Category: Politics

It’s Like Having Your Mother-in-Law Drive off a Cliff in Your Brand New Car

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So, the worst “Democrat” in the Senate, Joe Manchin, has come out against Biden’s choice of Neera Tanden, the worst think tank drone ever to come out of the Clinton machine, to head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

What’s more, he has done so for the worst possible reason, because Tanden is mean to Republicans sometimes. (Her venom toward Republicans is her ONLY redeeming feature)

The awfulness of the distinguished gentleman from West Virginia is self evident, but I’ll list a bill of particulars on Tanden: (It’s an updatepast from an old post if it sounds familiar)

I am hoping for a way that they can both lose, because neither of them deserve a win ever: 

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said Friday that he would oppose Neera Tanden‘s nomination to head the White House budget office, potentially sinking her Senate confirmation.

Manchin cited Tanden’s harsh tweets about Republicans as the reason for his opposition.

“I believe her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact on the important working relationship between members of Congress and the next director of the Office of Management and Budget,” Manchin said in a statement. “For this reason, I cannot support her nomination.”>br>
………

“Neera Tanden is an accomplished policy expert who would be an excellent Budget Director and we look forward to the committee votes next week and to continuing to work toward her confirmation through engagement with both parties,” Biden press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement distributed to reporters in response to Manchin’s remarks.

No, she’s a vacuous party hack, not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

The problem is that cannot keep good staff, has never had an original idea in her life, and has an affection for bad policy and bad politics that rivles that of her old boss, Hillary Clinton.

In a CNN interview Friday afternoon, Sanders was non-committal about supporting Tanden’s nomination, saying that he would speak to her next week about “what she wants to do.” Sanders reiterated that he was less concerned with her previous rhetoric than her future actions.

And Bernie Sanders is the only person in this entire sordid affair who is behaving like a mensch, probably because he is the only one in this entire sordid affair who values anything beyond his own career.

Of Course They Are Getting Screwed

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That was the whole purpose of the massive funding for Proposition 22 in California, to get a license to treat their employees like crap.

Anyone who says that they voted for Prop 22 because they thought that it would improve the lot of the Gypsy cab drivers and food delivery folks is either a liar or an idiot:

Weeks after Proposition 22 went into effect in California and exempted some major tech firms from fully complying with labor laws, workers for rideshare and delivery apps in the state claim poor working conditions have persisted and pay has decreased.

Drivers and labor groups opposed Prop 22, saying it would allow companies to sidestep their obligations to provide benefits and standard minimum wages to their workers even as they make billions of dollars. But the measure passed at the ballot box.

“It’s clear that as soon as Prop 22 passed, it was open season to start cutting my pay again,” said Peter Young, a rideshare driver for four years in Los Angeles. “I’m looking for other work. I can’t keep doing this at this pay. I’m doing food delivery right now. Everyone is ordering food online so there’s demand. It’s just that what they are choosing to pay me isn’t reliable any more and it’s getting lower.”

………

“I was under the impression that I was going to get an additional $0.30 per mile after Prop 22,” said [Uber driver Ben] Valdez, but he hasn’t received that extra compensation because, according to Uber’s metrics, his pay exceeds their calculation of 120 percent of minimum wage.

A studyby labor economists at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2019 found Prop 22 guarantees a minimum wage of $5.64 an hour, as only engaged time is accounted for in the wage calculations.

“A lot of drivers were duped because they expected they were magically going to be able to qualify for benefits that the companies made it sound like they were going to pay for up front and that drivers were going to be getting reimbursement for the mileage,” said Valdez. “They also made drivers believe that if Prop 22 didn’t pass then Uber and Lyft were going to leave the state of California because they couldn’t afford to pay drivers as employees.”

It’s pretty simple.  The gig companies won because they lied and because they spent a lot of money.

Start collecting signatures for a repeal, and come back again, and again.

Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and have lots of venture capital money, but no meaningful profits.

Between the lies, and the limits of their VCs, eventually they will lose.

Please, אִם יְרצֵה הַשֵׁם, Henry Kissinger ( יִמַּח שְׁמו ) Next*

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Rush Limbaugh has died of cancer at the age of 70.

Finally, he has done something to improve the world:

Rush Limbaugh, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, virtually created the style of political “shock jock” radio that made him so influential. His broadcasts, featuring attacks on opponents as purveyors of what we now call “fake news”, became the template for television’s Fox News, and at its peak played a huge part in Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” of 1994, which recaptured the House of Representatives from Bill Clinton’s Democrats.

Limbaugh set the tone for the internet age of politics, calling women’s rights activists “feminazis”, referring to HIV/Aids as “Rock Hudson’s disease” and claiming “environmentalist wackos” were “a bunch of scientists organised around a political position”.

He argued that the existence of gorillas disproved evolution, characterised both the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (2010) and the mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand (2019) as “false flag” operations organised by leftists, and accused the Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe of allowing the Charlottesville rioting in 2017 to worsen in order to boost his presidential ambitions. “Have you ever noticed how composite sketches of criminals always look like [the black activist] Jesse Jackson?” he asked his listeners.

Whether he was a vile person who was revealing himself, or just an actor playing a role does not mater.

The man was a stain upon humanity.

Spoiler: This incident from early in his career shows that he was just an asshole:

Limbaugh (pronounced “LIM baw”) was born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, into a family of conservative judges that included his father, whose name was also Rush. His mother, Mildred (nee Armstrong), was the family clown, and encouraged “Rusty” in his love of radio. He did poorly at school, then quit Southeast Missouri State University after a year and found a job with a radio station in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as “Bachelor Jeff Christie”, but was fired after he told a black caller he claimed to find difficult to understand to “take the bone out of your nose and call again”.

You will not be missed.
*A loose translation is, “God willing, Henry Kissinger (May his name be effaced) Next.

Where Will You Find 5 Honest Republicans

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I cannot get to that number unless I count dead Republicans, so Nancy Pelosi’s proposal for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection seems to be dead on arrival.

One need only to back to the 911 commission, where any idea of investigation of who f%$#ed it up, and holding those individuals accountable, was thrown out the window from the get-go.

It’s not that you cannot find people in the Republican Party with enough animus directed toward Trump to call him out, but the job involves calling out the entire Republican Party establishment, and beyond the “QAnon Shaman”, I cannot think of anyone else who might be inclined to do this:

There is no more terrifying a term in Washington for anyone who wants to know what actually happened than the phrase, “blue-ribbon commission.” It raises memories of past monsters like Simpson-Bowles, [Even though Simpson-Bowles was created and structured by Barack Obama specifically to facilitate the privatization of Social Security] and Tower (Iran-Contra), and 9/11—flashy public hearings followed by reports with all the sharp edges sanded off by internal politics, followed by leaks from dissatisfied staffers in which the staffers claim that they had The Answer, if only the commission members weren’t so a) corrupt, b) partisan, and c) starstruck. In a few years, everybody gets jobs on cable news shows so they can opine on the work of the special blue-ribbon commission looking into whatever the next catastrophe is. A Blue-Ribbon Commission is the living embodiment of the concept of Better Than Nothing. From the Washington Post:

Two days after former president Donald Trump was acquitted by the Senate of inciting the deadly attack, Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled in a letter to Democratic colleagues that the House would soon consider legislation to form a commission to “investigate and report” on the attack and interference in election proceedings, as well as an appropriation to pay for enhanced security features on the Capitol grounds…

Supporters of the commission say such an initiative will have broader authority than those committees to pursue testimony from those in Trump’s orbit — voices that were not part of the impeachment inquiry. The commission will not be under the time constraints of those committee investigations as it produces its findings. Lawmakers in both parties speaking on Sunday news shows endorsed the idea for an independent investigation modeled after the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, established in 2002 by Congress and President George W. Bush, which published a report with recommendations to guard against future attacks.

The 9/11 Commission did a great job marshaling the facts in service to producing recommendations. It did not do a great job marshaling the facts in service of informing the nation about who had screwed the pooch throughout the summer and fall of 2001. And, as Pete Williams explained on MSNBC Tuesday Morning, this was an era in which bipartisanship was not entirely a curse upon the land. Co-chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean even agreed that they would only do joint appearances. And still, a substantial portion of the commission’s membership and staff fought over the still highly flammable issue of the Bush administration’s failures of responsibility. That was then. This is now. And, on Monday night, Joy Reid got her teeth down to the bone when she asked her guests which Republicans they would trust on a commission to examine the role of a Republican president* in inciting an insurrection for which their Senate brethren just this weekend largely gave him a pass. It’s a question worth asking before everybody agrees that this commission will be the final word on anything.

Bipartisan, schmipartisan.  You won’t get sh%$ out of such a commission.

The Republicans will be determined to cover up for their fellow Republicans, and the Democrats will be determined to cover up for everyone.

People Are No Longer Afraid of Rat-Faced Andy

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Democratic members of the New York House and Senate are considering rescinding the Covid powers that they granted Andrew Cuomo in the budget bill following credible allegations that he and his administration covered up nursing home deaths for political advantage.

The fact that they are considering this at all is significant, Cuomo is known for his vindictive nature, and the fact that they are considering going against him means that they think that the time is right to do this.

It may be better to be feared than liked, but at some point, if the fear goes away, and everyone hates you, things can get unpleasant: 

Some Democrats in Albany have floated the legally dubious idea of threatening to rescind Gov. Cuomo’s pandemic powers and issue subpoenas as leverage in upcoming budget negotiations.

Over the weekend, the governor’s fellow Democrats, who control both houses in the Legislature, continued to hold discussions about scaling back Cuomo’s sweeping pandemic powers after a top aide admitted the state paused the release of nursing home death data over concerns it would be politicized by the Trump administration.

Senate Dems met virtually Sunday to consider rescinding the governor’s executive authority or potentially creating a commission that could outright reject executive orders, similar to a 10-member panel used in Connecticut, sources said.

The Legislature already has the ability to overturn any COVID-related executive order via a majority vote.

On Friday, 14 Democratic state senators, including a handful from the city, joined Republicans in backing the idea of taking away Cuomo’s emergency powers before they expire in April.

………

But threatening such actions, especially subpoenas, without intent to follow through in order to influence fiscal talks could backfire big time, insiders said. “It could legally be seen as extortion,” a source said.

Yeah, much in the same way that Marty Walsh’s insisting on a concert promoter using competent workers in Boston could be legally seen as extortion? (see prior post)

………

Barclay and others have spent months demanding subpoenas, hearings or a federal probe into the state’s nursing home policies amid the pandemic.

The Cuomo administration came under renewed fire last week, facing accusations of a coverup and mounting backlash over its failure to release a full count of nursing home deaths for nearly six months.

In a call meant to bridge a growing divide with fellow Dems, the governor’s most trusted confidant, Melissa DeRosa, told lawmakers that officials “froze” last year when the Department of Justice made an inquiry into elder care facilities.

DeRosa said the administration postponed responding to legislative requests and failed to include nursing home residents who died in hospitals in publicly available data because President Trump had turned the matter “into a giant political football.”

The call came two weeks after a report from Attorney General Letitia James estimated that the state was under-counting deaths of nursing home residents by as much as 50%.

Cuomo was not concerned about Trump, he delighted in fighting with him.

This was about his attempting to cast his incompetent and corrupt management of the Covid-19 crisis (It only looked good in comparison to Donald Trump) as a triumph rather than a disaster.

New York State needs to raise taxes on the wealthy, and to end the corrupt environment that Cuomo thrives in.

I Never Realized How Much of a Menace She Was

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Former Carmen Ortiz is perhaps best known for knowingly prosecuting Aaron Swartz to death, but it turns out that she was a corrupt piece of sh%$ on a par with Trump’s worst appointments, though somehow she managed to stay in office throughout the entire Obama administration, probably due to her friendship with Eric “Place” Holder.

Among other things, she prosecuted Teamsters for picketing the show Top Chef for not using union drivers, and went after Mayor, now Labor Secretary, Marty Walsh for pressuring a concert promoter to hire experienced union workers as stage hands, claiming racketeering.  (She also made no secret of wanting to be Mayor, and Walsh’s actions followed a spate of injuries and deaths resulting from sloppy stage work, including a fire in Rhode Island that killed over 100)

Particularly after her egregious behavior in the Shwartz case, there was a lot of pressure for Obama to fire her, but she stayed on through 2017.

It is that Marty Walsh has been picked by Biden as labor secretary is a sort of nail in the coffin for whatever shred of a political career she hoped to have.

It also might be a not so subtle way of throwing some (extremely mild) shade in Obama and Holder’s way:

The last time Joe Biden was in the White House, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh seemed an unlikely nominee for a future labor secretary. Carmen Ortiz, President Barack Obama’s U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, had Walsh in her crosshairs. One summer dawn in 2016 she sent FBI agents to arrest two of his staff under a federal racketeering indictment.

The Boston Globe, New England’s most powerful news outlet, known for its coverage of the Roman Catholic Church child abuse scandals, laid siege to the mayor’s office over his labor practices and union ties. The Globe had named Ortiz its 2011 “Bostonian of the Year.” Its reporters dug their foxholes wherever she pointed, and the paper cheered on her prosecution of Walsh’s staffers.

When “Top Chef” had filmed in Boston two years earlier, Walsh visited on set with the show’s host Padma Lakshmi. Outside, the Teamsters picketed for union jobs. Ortiz indicted them, also for racketeering extortion. And in a city obsessed with haute cuisine, Ortiz leveraged star power: At trial, Lakshmi would take the stand for the prosecution.

In Boston, Ortiz was considered a rising star and was expected to run for mayor herself, a task made easier by softening Walsh up. Hey, this is Boston. If you want finesse, watch a Bruins game; if you want blood, watch a City Council race. She was regularly talked of as a top-tier statewide candidate. The only question was whether she was destined for attorney general, the Senate, the governor’s mansion, or beyond.

………

Between Kennedy’s funeral and Holder’s exile, Ortiz and her then-chief of cybercrime, Stephen Heymann, indicted internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz on 14 felony counts for allegedly downloading too many academic journal articles. Swartz had used a simple script to download academic journal articles from the platform JSTOR, which provided its articles free to anyone on the MIT network. It’s not clear Swartz even violated the company’s terms of service; finding a crime anywhere in what he did took an awfully creative prosecutor.

………

Looking to avoid a trial, Heymann compared Swartz to a rapist. By refusing to plead guilty, the line went, Swartz had “revictimized” MIT. Swartz fervently resisted, but Ortiz and Heymann had a trump card.

The Honorable Nathaniel M. Gorton is well known to the Massachusetts Bar, whose members whisper he rarely meets an indictment he doesn’t like. He’s noted as a hanging judge; prosecutors go out of their way to get high-profile cases assigned to him. A legacy admission from the Gorton’s Seafood family to Dartmouth and then Columbia Law School, he was appointed to the bench by President George H.W. Bush after Bush campaigned beside his brother Sen. Slade Gorton.

After Swartz drew Gorton, his defense lawyers told Heymann the pressure of the case had rendered Swartz suicidal, his attorney later said he told prosecutors.

“Fine, we’ll lock him up,” Heymann responded.

Swartz killed himself shortly thereafter, in January 2013.

Within days of Swartz’s death, over 61,000 people digitally signed a White House petition to fire Ortiz — a singular distinction for a U.S. attorney. The Senate and House judiciary committees pilloried her.

Ortiz told the media that she and Heymann hadn’t known Swartz was on the brink of suicide and that if they had known, things might’ve been different. (Heymann’s knowledge only surfaced much later, along with his “Fine, we’ll lock him up” response.)

Ultimately Obama refused to sack Ortiz. She in turn refused to sack Heymann, though she did pick a new chief of cybercrime. Obama thus allowed Ortiz to save face, but she never recovered politically. Try as she might, it all went downhill for her from there, eventually culminating with Biden nominating Walsh for labor secretary.

Refused to sack Ortiz, because as I have noted, Barack Obama was the worst Constitutional law professor ever. ™

Outside the Boston Globe and Ortiz’s few remaining allies, the racketeering charges against Walsh’s staff garnered Ortiz all the wrong attention.

Merriam-Webster defines a racketeer as “a person who obtains money by an illegal enterprise usually involving intimidation.”

But Ortiz never accused Walsh or his staff of pocketing anything for themselves, or for his campaign, or for his administration. The indictment instead alleged that Walsh’s staff required a producer to hire local union stagehands for an outdoor rock concert. That’s business as usual for many in the heavily unionized capital of America’s bluest state.

“Is this illegal now?” mused CBS Boston anchor Jon Keller.

Legality aside, requiring experienced stagehands familiar with the particular outdoor venue was arguably a prudent public safety measure. A few years earlier, an outdoor stage collapsed during a Sugarland show in Indiana, killing seven.

A much deadlier incident eight years before that hit closer to Boston. One hundred people perished in smoke and flames in nearby West Warwick, Rhode Island, when a nightclub named The Station burned to the ground; over 200 were injured. The blaze started when the manager of a rock band ignited indoor stage pyrotechnics.

Yet when Walsh’s office insisted on better-vetted stagehands, Ortiz tried to make a federal case out of it.

………

Those cases would continue for years after Ortiz left office. Ortiz, however, had more immediate concerns. She had to find a job outside government. The Senate was no longer in the cards.

At or near the top of Ortiz’s list was Harvard Kennedy School. Philip Heymann, Ortiz’s mentor and the father of her former cybercrime chief, was a longtime Harvard professor. And of course the school is named after the family of her late supporter, Theodore E. Kennedy. Harvard nonetheless rejected Ortiz.

You have to f%$# up pretty badly for the Kennedy School to reject a former US Attorney.

………

A while later, Padma Lakshmi failed to fully convince a Boston jury. All four Teamsters tried were acquitted.

Because picketing people who hire non-union workers is not, or at least should not be a crime.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin at first threw out the separate case against Walsh’s staff. It required a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals before it made it to trial. The second time around Sorokin deep-sixed it beyond any likely reinstatement. He ruled that the aides hadn’t received anything of benefit, so couldn’t be charged with anything.

Now Biden has driven the final nail into Ortiz’s political coffin by nominating Walsh for labor secretary despite Ortiz’s indictments — or perhaps to signal his loyalty to union organizers, he nominated Walsh because of her indictments. Either way, Ortiz is now the former prosecutor who is linked to the suicide of a once-in-a-generation talent and who fought Biden’s labor secretary nominee over his labor practices and lost. Not exactly where one wants to start a Democratic primary or confirmation hearing.

I do think that Joe Biden is sending a message with this, both about support of union activities and that he is less naive about the intersection of politics and prosecutions than was Barack Obama.

And Clinton Throws the Democrats an Anvil

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So, now that the clusterfuck known as Donald is hanging around Republican’s neck like a millstone, Hillary Clinton is busy trying to remove that particular albatross: (welcome to the Matthew Saroff mixed metaphor festival)

Hillary Clinton is trying to entice Republican voters to ditch Donald Trump by portraying him as outside the mainstream of their party, putting her at odds with congressional Democrats who want to link the party’s House and Senate candidates to Trump’s controversial brand of politics.

In a speech on Aug. 25 that flayed the Republican nominee as an outlier channeling the views of white supremacists and courting the “fringe element” of his party, Clinton invoked the names of former President George W. Bush, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Arizona Senator John McCain and former Senator Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican nominee, to set up the contrast with Trump.

Republicans who’ve already voiced their opposition to Trump welcomed having the Democratic presidential nominee make their argument—that he doesn’t represent the party or mainstream conservatism.

“I’m glad that even Hillary Clinton recognizes that this isn’t our whole party,” Katie Packer, a former adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign, wrote on Twitter. “This is strong,” Republican strategist Ana Navarro said of Clinton’s praise for past Republican nominees. “It’s easily the best speech of any candidate this year,” Tony Fratto, a former spokesman for Bush, tweeted.

It’s Bill all over again:  Throwing the party, and the party’s ideals over the cliff in the quest for personal gain.

I am so going to take a sh%$ in the ballot booth this year. (I am not speaking figuratively here.)

They Can Find it In Their Couch

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Apple was just assessed a €13 billion ($14.4 B) fine tax delinquency for using Ireland as a tax haven. Essentially the European Commission ruled that Apple received tax breaks from Ireland that amounted to an illegal subsidy to the computer and phone maker:

Apple has warned that future investment by multinationals in Europe could be hit after it was ordered to pay a record-breaking €13bn (£11bn) in back taxes to Ireland.

The world’s largest company was presented with the huge bill after the European commission ruled that a sweetheart tax deal between Apple and the Irish tax authorities amounted to illegal state aid.

The commission said the deal allowed Apple to pay a maximum tax rate of just 1%. In 2014, the tech firm paid tax at just 0.005%. The usual rate of corporation tax in Ireland is 12.5%.

“Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules,” said the European competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, whose investigation of Apple’s complex tax dealings has taken three years.

Here is where it gets weird: Ireland, which stands to benefit to the tune of €2800 for every man, woman, and child in the country is fighting this, as is the US Treasury department, which one would expect to fight this sort of illegal tax scheme:

Vestager’s ruling prompted an angry response from Apple and from Ireland and is likely to spark a political row between the US and the EU. The US Treasury said the ruling threatened to damage “the important spirit of economic partnership between the US and the EU”.

………

The commission said Ireland’s tax arrangements with Apple between 1991 and 2015 had allowed the US company to attribute sales to a “head office” that only existed on paper and could not have generated such profits.

………

The Irish government, however, wants the ruling reversed because it wants to preserve its status as a low-tax base for overseas companies.

Ireland’s finance minister, Michael Noonan, said Dublin would appeal against the ruling. He said: “The decision leaves me with no choice but to seek cabinet approval to appeal. This is necessary to defend the integrity of our tax system, to provide tax certainty to business and to challenge the encroachment of EU state aid rules into the sovereign member state competence of taxation.”

This was money laundering, pure and simple.

And this won’t really hurt Apple:

Apple, which changed its tax arrangements with Ireland in 2015, should easily be able to pay the huge tax bill because it has a cash mountain of more than $230bn (£176bn) of cash and securities, mostly held outside the US. The tech group keeps the money outside the US because it would be forced to pay US tax charges if it repatriated the money.

It’s pocket change for them, but hopefully this will make further Irish tax shenanigans less common.

I would hope that we would see some more movement in this direction, but the Obama administration, in the person of Jacob Lew, seems determined to prove that only little people pay taxes.

I Don’t Vote for Internet Trolls

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Nor do I vote for those who knowingly and deliberately employ internet trolls :

When the Internet’s legions of Hillary hecklers steal away to chat rooms and Facebook pages to vent grievances about Clinton, express revulsion toward Clinton and launch attacks on Clinton, they now may find themselves in a surprising place – confronted by a multimillion dollar super PAC working with Clinton.

 Hillary Clinton’s well-heeled backers have opened a new frontier in digital campaigning, one that seems to have been inspired by some of the Internet’s worst instincts. Correct the Record, a super PAC coordinating with Clinton’s campaign, is spending some $1 million to find and confront  social media users who post unflattering messages about the Democratic front-runner.

 In effect, the effort aims to spend a large sum of money to increase the amount of trolling that already exists online.

………

 “It is meant to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical,” said Brian Donahue, chief executive of the consulting firm Craft Media/Digital.

 “That is what the Clinton campaign has always been about,” he said. “It runs the risk of being exactly what their opponents accuse them of being: a campaign that appears to be populist but is a smokescreen that is paid and brought to you by lifetime political operatives and high-level consultants.”

 ………

 The mere mention of Correct the Record makes some critics seethe. Super PACs are typically prohibited from working in tandem with candidates, but Correct the Record is doing just that by exploiting a loophole in campaign finance law that it says permits such coordination with digital campaigns.

(emphasis mine)

I’ve spent way too much of my time online dealing with these ratf%$#s, and Hillary Clinton is paying to make more of them.

I am so glad that I do not live in a swing state.

I Am So Hoping That Matt Taibbi Is Wrong

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Unfortunately, his analysis is pretty good, so his take that Kurt Shilling is the future of the modern conservative movement is rather alarming.

This is a guy who makes Donald Trump look measured and intelligent:

Curt Schilling, cauldron-bellied baseball star turned political activist, has apparently decided to run for Senate in Massachusetts. His goal will be ousting an icon of the liberal hegemony he proudly despises.

………

If you think the white-guy grievance movement will die after Donald Trump’s likely landslide defeat this November, think again. There will be plenty of filterless, self-pitying dunces to carry the torch in Trump’s place. Schilling is a leading candidate.

His story, maybe even more than Trump’s, is a parable on the comically comprehensive inability of some to recognize the advantages us white guys enjoy.

………

More recently, Schilling worked at ESPN, where he was paid $2.5 million a year to be an analyst.

He needed the money. Soon after his playing career ended, he blew his $50 million fortune on a failed video game venture, a fiasco that cost Rhode Island taxpayers $75 million.

After that, he fell back into the ESPN gig, which should have been easy money. For all his other qualities, Schilling is an excellent baseball analyst (although, humorously, his ex-teammate and rival Pedro Martinez is better).

But Curt couldn’t keep his job. As is usually the case with people who can’t hold on to gravy-train situations, the culprit was addiction. In Schilling’s case, it wasn’t booze or pills, but line-crossing political rants.

………

Having proven incapable of running a business, being a good steward of either his own money or the taxpayers’, or holding down the world’s cushiest job, Schilling naturally decided to get into politics.

Don’t bet against him winning a Senate seat in my home state of Massachusetts, either. His would be a victory for the cause of ignorance and tone-deafness perhaps even exceeding Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination.

………

Schilling should wake up every morning and compose a five-page letter to God thanking him for the American white-guy lifestyle jackpot. Instead, he’s consumed with bitterness over the raw deal he thinks people like him have gotten.

In this, he’s very much like Donald Trump, who spent much of his adult life partying with models and celebrities and somehow emerged in late middle age as the most obdurate complainer in American history.

………

This shouldn’t be too big an ask, since (as the likes of Trump and Schilling regularly prove) American white men still mostly run the world and live highly failure-resistant existences. Just take yes for an answer, enjoy the ride, and try to have the decency to not act like a victim; that’s all anyone asks.

But they can’t do it. The Schilling/Trump principle is never shutting up, particularly on topics about which they are ignorant, which is pretty much all of them. This is a movement, not limited to Trump, and it’s not going to end anytime soon. God help us.

If Taibbi is right, and I think that he is, this likely is an indicator of a society in precipitous decline into absurdity and obscurity.

And Now We Have Very Serious People Coming Out Against the TPP

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So, now we have a former Reagan and Clinton trade official and a retired general arguing that the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is a security risk to the United States because it will hasten the hollowing out of American manufacturing, which makes the US dependent on foreign manufacturers in places like China and Vietnam for the crucial building blocks of military equipment.

This is a rather interesting counterpoint to the Obama administration’s argument that we have to pass the TPP as a counter weight to Chinese influence in the region.

The first OP/ED appeared in the New York Times. The second appeared in The Hill.

It doesn’t get any more establishment than that.

I’m actually beginning to think that Obama won’t be able to get it through during the lame duck session.

I hope that this is not irrational optimism.

Pass the Popcorn

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First, we have Trump’s campaign manager turfed out in large part because of his lobbying dealings with the former President of the Ukraine.

Now we have a The Podesta Group, founded by Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, and run by his brother Tony Podesta, lawyering up over their involvement with the same corrupt dirtbag:

A prominent D.C. lobbying firm has hired outside counsel over revelations that it may have been improperly involved in lobbying on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians who also employed former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

As first reported by BuzzFeed, the Podesta Group announced Friday that it has retained law firm Caplin & Drysdale to investigate whether or not the lobbying firm unwittingly did work for the pro-Russian political party in Europe that also hired Manafort.

“Unwittingly” my ass.

………

Working on behalf of the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, the Podesta Group lobbied in Washington for positions favored by the pro-Russian political party, of which deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych was a member. The lobbying work ended in 2014 after Yanukovych fled Ukraine for Russia, where he remains in exile.

The problem here, as it often is in the world of lobbying, is not what is illegal, but what is legal.

Manafort and Podesta are peas in a pod that only differ in their client list.

Sh%$ I Don’t Care About

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Musical chairs amongst the hired guns at political campaigns.

I get it: Paul Manafort, Trump’s now-former campaign manager has resigned.

This is definitely news, and it should be covered by normal news sources.  (I am not a news source, I am an essayist whose writing is driven by lazy thinking, dubious sourcing sourcing, and the worst writing on the internet™.)

I just don’t think that it should be page 1 news, even below the fold on a slow news day:  It’s just inside baseball.

This is Angela Merkel Desperately Trying to Salvage Her Electoral Chances

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Frau Merkel* has signed onto a proposal to ban face veils from public places in Germany:

Europe’s battle over public attire for Muslim women moved on Friday from the outcry over banning “burkinis” in France to a strong call from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing conservative bloc for a ban in Germany on face veils in schools and universities and while driving.

The German proposal, announced by the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, was clearly driven by an intensifying political season and a surge in support for the far right since Germany accepted more than a million refugees last year. There has been mounting public anxiety over integrating the refugees, who are mostly from Muslim countries, particularly after a series of terrorist assaults and a gun rampage last month.

………

Yet the proposals now being floated in Germany around restricting the burqa make it clear that France is not the only European country grappling with whether some Islamic coverings amount to a barrier to the full participation of women in Western society.

Ms. Merkel had sent a signal about the partial ban on face veils on Thursday, when she told a group of provincial newspapers that “from my standpoint, a fully veiled woman scarcely has a chance at full integration in Germany.”

Mr. de Maizière said the same day that “the burqa doesn’t fit with our country and does not correspond to our understanding of the role of women.”
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Mr. de Maizière and Ms. Merkel stopped short of calling for an outright ban on the burqa, but the proposal put forward on Friday tiptoes along a path that the French traveled down with a 2010 law that barred any covering that hides the face.

………

The German plan would not ban shawls or abayas that cover the body and are often worn with a hijab, a head scarf that does not cover the face, which German officials acknowledge would not win approval from the country’s constitutional court.

It would ban full face veils in schools and colleges, and while driving, appearing before courts or at public registry offices, or when going through passport control. Women who want to wear a face veil in public should not teach or become civil servants, Mr. de Maizière said in announcing the plan on morning television.

“We want to make it a legal requirement to show your face in places where that is necessary for the cohesion of our society,” he said.

He was flanked by the conservative leaders of two states with elections next month — Lorenz Caffier of the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Frank Henkel of the city-state of Berlin. Both men are running on strong law-and-order platforms and had called for a ban on veils.

This is all about the elections.

Merkel has managed to burn through a lot of good will from the German electorate with her handling of the Syrian refugee crisis, and this is an attempt at damage control.

*Horses whinnying.

How Utterly Proper

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Hillary Clinton has selected right wing pro-fracking pro TPP DINO Ken Salazar to head her transition team:

Two big issues dogged Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary: the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) and fracking. She had a long history of supporting both.

Under fire from Bernie Sanders, she came out against the TPP and took a more critical position on fracking. But critics wondered if this was a sincere conversion or simply campaign rhetoric.

Now, in two of the most significant personnel moves she will ever make, she has signaled a lack of sincerity.

She chose as her vice presidential running mate Tim Kaine, who voted to authorize fast-track powers for the TPP and praised the agreement just two days before he was chosen.

And now she has named former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team — the group tasked with helping set up the new administration should she win in November. That includes identifying, selecting, and vetting candidates for over 4,000 presidential appointments.

As a senator, Salazar was widely considered a reliable friend to the oil, gas, ranching and mining industries. As interior secretary, he opened the Arctic Ocean for oil drilling, and oversaw the botched response to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since returning to the private sector, he has been an ardent supporter of the TPP, while pushing back against curbs on fracking.

He said this:

“We know that, from everything we’ve seen, there’s not a single case where hydraulic fracking has created an environmental problem for anyone,” Salazar told the attendees, who included the vice president of BP America, another keynote speaker at the conference. “We need to make sure that story is told.”

He is ignoring many cases of contaminated water, including some cases where the water would burn.

And he claims that there is not one single case of a problem.

As interior secretary, he was waiving environmental reviews for BP project as its as its Deepwater Horizon was still spewing thousands of barrels a day in to the Gulf of Mexico,

And this ratf%$# will be vetting her staff, which means that in a very real way, he will have more impact on the shape of her administration than anyone but her.

If you think that Clinton is a progressive, I have some of Donald Trump’s debt to sell you.

I Cannot Imagine Any of My Elected Officials Doing This

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While riding in a crowded train on a three hour trip to debate with his opponent for Labour leadership, Jeremy Corbyn spent 3 hours sitting on the floor rather than upgrading to first class:

Spending a busy train journey without a seat, crushed up against other commuters in the aisle, or crouched uncomfortably in the luggage compartment is an all-too-common experience for many. But you don’t expect to spot the leader of the opposition on the floor of a train on your way to work.

Jeremy Corbyn, famed for standing up for his principles, sat down for them last week, along with 20 other seatless commuters on a three-hour train journey from London to Newcastle.

In a video shot as he was on his way to debate with Owen Smith in the Labour leadership hustings in Gateshead, Corbyn is seen sitting on the floor of the train, a coffee and brown paper bag at his feet, reading Private Eye. The freelance filmmaker Yannis Mendez, who has been following Corbyn and volunteers for his campaign, filmed the footage.

From his spot on the floor, which he chose rather than upgrading to first class, Corbyn turns to the camera and says: “This is a problem that many passengers face every day, commuters and long-distance travellers. Today this train is completely ram-packed. The staff are absolutely brilliant, working really hard to help everybody.

“The reality is there are not enough trains, we need more of them – and they’re also incredibly expensive.” He said the whole experience was a good case for public ownership.

Later, Corbyn said: “Is it fair that I should upgrade my ticket whilst others who might not be able to afford such a luxury should have to sit on the floor? It’s their money I would be spending after all.”

I cannot for the life of me imagine why the voters are choosing him over the posh clueless assholes from the Parliamentary Labour Party.

Somehow, the geniuses who lost the last two elections, and have converted Scotland from a Labour fortress to Terra Incognita, think that Corbyn is going to lose them an election.

I don’t know whether or not  Corbyn will win the next election, but I do know that the Labour establishment will find a way to lose.

Damn

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The Labour Executive Council won its appeal, so 130,000 new Labour members will not be able to vote in the next leadership election:

Labour’s ruling body has won its bid to overturn a high court decision allowing new party members to vote in the forthcoming leadership election, a ruling that could bar tens of thousands of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn from voting in the ballot.

The ruling by three court of appeal judges, Lord Justice Beatson, Lady Justice Macur and Lord Justice Sales, will mean 130,000 new members who joined less than six months ago will not be able to vote in the forthcoming poll between Corbyn and Owen Smith for the Labour leadership.

Corbyn’s campaign condemned the decision as wrong “both legally and democratically”, warning that it threatened to disenfranchise members who were explicitly told upon joining the party that they would have a vote in any leadership election.

“Crucial to the outcome today was the introduction of a new argument by the Labour party HQ’s lawyers, who invoked an obscure clause in the Labour party rules (chapter 4, clause II, 1A), which could be read as giving the NEC the right to ignore all of the rules laid out for leadership elections,” a campaign spokesman said.

“In other words, this is a ‘make it up as you go along’ rule. We do not think that making it up as you go along is a reasonable way to conduct democracy in our party.”

I still think that Corbyn will win, but I think that it will be a much closer thing.

Damn! The NORML Tinfoil Hat Fits!

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One of the under-reported facts in the DNC email leaks was that the alcohol lobby was working aggressively with the DNC to foreclose any move toward legalization:

The WikiLeaks release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is causing quite a stir for Hillary Clinton after some of the messages appeared to show the supposedly neutral committee favoring her presidential campaign over that of primary rival Bernie Sanders.

But the emails also contain a juicy tidbit for followers of the increasingly prominent debate about marijuana legalization.

One message sent to DNC Finance Director Jordon Kaplan shows that the alcohol industry is spending money to get members of Congress to pay attention to marijuana-impaired driving.

………

While the excerpt from a public email newsletter is not exactly a secret like the internal DNC messages are, it is a revealing window into the alcohol industry’s apparent concern over the marijuana policy reform movement’s increasing success.

Pro-legalization advocates have long speculated that as criminalization and stigma disappear, many adults will choose to use marijuana instead of drink alcohol, which could lead to diminishing profits for beer, wine and liquor manufacturers and sellers.

The Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America’s website calls marijuana policy a “key issue” and its annual convention last year featured a panel titled, “Everything You Need to Know about Marijuana Legalization.” A press release said the session would cover “how marijuana legalization could impact another socially sensitive product: beverage alcohol.”

………

WSWA represents companies in the middle of the three tiers: Distributors who buy alcohol from producers and then place it into retail establishments where consumers shop.

“Without a similarly robust system, the marijuana market could present the potential for illicit and unregulated activity akin to that which occurred with alcohol prior to and during Prohibition,” the group’s site says. “Accordingly, WSWA stands ready to serve as a resource for states in explaining the merits of the three tier system as a systematic and effective regulatory framework.”

So WSWA isn’t necessarily opposed to legalization. It just seems to want to be the middleman between producers and retail sellers — and to grab a piece of the profits along the way.

So not a surprise.

Seriously? Boasting About an Endorsement from John f%$#ing Negroponte?

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It appears that the latest endorsement for Hillary Clinton from the “Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity” crowd is in, and her campaign is crowing about John Negroponte’s Endorsement, probably because Henry Kissinger was busy:

In her continuing tour of the dingier side of the 20th Century American diplomatic elite, Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up the endorsement on Wednesday of one John Negroponte. ………

 ………

 Well, that’s special, isn’t it? And what did Negroponte do while serving “in numerous diplomatic and national security positions starting in 1960”? I’m glad you asked.

 In the 1980s, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras. In addition to (at best) covering for that country’s murderous autocrats, he also served the Reagan Administration by helping to turn Honduras into a staging area for American-trained death squads in places like El Salvador and Guatemala. (Remember, Eugene Hasenfus was flying out of a base in Honduras when he got shot down over Nicaragua, which is when the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise began to unravel.)………

 In any case, the essential Robert Parry has been dogging this story for nearly 40 years now. From In These Times:

Given the human rights records of the Honduran military and the Nicaraguan contras who set up shop in Honduras during Negroponte’s tenure as ambassador in the early ’80s, he will have no moral standing as a public official who repudiates abusive interrogation techniques and brutal counterinsurgency tactics. Indeed, some cynics might suggest that’s one of the reasons Bush picked him. Negroponte’s work in Honduras means, too, that he will come to his new job with a history of forwarding inaccurate intelligence to Washington and leaving out information that would have upset the upper echelon of the Reagan-Bush administration. For his part, Negroponte, who is now 65, has staunchly denied knowledge of “death squad” operations by the Honduran military in the ’80s.

 In 1983, in another move that helped the Honduran military and the contras, the Reagan-Bush administration closed down the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) office at the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, just as Honduras was emerging as an important base for cocaine transshipments to the United States. “Elements of the Honduran military were involved … in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,” is how a Senate Foreign Relations investigative report, issued in 1989 by a subcommittee headed by Sen. John Kerry, put it. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S. government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.” It’s unclear what role Negroponte played in shutting down the DEA office in Honduras during his time as U.S. ambassador, but it is hard to imagine that a step of that significance could have occurred without at least his acquiescence.

 ………

 “Given what we know about the extent and nature of Honduran human rights abuses, to say that Mr. Negroponte was less than forthcoming in his responses to my questions is being generous,” said Dodd. “I was also troubled by Ambassador Negroponte’s unwillingness to admit that—as a consequence of other U.S. policy priorities—the U.S. Embassy, by acts of omissions, end[ed] up shading the truth about the extent and nature of ongoing human rights abuses in the 1980s. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had no such reluctance in assigning blame to the Honduran government during its adjudication of a case brought against the government of Honduras [in 1987],” [Senator Christopher] Dodd said.

Hillary Clinton has been completely captured by they dysfunctional, immoral, and incompetent foreign policy consensus that has been mismanaging our foreign policy since the 1960s.

This The Best and the Brightest crap really needs to end.

It has produced nothing but death and misery and failure.

Corbyn Just Scored Some Major Wins

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He just won a court case over voting rights for members and his supporters slate swept the elections for Labour’s executive committee:

Jeremy Corbyn has consolidated his grip on the Labour party after he won the first round of the latest high court battle over the rules of the leadership contest – and his supporters swept the board in elections to the party’s ruling National Executive Committee.

After another day of twists and turns in the fierce battle for the future of the party, some of Corbyn’s critics among Labour MPs were privately saying his position now appeared unassailable.

The next step by the Blairites and their ilk will be to actively sabotage the next election, because they will keep the Tories in power forever to keep their privileged positions within the party.