated the sexes. The Saudis demanded religious conformity in return for their munificence, so Wahhabi rejection of all other forms of Islam as well as other faiths would reach as deeply into Bradford, England, and Buffalo, New York, as into Pakistan, Jordan or Syria: everywhere gravely undermining Islam’s traditional pluralism.

It provides a lot of insights into forces like Al Qaeda and ISIS, and makes it clear that the House of Saud, and that regime’s use of religion as a way to exert control and to promulgate a millennia long conflict between Arabs and Persians.

Saudi Arabia cannot be a part of any solution until they are forced to face the fact that they are the source of the problem.

Not What I Would Expect from the Koch Suckers at the Cato Institute

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Considering their background, that of an Ayn Rand inspired think tank, I would think that their attitude toward IP, copyright and patents, would be one of absolute support, but here is an article where describes our current regime as regressive rent seeking:

………

All three of these critical national problems derive from the same source. We often talk about the last third of a century as an era of deregulation and the expansions of markets. And in certain areas that is certainly true. But the most important market rigidities that have been eliminated have been those that protected those from the middle class on down. In fact, the great paradox of the last third of a century is that we have actually had an explosion of regulation in this “supposedly deregulatory” era — but regulation that has the effect of redistributing, sometimes dramatically, upward.

A few examples will suffice to make the point. Intellectual property protections, especially patents and copyright, have been expanded dramatically over this period, both in time (through patent and copyright extensions for existing IP) and across space (by using trade agreements to push American IP principles into foreign law). While there is an argument that this expansion has actually reduced innovation, there is no doubt that it has allowed existing firms to use the force of law (rather than the market) to enrich themselves by reaching further into the pockets of consumers.

………

The article is actually fairly tepid in its conclusions, but considering that this is coming from the Cato institute, it does indicatge that the push-back against the American model of over aggressive IP protections is becoming more broadly accepted across the ideological spectrum.

Demonstrating Why Matt Taibbi is the Only Credible Big Name Financial Reporter………

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Case in point, perhaps the highest profile financial reporter in the United States, the New York Times‘ Andrew Ross Sorkin, who has gotten the vapors over Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street:

Wall Street stenographer Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times complains this morning that Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is making it harder for Wall Street veterans to take on government jobs overseeing the financial industry, calling the former Harvard law professor and longtime industry critic “misinformed” in her opposition to investment banker Antonio Weiss’ nomination to a key Treasury Department post.

Weiss, President Barack Obama’s nominee to be under secretary of Treasury for domestic finance, is currently head of global investment banking at Lazard, which advised Burger King on its merger with Canadian coffee and doughnut chain Tim Hortons — a so-called inversion that will help Burger King avoid taxes. Warren cited Lazard’s work on inversions in explaining her opposition to Weiss’ nomination, but Sorkin contends that her concerns are “misplaced.” Sure, tax avoidance may have been “a consideration” in the BK-Tim Hortons deal, Sorkin concedes, but they weren’t the “primary factor.” At any rate, Weiss was “simply as one of several advisers” of the merger — hardly its mastermind.

Sorkin — who has criticized some inversions in the past — apparently finds no fault with the Obama administration seeking to enlist Weiss even as it pledges to crack down on corporate tax avoidance schemes.

While the inversion issue formed the crux of Sorkin’s substantive defense of Weiss, Warren has also pointed to the nominee’s financial industry background as a broad concern in itself.

Sorkin has been thoroughly captured by the financial industry, and he cannot be trusted to report on wrongdoing in the financial industry.

It could be argued that his role never was to reporting on wrongdoing, but instead his job is to document the official actions of the banking sector.

He reports on things like mergers, interviews CEOs, etc.

Of course, if that IS is real role, he is not a journalist. He is a stenographer.

Why the F%$# Do They Do This?

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It’s now been twice that the FEC ruling allowing for anonymously funded election ads has been ruled illegal:

A U.S. judge again tossed out a Federal Election Commission rule that allowed nonprofit groups running “issue ads” to keep their donors secret, in a setback for groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington said today that the rule is “arbitrary, capricious and contrary to law.” Jackson arrived at her decision a second time, after a Washington-based appeals court asked her to reconsider a 2012 order requiring disclosure of donor names.

At issue were FEC regulations adopted in 2007 that let organizations and nonprofit groups keep secret the names of donors who pay for issue ads during an election campaign. In her previous ruling, Jackson said the regulations clashed with requirements of the 2002 campaign-finance law known as McCain-Feingold, a finding she reiterated today.

Congress passed the disclosure rules “to ensure that members of the public would be aware of who was trying to influence their votes just before an election,” Jackson wrote. The FEC’s rule “thwarts that objective by creating an easily exploited loophole that allows the true sponsors of advertisements to hide behind dubious and misleading names,” she said.

………

The rules at issue today apply only to what are known as “electioneering communications,” or ads that run before an election and mention a federal candidate without urging a vote for or against the person. So-called independent expenditures, which advocate support for or opposition to a candidate, aren’t affected by the decision.

Seriously.

The Supreme Court specifically allowed for disclosure requirements in their Citizens United ruling, and we the law explicitly calls for disclosure, and we are still litigating this?

Would the federal courts please finish cock punching Karl Rove?

You Would Have Thought that They Would Have Learned After the Ottoman Empire and the Ferme Générale Debacles………

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Or, if they don’t want to go back so far, the Chicago parking meter debacle, but history repeats itself, and Chris Christie’s privatization of the New Jersey lottery shows once again that privatizing the collection government revenues, does not produce additional revenue, it just produces waste and corruption:

The state Assembly budget committee chairman is calling for a review of the contract privatizing parts of the state lottery following a news report that the firm hired to manage the system fell short of revenue benchmarks.

Assemblyman Gary Schaer (D-Passaic), reacting to a Bloomberg report Monday that Northstar New Jersey missed its projections by $24 million in the first fiscal year of a 15-year contract, said the shortfall puts programs for seniors, veterans and people with disabilities at risk.

The premise of the lottery contract is increasing lottery revenues according to Northstar’s own projections, Schaer said.

“The administration brought in a company to work on the lottery system, and clearly the results are not what they should be,” he said.

Christie inked the deal with Northstar in July 2013, making New Jersey the third state to hire a private firm to help run its lottery in hopes of boosting lottery sales.

Four months into the arrangement, which began Oct. 1, 2013, Northstar secured a contract amendment reducing its revenue goals, according to Bloomberg. Northstar cited slowed sales from Superstorm Sandy in its request.

These deals never generate more revenue.

At best, what they do is generate a dollar today at the cost of many more dollars tomorrow.

In this case, considering that it is Jabba the Governor, it’s about payback for politically connected friends of Chris.

Hopefully, the media is over their man-crush on Christie, and and will begin to notice the morass of cronyism and self-dealing that is his tenure as Governor.

Troll

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Ted “Tailgunner” Cruz is at again, suggesting that Barack Obama appoint Joe Lieberman as the next Secretary of Defense.

Cruz is just f%$#ing with Democrats now.

Personally, I would troll back, and leak that John McCain was under consideration, which would serve a number of purposes:

  • It would scare the hell out of John McCain, because he would have to defend his own decisions in the real world, as opposed to simply complaining about what the other guys are doing.
  • It would shut up that whiny bitch Lindsey Graham, because he does not take a dump without McCain’s approval.
  • It would set up a special election in Arizona, which would place limits on Republican Party f%$#ery. (Impeachment, government shutdown, etc.).
  • It would confound the Republican leadership.

Based on Obama’s decision to keep the war going in Afghanistan, it is very clear that the civilian leadership in his administration gets its marching orders from the military, rather than the other way around, so the SecDef really does not matter anyway.

Seriously, Charles Schumer is a Boil on the Ass of the Body Politic

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While I am highly dubious that the recent “leadership” position granted to Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, the response of Chuck Schumer to this development was a case study as to why the Democratic Party is seen as hopeless:

When Reid was in talks with Warren about a job in Senate leadership earlier this month, Schumer suggested tapping moderate Sen. Mark Warner, too, to balance out her progressive politics — or perhaps making her a “liaison to liberal groups,” a narrower job than what Reid had proposed, according to sources familiar with the private talks.

Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said no to both of Schumer’s suggestions, later taking the job as a policy adviser to Schumer’s messaging operation.

Mark Warner? Seriously?!?!?!

Because somehow or other, Elizabeth Warren is just so scary that Schumer needed for her to be counterbalanced by yet another bland creature of the oligarchs.

The Cops will Riot, Not the Protesters. That’s What Happened the Last Time

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Craven Politician,* and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon has decided to declare a state of emergency and call out the National Guard:

Governor Jay Nixon activated the Missouri National Guard in anticipation of unrest when a grand jury decides whether to indict a white police officer who shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.

Nixon declared a state of emergency and created a “unified command” of police agencies in preparation for the decision, due this month in the slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown of Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to plan and be prepared for any contingency, it is necessary to have these resources in place in advance of any announcement,” Nixon, a 58-year-old Democrat, said yesterday in a statement. “Public safety demands that we are fully prepared.”

The violence in Ferguson last time did not come from the protesters. It came from the cops.

The Ferguson, and the other local and county police forces participating, rioted.

If Nixon wants to do the right thing, he needs to take those Guard troops, and use them to keep the local police in their barracks.

If he is not willing to do so, then Obama should federalize the guard, and lock down the cops.

A lot of meaningless violence would be prevented.

*But I repeat myself.

This is a Twisted Equivalent of a Japanese Corner Office

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In Japan, a corner office is not a mark of status.

The term is Madogiwa-zoku (窓際 literally”at the window tribe”), and it is a way of cashiering long term loyal employees who have not quite made it to retirement age.

The twisted bit here is the idea of taking a promising person, and giving them a shiny new “Leadership” position as a way of neutering them.

The person in question being taken to the Vet’s is Elizabeth Warren:

Senate Democrats are elevating Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to a new leadership position on Thursday. She will help shape policy and messaging for the party.

Warren’s title will be Strategic Policy Advisor to the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. She will serve as a liaison to liberal organizations, a source familiar with the move confirmed to TPM.

“Senator Warren will be a liaison to the liberal groups in our base to ensure that they have a voice in leadership meetings and discussions,” the source said.

A top Democratic leadership aide told TPM that “the idea was to create a position in leadership for her within the Democratic Policy and Communications Center, which is the messaging and policy “war room” chaired by Senator Schumer and Vice Chair Stabenow.”

This is all about making sure that Warren is not in a position to agitate for changes in the (frequently inept) Senate leadership now, or to be a public voice for economic and financial regulation in 2016 primaries.  (I do not expect her to run, but I can see her being a pain for a Wall Street friendly candidate, like Hillary Clinton.)

Republicans Simply Do Not Understand Rock and Roll

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There was a concert on the Mall in Washington, DC for memorial day , and right wing heads exploded over his singing the John Fogerty song Fortunate Son:

It’s still unclear if Bruce Springsteen, one of the musicians at the center of the latest controversy, will be similarly apologetic.

Pretty much everyone has had something to say about Springsteen’s performance Tuesday at the “Concert for Valor,” an HBO musical event for veterans held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Performing with Zac Brown and Dave Grohl, Springsteen sang “Fortunate Son,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic Vietnam War-era anthem that examines issues of class and jingoism in America. John Fogerty, the CCR frontman, said that his own experience as a drafted serviceman served as an inspiration for the song.

“I was the same age as the soldiers serving in Vietnam and from the same lower-middle class as them,” Fogerty once said.

 ………

Springsteen also performed his hit “Born in the U.S.A.,” a song that, as the Washington Post’s Justin Moyer pointed out, actually includes many of the same themes as “Fortunate Son.”

Of course, as Charlie Pierce pithily observes, the song supports the troops,  It condemn the people who profit from war without fighting themselves:

Apparently, one of the Fox peawits did notice what the song actually is about. (And it’s here where I point out that, unlike most of the people pretending to be offended today, Fogerty actually is a veteran, and that, when I was covering Vietnam veterans issues in the late 1970’s, most of the guys I talked to absolutely adored this song.) It’s not about people like this.



It’s about people like this.



Glad I could clear that up.

Republicans do not understand Rock and Roll.

QED.

Rush Limbaugh is a Whiny Bitch, Part MMMMMMCMLXIX

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Yeah, he’s threatening to sue the DCCC over their use of his quotes in the last campaign:

Rush Limbaugh is hopping mad at the Democratic Party — but this time he’s threatening to do more than just talk about it on the radio.

The conservative pundit is threatening to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for a series of fundraising e-mails that suggested Limbaugh was condoning campus rape in comments he made on his widely syndicated program on Sept. 15.

In a letter to the Washington-based organization intended for delivery Monday morning, Limbaugh’s lawyer demanded a retraction and a public apology for the fundraising e-mails. The letter indicated Limbaugh will sue for defamation and business “interference” if his demand isn’t met.

DCCC representatives were not available Monday; the organization’s offices are closed for the Veterans Day holiday.

The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh’s on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — “How many of you guys . . . have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.

………

The legal threat is the result of DCCC fundraising appeals sent out in the wake of Limbaugh’s on-air comments about a new policy at Ohio State University that instructs students to get verbal consent before having sex. The DCCC highlighted one particular sentence from his commentary — “How many of you guys . . . have learned that ‘no’ means ‘yes’ if you know how to spot it?” — saying it was tantamount to condoning sexual assault.

Yeah, well I listened to what he said, and even if he weren’t a public figure, this would be laughed out of court, because, in the United States, the truth is always a defense against accusations of libel and slander.

As a public figure, there is no evidence of malice or a reckless disregard for the truth in this.

Also, considering how the DCCC did no November 4, why the f%$# would Limbaugh, who is Republican to his core want to force the Democratic party to change its strategy?

Seriously Rush, take one for the team, and man up.

Way to Go, Francis

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Pope Francis has demoted right wing Cardinal Raymond Burke yet again:

In a move that reflects the loosening posture of the Vatican on major social issues, conservative U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke was removed by Pope Francis from yet another top post.

Burke, who has long been vocal about denying communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion, was dismissed as head of the Holy See’s highest court and given the post of Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a largely ceremonial job overseeing charity to seniors.

At 66, Burke is considered young by church hierarchy standards. The dismissal is a set-back to his Vatican career as well as a clear message from Pope Francis to those not hewing to his progressive view of the Catholic Church.

The move was expected by Vatican-watchers given that Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, had openly criticized Francis’ less doctrinaire approach to the faith. Last year, Francis had removed Burke from the Congregation for Bishops, a group tasked with the appointment of new bishops worldwide.

In addition that Burke was playing partisan politics in the United States, which created a long term risk for what is arguably the richest community in Catholicism, Burke was also ignoring the basic structure of the Church.

I may not know the finer points of canon law, and quite honestly I have no desire to, being a Jew, but I do the middle ages on weekends as a hobby, and so I do have a decent understanding of a feudal system of government.

Basically, a Bishop is like a Count, a Cardinal is more like a Duke (Technically called. “Princes of the Church”), and the Pope is the Monarch in charge.

The important bit about this is that Bishops and Cardinals are in fealty to the Pope, and calling out the guy in charge in public is frowned upon in such a system.

Raymond Burke should consider himself lucky.

A few hundred years ago, (or in any case, certainly before the Magna Carta was signed) if a Count or a Duke acted this way, it would keep the headsman gainfully employed.

What the Hairy One* Said

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My older brother, Sasquatch Stephen, makes a very good point about the tactics of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), which is that while they are a bunch of evil mother f%$#ers who will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes, their tactics viewed in isolation are in fact both laudable and effective:

In the well duh category, the Huffington Post recently posted an article entitled Democrats Create An ALEC-Killer.

 Gee, often I have heard the cries about these dark, underhanded, suspicious tactics of this group.

 And what are these tactics, why the Republicans have organized a right-wing group to push for its policies at the state level, providing political discipline, they create draft statutes, coordinate activities, and support people who agree with them across the spectrum. And all this has worked for them very well over the last decade.

 You know, this is called activism. I once tried to point this out at a MoveOn meeting I was stupid enough to attend. The reception to that comment wasn’t good.

 Sure it’s financed by the right’s most fanatical and finanically interested participants, and you expected different?

(emphasis mine)

The reaction at the MoveOn meeting is not surprising.

MoveOn has always been more about giving comfortable people the impression that they are doing something  than it is about actually getting sh%$ done.

*I have it on good authority that he once frightened a Chinese village that described him as a “Hairy Giant.”