Category: Politics

Wonkett Nails It

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Democrats Have Great Exciting New Idea: Being Democrats:

Here’s an idea that’s so crazy, it just might work! After the thorough ass-kicking the Democratic Party suffered on Election Day, some Democrats are considering the possibility that maybe running “Democratic” candidates who are embarrassed to be Democrats is not the best way to appeal to the Democratic Party. Crazy, huh? With candidates refusing to support Obamacare, refusing to support Democratic policies, refusing to even say “Hell, yes, I voted for Barack Obama because I am a Democrat, DUH,” the new minority is thinking maybe it’s time to get back to being Democrats.

According to Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to the soon-to-be-ex Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the new plan for 2016 is to maybe — maybe — run Democratic candidates on a Democratic platform.

Your mouth to God’s year, Faiz.

Cowardice is bad politics.

Taibbi is Back

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Now that Matt Taibbi is no longer being gaslighted by FirstLook media, he’s back to writing about corruption in finance, and this one is a doozy.

Basically, he has found a whistle blower who taking the step of breaching her confidentiality agreement to reveal extensive and systematic fraud at J.P. Morgan Chase:

She tried to stay quiet, she really did. But after eight years of keeping a heavy secret, the day came when Alayne Fleischmann couldn’t take it anymore.

“It was like watching an old lady get mugged on the street,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t sit by any longer.'”

Fleischmann is a tall, thin, quick-witted securities lawyer in her late thirties, with long blond hair, pale-blue eyes and an infectious sense of humor that has survived some very tough times. She’s had to struggle to find work despite some striking skills and qualifications, a common symptom of a not-so-common condition called being a whistle-blower.

leischmann is the central witness in one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime in American history, possessing secrets that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon late last year paid $9 billion (not $13 billion as regularly reported – more on that later) to keep the public from hearing.

Back in 2006, as a deal manager at the gigantic bank, Fleischmann first witnessed, then tried to stop, what she describes as “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations.

Thanks to a confidentiality agreement, she’s kept her mouth shut since then. “My closest family and friends don’t know what I’ve been living with,” she says. “Even my brother will only find out for the first time when he sees this interview.”

………

She was blocked at every turn: by asleep-on-the-job regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a court system that allowed Chase to use its billions to bury her evidence, and, finally, by officials like outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, the chief architect of the crazily elaborate government policy of surrender, secrecy and cover-up. “Every time I had a chance to talk, something always got in the way,” Fleischmann says.

This past year she watched as Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of historic settlement deals with Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America. The root bargain in these deals was cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials or even judges – only secret negotiations that typically ended with the public shown nothing but vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.


And now, with Holder about to leave office and his Justice Department reportedly wrapping up its final settlements, the state is effectively putting the finishing touches on what will amount to a sweeping, industrywide effort to bury the facts of a whole generation of Wall Street corruption. “I could be sued into bankruptcy,” she says. “I could lose my license to practice law. I could lose everything. But if we don’t start speaking up, then this really is all we’re going to get: the biggest financial cover-up in history.”

Read the rest. 

It’s a long read, but well worth it.

The fact that all the big banks are criminal enterprises is now a surprise to anyone who reads the paper, but Taibbi’s description of Fleischmann’s experience with the so called regulators and so called authorities a searing indictment of the deeply craven and corrupt people at the Justice Department, particularly Eric “Place” Holder.

I Want My Howard Dean!!!

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What Atrios says:

One thing that I think people tend to forget is that Howard Dean’s 50 state strategy wasn’t simply about fighting everywhere, it was about shoveling money out of DC before the vultures there could get their hands on it. It was about the idea that people who run campaigns out of Washington don’t know what the hell they’re doing, but that as long as the money was sitting there, candidates didn’t have much choice but to deal with them.

In case you doubt the wisdom of his words, note what some anonymous Democratic Party functionary asshat said about all this:

“This is a tsunami. Heads will roll at 1600. And if they don’t, shame,” the insider said, adding: “The president has 60 days to clean house, regrow his spine, and lay out an aggressive, centrist agenda. If he fails at any of those, he might as well just start writing his memoir.”

Note that in the same article, there is someone who gets it:

“Democratic operatives who refuse to acknowledge this is the White House’s fault are out of their f—— minds,” the operative said. “These operatives who don’t understand that the White House fucked up are the same hacks who overcharge House and Senate candidates for shitty consulting work and help lose elections year after year.”

The operative also said Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hurt the party by delaying ambitious action on immigration and other hot-button issues to protect incumbent senators in southern states.

“It also doesn’t help that Dems completely broke their promise to enact immigration reform. Reid’s strategy of ‘no big bills’ this year that could protect [Arkansas Sen. Mark] Pryor, [North Carolina Sen. Kay] Hagan, and [Louisiana Sen. Mary] Landrieu obviously backfired,” the operative said. “They lost anyway, and we pissed off our base at the same time.”

Let me make a note here:  Were the Democratic Party to adopt a “F%#@ the South strategy”, much in the same way that Republicans have adopted a “F%$# New York City & Hollywood & San Francisco & Boston & non white Americans”, there really wound not be a down side.

Over the past 40 years, the Democratic Party has devoted increasing resources to keep its foothold in the white South, and that is simply not going to happen.

The dynamic that LBJ said over 50 years ago, “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.“

We as a nation are not going to change this dynamic until we as a nation stop pandering to it.

Chickensh%$s on the World Stage

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As you are no doubt aware, anonymous sources at the White House called Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu a Chickensh%$.

There was a minor sh%$ storm over this, but reaction was, and is, “But he IS a complete chickensh%$?”

He’s a guy with no morals or vision who cannot look past the next election.

Then again, in the least surprising news of so far this week, email have leaked revealing that, despite their contemporaneous denials, the Obama administration was intimately involved in the firing of Shirley Sherrod:(Background here)

A 2010 e-mail from Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says his department was “waiting for the go-ahead” from the White House before accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod, according to newly released documents, despite Obama administration assertions that her ouster was Vilsack’s decision alone.

The e-mail, which was made public Friday in an ongoing federal court case over the matter, shed more light on the evening of July 19, 2010, when the USDA hastily asked Sherrod to resign after a video showing her making supposed racist remarks surfaced on a conservative Web site. Her dismissal turned into a racial firestorm after it became clear that the video had been edited and her remarks were meant to tell a story of reconciliation.

Both the White House and Vilsack have repeatedly said that the agriculture secretary made the decision to ask for Sherrod’s resignation without White House input. The e-mails, along with earlier e-mails obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act in 2010 and 2012, make it apparent that Vilsack wanted Sherrod to leave the department and ordered her resignation. But a newly released e-mail sent by Vilsack himself suggests that he was awaiting a decision from White House officials on how to proceed.

“She has offered her resignation which is appropriate,” reads an e-mail from the initials “TJV” to Dallas Tonsager, then the USDA undersecretary of rural development and Sherrod’s boss. Vilsack’s middle name is James. “The WH is involved and we are waiting for the go-ahead to accept her resignation. I suspect some direction from WH soon.”

Israel has a chickensh%$ Prime Minister, and the US has a chickensh%$ president.

Anyone who is surprised by either of these facts has been living under a rock.

Today’s Must Read

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Mother Jones has an article describing the sordid history of the the Koch family’s involvement in politics, The Making of the Kochtopus.  (Also, they have a fairly complete list of their web of shell organizations here.)

These people have been a cancer on the American body politic for half a century:

The John Birch Society likes to point out that its members were tea partiers before the tea party existed. And indeed, some of today’s conservative fears—from a socialist president to a United Nations-driven “one-world government”—wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the early 1960s, when Birch Society leader Robert Welch commanded a right-wing movement that Republican establishmentarians viewed as a mortal threat.

The connective tissue linking the Birchers of the past to today’s tea partiers meanders through the libertarian movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and de

tours into the tobacco wars of the 1980s and the Hillarycare battle of the 1990s. At the nexus of this throughline is the Koch family, which for more than six decades has helped to finance and cultivate the ideological uprising that has now, at long last, established itself at the very heart of Republican power.

Patriarch Fred Koch—a leader of the successful effort to make Kansas a right-to-work state in the late 1950s—was a founding member of the John Birch Society. Fred was in the room the day in 1958 when Welch addressed a small group of prominent conservatives to plan a movement that would place its weight on “the political scales in this country as fast and as far” as possible. Charles Koch, a Birch Society member like his father, would later join a group of fellow Birchers committed to growing the Freedom School, a Colorado-based educational center founded by a controversial libertarian guru named Robert LeFevre.

Through the Freedom School—which taught free-market dogma and whose leader postulated that any rights the government conferred, it had first robbed you of—passed many of the luminaries who founded the modern libertarian movement, not least of them Charles and David Koch. Together, the brothers would go on to play a pivotal role in bringing the libertarian ideology (a “radical philosophy,” Charles readily admitted) to the masses.

 They have been very evil for a very long time.

The Least Likely Democrat to Tell the Truth and to not Backtrack About it Is………

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That would be Mary Landrieu, who said that part of the hostility against Obama in the South had its roots in racism, that’s the truth bit, and now she has refused to apologize for speaking the truth:

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu made conservative heads explode by stating a truth, that the South has not always been the friendliest place go African-Americans and to women. Landrieu’s campaign put out a press release standing by her comments.

This is a level of guts and honesty that I would never have expected of her.

The Pentagon wants its War, and Now they are Waging a War of Leaks

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We now get leaks of the military complaining that the Obama administration is “micromanaging” operations in Iraq and Syria:

Top military leaders in the Pentagon and in the field are growing increasingly frustrated by the tight constraints the White House has placed on the plans to fight ISIS and train a new Syrian rebel army.

As the American-led battle against ISIS stretches into its fourth month, the generals and Pentagon officials leading the air campaign and preparing to train Syrian rebels are working under strict White House orders to keep the war contained within policy limits. The National Security Council has given precise instructions on which rebels can be engaged, who can be trained, and what exactly those fighters will do when they return to Syria. Most of the rebels to be trained by the U.S. will never be sent to fight against ISIS.

………

Other gripes among the top Pentagon and military brass are about the White House’s decision not to work with what’s left of the existing Syrian moderate opposition on the ground, which prevents intelligence sharing on fighting ISIS and prevents the military from using trained fighters to build the new rebel army that President Obama has said is needed to push Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into a political negotiation to end the conflict.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel himself is among the critics of Obama’s strategy in Syria. Hagel wrote a memo last week to Rice warning that Obama’s Syria strategy was unclear about U.S. intentions with respect to Assad, undermining the plan.

What is going on here is that the Pentagon, including Hegel want the US to move aggressively for regime change in Syria, because they feel that it is their God given right to wage war with, and overthrow, whoever they want.

We’ve seen what happens if they get their way, the clusterf%$#s that are commonly known as Iraq and Libya.

The fact that the adults in the White House (there is an expression I never thought that I would say) are telling the war mongers in the Pentagon that they cannot topple yet another government just because, they are leaking to the press.

OK, this is Weird

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Republicans like Nickelback. No Surprise.


Republicans hate the Empire State Building. So did King Kong. Coincidence? I think not.


Ronald Reagan wrote a book? Was it a coloring book?


Man the ‘Phants hate Maddow.

Click for slideshow.

I was reading Kevin Drum, and he pointed me toward an article that polled people on their musical preferences and politics.

While I would expect some differences, I don’t expect ‘Phants to like Springsteen or the Dixie Chicks, but it turns out that conservatives hate The Beatles:

With the 2014 midterm elections approaching, we decided to take a look at the cultural similarities and differences between people who support Democrats and people who support Republicans. To do this, we looked at everyone who liked the campaign page of any Democrat or Republican running for governor, U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives. We then looked at what other pages those people liked on Facebook and identified the pages that were most differentiating—that is, the pages which were disproportionately liked by the supporters of one party versus the other—and those that were most balanced.

 Note: in all of the figures below, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Republican candidates, the farther right the page name appears (precisely indicated by the darker line in the middle). Conversely, the more a page is disproportionately liked by fans of Democratic candidates, the farther left the page name appears. The font size of the name is proportional to the total number of people from the US who liked that page.

I have a theory, with absolutely no facts to back me up, about why Republicans hate The Beatles:  Jealousy.

You see, of all the bands listed here, none is more closely connected with the 1960s, and the changes in cultural mores, the whole sex and drugs and rock and roll thing, and the Republicans are pissed off that they spent the 60s defending “virtue” while everyone else got their piece of ass.

Of course, the children of the 60s are in their 60s now, and while most of the Republican apparatchiks are younger than that, they were brought up under the tutelage of those frustrated segment of the children of the ’60s, and the rage remains.

It’s kind of sick, and kind of juvenile, but it’s the Republican Party,

I Have Mixed Emotions About This………

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It appears that a guy in Oklahoma drove his car into the 10 Commandments sculpture on the State House Lawn:

A man was taken into custody on Friday on suspicion of knocking over a Ten Commandments monument with a car on the grounds of the Oklahoma statehouse and then fleeing the scene, law enforcement officials said on Friday.

The U.S. Secret Service detained the man, who has not been identified, after he was alleged to have made threatening statements at a federal building in Oklahoma City. The man told agents he urinated on the monument and ran it over with a car, said David Allison, the assistant special agent in charge.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol said they believe a single person was responsible for the act on Thursday night that left the 6-foot (1.8-meter) monument broken in several large pieces not far from where it was mounted. The man will be turned over to Oklahoma police.

In some ways, this is a good thing.

Additionally, the monument was clearly intended to enfranchise a religion, specifically Protestant Christian, as their mistranslation is the one used on the sculpture.

On the other hand, I do not approve of someone taking the law into their own hands and knocking it down.

That’s just wrong.

You Know, the Whole Hamlet Thing Didn’t Work for Adlai Stevenson………

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Elizabeth Warren is not being not quite so categorical in her denial of a 2016 Presidential run:

Senator Elizabeth Warren gave an interview to People magazine for this week’s issue and was asked for roughly the thousandth time if she planned to run for president. But her answer to this query was different than all the others:

But is the freshman senator from Massachusetts herself on board with a run for the White House? Warren wrinkles her nose.

“I don’t think so,” she tells PEOPLE in an interview conducted at Warren’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, home for this week’s issue. “If there’s any lesson I’ve learned in the last five years, it’s don’t be so sure about what lies ahead. There are amazing doors that could open.”

She just doesn’t see the door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue being one of them. Not yet, anyway. “Right now,” Warren says, “I’m focused on figuring out what else I can do from this spot” in the U.S. Senate.

As a veteran Warren-watcher, I can say with certainty this is more ambiguous than she’s ever been on the subject. “I don’t think so,” “amazing doors that could open,” and “right now” are the traditional vernacular of a someone flirting with a campaign—-and someone who wants you to know it.

In the past, Warren has been much more unequivocal. (Examples: “I’m not running for president, and I plan to serve out my term,” and “I am not running for president. Do you want to put an exclamation point at the end of that?”)

I understand how tempting it is to play a “will she or won’t she” game, it creates a buzz, and it can get one’s ego stroked, but you need to be either in or out.

I’d love to see someone from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, as opposed to the current  front runner, Hillary Clinton, but jerking around potential supporters is never winning

Either get serious, and start an exploratory committee, or remain adamant about staying out.

Obama is Hoping to Lose the Senate

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Dan Froomkin is claiming that Obama is running out the clock, because he is expecting the Democrats to lose the Senate, and the Republicans will not vote to release the document:

Continued White House foot-dragging on the declassification of a much-anticipated Senate torture report is raising concerns that the administration is holding out until Republicans take over the chamber and kill the report themselves.

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intelligence committee sent a 480-page executive summary of its extensive report on the CIA’s abuse of detainees to the White House for declassification more than six months ago.

In August, the White House, working closely with the CIA, sent back redactions that Feinstein and other Senate Democrats said rendered the summary unintelligible and unsupported.

Since then, the wrangling has continued behind closed doors, with projected release dates repeatedly falling by the wayside. The Huffington Post reported this week that White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, a close ally of CIA Director John Brennan, is personally leading the negotiations, suggesting keen interest in their progress — or lack thereof — on the part of Brennan and President Obama.

Human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, who interviewed a wide range of intelligence and administration officials for his upcoming book, “Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy,” told The Intercept that the White House and the CIA are hoping a Republican Senate will, in their words, “put an end to this nonsense.”

(emphasis mine)

Seriously.  This is despicable.

Barack Obama in general, and CIA Director John Brennan have no intention of letting this report see the light of day.

This is why the Senate Intel Committee should declassify the document on their own using Senate Resolution 400, which allows them to release the document with a simple majority vote.

It’s something to consider for the lame duck session.  Because if they don’t do this, or read the report in the well of the Senate, or leak it to Glenn Greenwald, there is a whole bunch of stuff that is both evil and stupid will get buried, and we will do it all again the next time.

History Repeats Itself, First as Tragedy, then as Farce.

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After having seized defeat from the jaws of victory in her race against Scott Brown for Senate in 2007, it looks like Martha Coakley is about to turn over the Governor’s Mansion to the Republicans:

National Democrats are haunted by memories of Martha Coakley’s unforced stumbles and missteps in 2010, which cost them a U.S. Senate seat in one of the country’s bluest states.

 Four laters later, the Massachusetts attorney general might be about to blow another major contest: The race to succeed Deval Patrick as governor.

 With two weeks left to go, a new poll by WBUR, which tracks the race weekly, found Coakley trailing for the first time against Republican Charlie Baker, a former health care CEO who served as secretary of finance and health under Gov. William Weld in the 1990s.

 It’s still a close contest: Baker has 43 percent while Coakley has 42 percent, well inside the poll’s 4.4 percent margin of error.

 But the troubling sign for Coakley is that Baker appears to be gaining steam down the stretch after consistently trailing throughout the campaign.

I was a bit alarmed when Coakley got the nomination, seeing as how she had run the worst campaign this side of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in 2002.

I’ve always had this suspicion that the Democratic Party establishment in Massachusetts discovered that they preferred having Speaker of the state House, and the President of the state Senate as the most senior Democrats in the state, and as such, they have subtly worked to make Republicans governor.

It’s what I call the Iron Law of Organizations Institutions, where people will work for power within an organization at the expense of the power of that organization.

Scott Walker is Betting that the People of Wisconsin are Unbelievably Stupid

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The goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, as the inestimable Charlie Pierce calls him, is trying to sell himself as a pro choice candidate:

How do you know Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is in serious re-election trouble? He just tried to declare himself pro-choice.

Of course, he didn’t use those words specifically. What the Republican governor did do, however, is attempt to repaint himself as someone who is not an extremist when it comes to abortion and birth control, despite a decade in politics that shows otherwise.

It is impossible to deny Walker has an extensive political career promoted on blocking the right to abortion and birth control access. Walker’s legacy on women has been clear: He proposed cuts to Badgercare, the health care insurance program for low-income Wisconsinites; defunding Well Women programs, which provide free preventative health care screenings to women; limiting birth control access to teens; signing anti-abortion legislation that was so restrictive that it ended all medication abortion in the state (before a court overturned it) and later attempted to closed nearly every abortion clinic. He has been a one-man war on women. Signing bills on holidays to hide his actions doesn’t change that.

Now, in the waning days of his re-election campaign, all of these moves are coming back to haunt him. Walker and his Democratic challenger, Mary Burke, continue to be tied in the polls, and, when it comes to women voters, Burke is leading him by a whopping 14 points.

………

Walker, too, has been on a personal crusade against reproductive autonomy since he stepped into office, and yes, that means birth control, too. In the most recent example he attempted to use the Hobby Lobby decision to ban birth control coverage in Wisconsin’s own insurance plans, which is mandatory under the state’s contraceptive equity law. Pile that on top of the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, quest that has shut down a number of clinics across the state that did not offer any abortion services, and it’s clear that contraception is just as big of a target to him as abortion is.

The question here is a simple one:  Whether or not the people of Wisconsin are so stupid that they cannot be trusted to cut their own meat, or not.

Anyone who buys Walker’s line of baloney about his seeing abortion and contraception as an issue between a woman and her doctor should really be kept away from pointy objects.

It’s Already Happened

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Howie Klein at Down with Tyranny observes that the Democratic Party establishment is targeting liberals, with both the DCCC and the DSCC systematically supporting conservative Dems over liberal ones, even when the numbers point toward the liberals being a more competitive candidates.

It’s clear, for example, that DCCC chairman Steve Israel feels that is more important to rebuild the Blue Dog Caucus than it is to win control of the Congress.

He then wonders the establishment would target a liberal presidential candidate and support a less electable corporate Democrat:

Which suggests an interesting thought. If a truly hard-core progressive — an Elizabeth Warren or Zephyr Teachout, say — were the party’s strongest presidential candidate, would corporate Democrats choose a lesser candidate anyway, one with a greater chance of losing, just to keep the White House in the hands of someone’s One-Percent candidate? Again, your call, but we may see that tested fairly soon.

 He’s actually wrong about this.  It already happened ……… In 1973, and not only did the party establishment not support the Liberal nominee, George McGovern, and they actively sabotaged his campaign, and tacitly supported Richard “The Human Stain” Nixon.

The corporatist wing of the Democratic Party will fight for its power within the party even at the expense of the power of the party.

This is a Sauce for the Gander Moment

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Frank Wolf (R-VA), who chairs the subcommittee that writes the Department Justice budget, has demanded an investigation of foreign money taken by think tanks:

The Justice Department should look into whether Washington think tanks may be violating federal law by accepting money from foreign governments — and then issuing reports that promote the donors’ agendas — without registering as a “foreign agent,” a senior House lawmaker has said in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.

The request, from Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, who has already criticized the Brookings Institution for taking large donations from foreign governments, puts pressure on the Justice Department to get involved in the debate, particularly given that Mr. Wolf is the chairman of the House panel that controls the Justice Department‘s budget.

The letter, sent on Wednesday, refers to an article published in The New York Times in September that detailed the tens of millions of dollars that foreign governments, including Norway and the United Arab Emirates, have donated in recent years to think tanks as those governments have sought help in highlighting their priorities in Washington.

Federal law requires any organization taking money from a foreign government and acting at its request, direction or control to file documents with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

………

He noted in the letter that money has also been included in next year’s budget bill for the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate the quality of the agency’s enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and to consider possible changes needed in the law. The legislation was first passed in 1938, based on fear that Germany was secretly funding Nazi propaganda in the United States.

The distinguished from Virginia should be aware that this can go places he does not intend.

Even ignoring the various peccadilloes of Grover Norquist, the right wing think tank ecosystem is at least as awash in foreign money as places like the Brookings Institute.

Honestly, in a perfect world, I think that we would be better off without think tanks, which on both sides of the which seem to primarily function be a full employment system for political hacks, defeated politicians, supporters of American empire, which ill serves both America and the world.

Not The Onion

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President Obama blasted Republicans as the party of “billionaires” on Tuesday while mingling with high-rollers at the $26 million estate of Rich Richman — yes, that’s his real name — in Greenwich, Conn.

Richman, who built his $10 billion company developing rental housing, lives in the Conyers Farm area, where the minimum lot size is 10 acres. Twenty-five donors paid $32,400 each to get their photo taken with the president. Others paid $10,000 for dinner.

To quote Depeche Mode, “I think that God has a sick sense of humor. “

Governor Corbet (R-PA) Picks Fights with Philadelphia Teachers to Bolster Flagging Campaign

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So, surprise, his evil minions on the Philadelphia School Reform Commission picked a fight with the teachers’ union by unilaterally abrogating their contract:

In a stunning move that could reshape the face of city schools, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission voted Monday to unilaterally cancel its teachers’ contract. The vote was unanimous.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers was given no advance word of the action — which happened at an early-morning SRC meeting called with minimal notice — and which figures to result in a legal challenge to the takeover law the SRC believes gives it the power to bypass negotiations and impose terms.

Jerry Jordan, PFT president, called the move “cowardly” and vowed to fight it strongly.

“I am taking nothing off the table,” a clearly angry Jordan said at an afternoon news conference. Job actions could be possible, once he determines what members want to do. “We are not indentured servants.”

………

Whether the state takeover law, known as Act 46, actually gives the SRC the power to cancel union contracts remains to be seen.

The SRC has imposed some work rules on the teachers’ union the past year, but has always bargained contracts since its creation in 2001.

“Unbelievable!” Ted Kirsch, president of the statewide AFT-PA and a former longtime president of the PFT, said Monday morning when he learned of the SRC’s action.

“They have mismanaged this system and now they’re following along with Corbett’s plan – it’s the teachers’ fault.”

Will Bunch, aka Attytood, responds in an analysis aptly titled, “A heartbreaking act of staggering cowardice,” and even by the standard of Pennsylvania politics, this is completely classless:

See this picture? This is what raw cowardice and utter contempt for democracy looks like.

Moments before meeting begins, crowd is mainly district staffers and journalists. pic.twitter.com/bx7TMw8jUW
— Kevin McCorry (@byKevinMcCorry) October 6, 2014



The picture was taken Monday morning and posted on Twitter by Kevin McCorry of WHYY’s Newsworks just before 9:30 a.m., at the Philadelphia School District headquarters building at 440 North Broad Street.

In a matter of seconds — in a meeting that would last all of 17 minutes, and with one hasty comment from the public — the Philadelphia School Reform Commission, the state agency that has presided over 14 years of ruination of public education here, is about to explode a political bombshell. The SRC is about to revoke its contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, and cut the teachers’ benefits — and it’s about to do it before this nearly empty room.

This is no accident. The lack of a crowd, and the lack of public debate, was an act of careful calculation. The calculation of cowards.

The meeting was called on short notice, and not announced on their web site.

Instead, it was printed in small print in the Philadelphia Inquirer classified the day before.

Finally, there is this particularly astute bit of political analysis:

The contract stalemate between the SRC and the PFT has been going on for 21 months, so why take this vote in such a rash and arrogant fashion on this particular morning, October 6, 2014? Could it be because it’s exactly 29 days before Pennsylvania votes on whether to keep Gov. Corbett — who appointed the majority on the five-member SRC — or ditch him for Democrat Tom Wolf.

Do you remember that it was just last year that a Republican firm took a secret poll and used the report to urge Gov. Corbett that there was only one way that the foundering, unpopular governor could restore his image on education issues: To confront the Philadelphia teachers union. Now, with Corbett in the political fight of his life and losing badly, the school commission led by the governor’s appointees is starting a fight with the Philadelphia teachers’ union.

What a remarkable coincidence!

Look, I know what you’re thinking — Corbett is getting clobbered so badly in the polls that what does it matter at this point. I agree — but why do NFL teams keep lobbing Hail Mary passes when they’re losing by five touchdowns? Maybe Corbett figures a tough stance will appeal to suburban voters (although most of them are too freaked out by their own sky-high property taxes to notice). Maybe he’s desperate for the chaos of a teacher’s strike, which would violate a 1992 state law. Here’s a prominent Philadelphia Republican (yes, that’s a thing, apparently) who came out practically minutes after the SRC vote saying that a) he hates (yes, hates) the union but b) pleads with them to strike. Another coincidence? A strike (which I seriously doubt will happen — look for this to be fought in court) would be devastating to tens of thousands of schoolchildren. But, hey, politics ain’t beanbag.

Corbett hopes to pick up votes by running against Philadelphia, which is, of course a dog whistle for running against people with a high amount of melanin, and the children be damned.