Category: Stupid

You Cannot Make this Sh%$ Up

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Ted Cruz just engaged in a mammoth talk on the Senate floor, (it was not a filibuster) talking about the evils of Obamacare.

At one point, he read from the children’s classic Green Eggs and Ham, while talking about how awful the PPACA will be.

As Senator Claire McCaskill observed, Ted Cruz does not get the Dr. Seuss story, which is all about not prejudging things:

During Sen. Ted Cruz’ marathon talk-a-thon, he dramatically read one of his children’s favorite books, Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham, saying it was a good-night story for his children.

How ironic, Sen. Claire McCaskill, remarked on Morning Joe, that the Texas Republican used that book in a marathon speech opposing a healthcare reform bill he has never tried.

“I went the University of Missouri, I did not go to Harvard, but I’ll tell you that my daughter texted me this morning and said ‘Mom, does he not know the point of the story?’” the Missouri Democrat said.

In the classic Seuss novel, a grumpy character declares “I do not like them, Sam-I-am. I do not like green eggs and ham…I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere.”

Eventually, the character tries the green eggs and ham to appease his persistent friend and finds that he quite likes them: “I like green eggs and ham! I do! I like them, Sam-I-am!”

“It’s that you can’t knock things till you try it,” McCaskill said with a smile. “It’s ironic that he used that in the filibuster because I think when people realize how the these exchanges are going to work…It’s all private insurance companies on these exchanges.”

Not only reading Seuss on the Senate floor, but getting it wrong.

Theodore Seuss Geisel must be spinning in his grave.

Machiavelli Explains Syria

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It now appears that rebels in Syria have found the “leadership” in exile to be incompetent self-serving leeches:

With empty pockets and clothes smudged with dirt, the Syrian rebel fighter smuggled himself across the border and traveled 18 hours by bus to plead with Syrian opposition leaders meeting in a luxury hotel here to send help back home.

The fighter, Hassan Tabanja, a former electrician, needed money to provide food, weapons and ammunition for dozens of men fighting alongside him against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. But after two days of scant results at the main opposition coalition’s meeting here last weekend, Mr. Tabanja sat on the patio glaring at the men in suits all around him.

What they had provided, he said, “will barely get me back to Syria.”

For Mr. Tabanja and many other government opponents inside Syria, the leaders of the coalition who claim to represent them abroad have long seemed detached from their suffering, and frugal or mysterious with the money they have raised. As the leaders have shuttled among world capitals and bickered in fancy hotels, they have appeared increasingly powerless to affect the course of Syria’s war: more than 100,000 people have died, millions have been displaced, and extremist groups are gaining ground.

The leaders complain that their efforts to win recognition and support have been thwarted by the world’s indifference and the competing agendas of their own tightfisted patrons, but their words have failed to assuage many of the people relying on them for help.

“It’s a political game,” said Mr. Tabanja, after he was shooed away by guards surrounding Ahmad al-Jarba, the leader of the main opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition. “They are like puppets in the hands of their enemies,” he said. “They are prolonging the presence of Assad.”

I will remind you what Nicolo Machiavelli said about exiles:

A prince should therefore be slow in undertaking any enterprise upon the representations of exiles, for he will generally gain nothing by it but shame and serious injury.

We could have learned this from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Or we could just have read Machiavelli, is one of the found figures of the study of governments.

Seriously, this sh%$ is literally governance 101.

The New York Times Ratf%$#s* Bill de Blasio

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It appears that they are (I’m not joking here) accusing Bill de Blasio of having been a commie during the 1980s:

The scruffy young man who arrived in Nicaragua in 1988 stood out.

 He was tall and sometimes goofy, known for his ability to mimic a goose’s honk. He spoke in long, meandering paragraphs, musing on Franklin D. Roosevelt, Karl Marx and Bob Marley. He took painstaking notes on encounters with farmers, doctors and revolutionary fighters.

 Bill de Blasio, then 26, went to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine in the middle of a war between left and right. But he returned with something else entirely: a vision of the possibilities of an unfettered leftist government.

 As he seeks to become the next mayor of New York City, Mr. de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, has spoken only occasionally about his time as a fresh-faced idealist who opposed foreign wars, missile defense systems and apartheid in the late 1980s and early 1990s. References to his early activism have been omitted from his campaign Web site.

 But a review of hundreds of pages of records and more than two dozen interviews suggest his time as a young activist was more influential in shaping his ideology than previously known, and far more political than typical humanitarian work.

………

By the beginning of 1990, Mr. de Blasio had a foot in two worlds — government official by day, activist by night.

He was becoming a part of the institution he had railed against — the establishment — as a low-level aide to Mr. Dinkins in City Hall. On the side, he helped raise funds for the Nicaragua Solidarity Network and forge alliances between New York and Nicaraguan labor unions.

And they f%$#ing put it on the f%$#ing front page.

Gee the US government was funding terrorist operations against the Sandinistas, and they did so in violation of the law.

I think that maybe some of the more overpaid New York Times staffers are upset that de Blasio won’t be genuflecting to the rich like Bloomberg did.

*It’s a term for political dirty tricks, allegedly made popular by Nixon dirty trickster Roger Stone.

Your Syria Update

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Let us start with the thought that maybe Binyamin Netanyahu should tell his political allies to shut the F%$# up:

‘Israel wanted Assad gone since start of Syria civil war’

 “Tehran-Damascus-Beirut arc is the greatest danger,” says outgoing Israeli envoy to US Michael Oren.

 “Bad guys” backed by Iran are worse for Israel than “bad guys” who are not supported by the Islamic Republic, Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US Michael Oren told The Jerusalem Post in a parting interview.

 Oren, in the interview that is to be published in full on Friday, traced the evolution of Israel’s message on Syria during the three weeks of the chemical weapons crisis.

 “The initial message about the Syrian issue was that we always wanted [President] Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran,” he said.

 This was the case, he said, even if the other “bad guys” were affiliated to al-Qaida.

Seriously. In one interview, he dissed the United States by saying that al Qaida is not that bad, and effectively endorses Bashir Assad, because if Israel is for it, then the Arab world is against it.

Oh, for f%$# sake, shut the f%$# up!

BTW, in the whole soft on terrorist sh%$, we have Obama waiving the rule against supplying weapons to terrorists:

President Obama, in order to arm Al-Qaeda linked Syrian rebels, has waived a provision of federal law designed to prevent the supply of arms to terrorist groups. Not surprisingly, federal law currently bans giving weapons to terrorists. Though it seems Obama does have the authority to bypass the restriction and he is choosing to do so by arming the Syrian rebels who have links to Al Qaeda, a group still listed as supporting terrorism.

The president, citing his authority under the Arms Export Control Act, announced today that he would “waive the prohibitions in sections 40 and 40A of the AECA related to such a transaction.”
Those two sections prohibit sending weaponry to countries described in section 40(d): “The prohibitions contained in this section apply with respect to a country if the Secretary of State determines that the government of that country has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism,” Congress stated in the Arms Control Export Act.

The Syrian rebels not only include factions that are explicitly loyal to Al Qaeda but, according to US intelligence and experts analysts, those factions are now dominant within the opposition. So it is highly likely that some of the arms being shipped into Syria right now by the CIA will fall into the hands of Syrian rebels loyal to Al Qaeda.

This has epic fail written all over it.

As to the UN report it is not conclusive, but it does point toward the Syrian government as being the perps.  Note however though that some people disagree with this strongly.

I’ve looked at the UN report, I have a number of thoughts:
It’s 41 pages long, and pages 9-41 are appendices.  (I like this format, it allows you to take in the information quickly.)

  • It’s definitely Sarin.  The processes and technology are solid.
  • They were scrupulous in maintaining a chain of custody.
  • There are mentions of “interesting chemicals” in addition to decomposition products of Sarin.  

I would assume that this would be stabilizers and production impurities, but my knowledge of the chemistry of chemical weapons is limited.  (I’m sort of in the “biz”, but I just package detection methods, and so have a limited knowledge of the chemistry)

As such, the “interesting” chemicals that could present a clearer picture of how the agents were manufactured and stored.

This would probably give some better indications as to the who produced the agents.

In any case, it appears that my earlier assessment, where I fingered the rebels, now appears to be somewhat less likely.

Idiot of the Day

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David Ignatius:

You can think this new American caution is potentially dangerous (as I do), but there’s no arguing that it’s deeply felt and (given the immense cost and almost nonexistent benefits of war in Iraq and Afghanistan) understandable. The question is what a president should do about it.

It’s dangerous to avoid costly wars with no benefits.

Seriously, what the f%$# is the problem in Washington, DC?

There seems to be a conventional wisdom that in order for us to be “centrist”, we have to bomb the sh%$ out of people just because, or just because the President made a stupid, “Red Line,” comment at a news conference.

Just how small are their penises anyway?

H/t Atrios.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

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Have you heard, in preparation with negotiations with the Russians over Syria, John Kerry is seeking advice from Henry Kissinger.

Yes, that Henry Kissinger.

The man who orchestrated our dropping more bombs on Cambodia than we had on Germany during WWII.

The man who did his level best to bring the murderous psychopath Agusto Pinochet to power.

The man who did his best to cover up the facts of the terrorist attack in Washington DC conducted by the Pinochet government. (Orlando Letalier assassination)

The man who sabotaged peace talks between North Vietnam and the US in 1968 for political advantage.

An avowed enemy of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, for whom John Kerry was the public face at a critical juncture.

And then there are the accusations that Kissinger was complicit in numerous crimes against humanity in much of Latin America.

This ……… is ……… ……… ……… ………

I have no words.

It Has Been 12 Years, Stop Waving the Bloody Shirt

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It is not my intent to demean the feelings of people who suffered personal losses on September 11, 2001, but the rest of us have to attempt a modest return to sanity.

As I have noted before, we as a society have been driven to insanity by this, and it has convinced us  to commence destroying ourselves. (Read the book Wasp by Eric Frank Russell)

The deaths on 911 are less than:

As to the last item, think about how many of this children we could have saved by spending just one tenth of the roughly $4 Trillion spend on this.

It’s normal to freak out after something like 911, but we are still freaking out 12 years later.

We need to chill out, and deal with the reality we have, not the reality we want to have.

It’s Not Like it Was Important, It’s Just an Execution

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So Florida Attorney General had a fundraising meeting, so she delayed an execution:

There is no graver responsibility and act of state government than an execution.

In Florida this week, a campaign fundraiser takes precedence.

Attorney General Pam Bondi persuaded Gov. Rick Scott to postpone an execution scheduled for tonight because it conflicted with her re-election kick-off reception.

“What’s going on down there? It’s ridiculous,” said Phyllis Novick, the Ohio mother of one of Marshall Lee Gore’s victims, when told Monday about the reason for the delay.

Gore, 50, raped, strangled and stabbed 30-year-old Robyn Novick in 1988 before dumping her body into a Miami-Dade County trash heap. Gore was also sentenced to die for the slaying of 19-year-old Susan Roark, whose body was found a few months later in Columbia County.

Gore was initially scheduled for execution in June, but the date was twice delayed because of legal skirmishes over Gore’s sanity.

I have mixed emotions.

I oppose the death penalty, I see a delay to an execution as a good thing, but postponing an execution so that you can raise money?!?!

Damn, that is cold.

Not Enough Bullets………

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In the New York City Mayoral primary, Bill De Blasio, the New York City Public Advocate, is leading in all the polls.

In fact, he is leading by enough that, in a 9 candidate race, he has a shot to clear the 40% requirement in a runoff, is rather telling.

It is heartening that in the home of Wall Street an unabashed liberal appears likely to be the next Mayor of New York.

One of his central proposals is to, “Increase the city’s income tax on wealthy residents earning over $500,000, from 3.86 percent to 4.41 percent,” (PDF) to fund universal preschool.

If you do the math, you will realize that this means an additional $2750.00 in taxes for someone earning a million dollars a year, basically chump change, particularly amongst the well to do in New York.

However, it appears the suggestion that the rich and very rich toss a few more pennies toward public resources has hurt the feeling of rich self absorbed assholes:

When New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio first proposed taxing the rich so every child in the city could attend all-day preschool, it was October and he had support from fewer than 10 percent of Democrats in polls.

 Now he leads the pack. And some of the wealthy New Yorkers who’d pay more under his plan say it bewilders and offends them.

Oh, it offends them, their delicate feelings are hurt.

F%$# that.

“It shows lack of sensitivity to the city’s biggest revenue providers and job creators,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a network of 200 chief executive officers, including co-Chairman Laurence Fink of BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world’s biggest money manager.

I am so concerned that we are being insufficiently “sensitive” to the parasites from Wall Street.

E.E. “Buzzy” Geduld, who runs the hedge fund Cougar Capital LLC in the city and is a trustee of Manhattan’s Dalton School, where annual tuition tops $40,000, said de Blasio’s plan “is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard” and “not a smart thing to do.”

Yes, because someone who can afford $40,000.00 for a year at private school, will be absolutely destroyed by a 0.55% increase in their taxes on income over ½ a million dollars a year.

De Blasio first presented his tax plan to a quiet audience attending his Oct. 4 speech to the Association for a Better New York, a real-estate developers’ civic group. He called on them, as some of the city’s wealthiest individuals, to provide about $532 million for universal all-day pre-kindergarten and after-hours middle-school programs.

About 20,000 of New York’s 68,000 four-year-olds get city-funded full-day pre-kindergarten classes, with 38,000 enrolled in three-hour programs and 10,000 in none. The added pre-K slots would cost roughly $342 million, de Blasio said.

It’s rather telling that George Soros has contributed to De Blasio campaign. I think that he earns a decent salary.

Additionally, that raving Bolshevik Ben Bernanke has endorsed increased pre-school and after school programs as well.

What a bunch or useless self-absorbed jerks.  I would call them schmucks, but a schmuck has a head.

This almost Makes Me Miss Condoleeza Rice

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Some times, the stupid just just overwhelms me.

Normally, it’s a group effort, but recently, John Kerry has been a on a particular reprehensible roll:

Secretary of State John Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee today that he “often” agrees with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, despite taking issue with his most recent column on the Syria conflict.

 ………

 “So with all due respect to Tom Friedman, Who is Most Often Correct, on this occasion, it is absolutely vital that we send the message and deteriorate his capacity,” Kerry concluded.

Seriously.

This almost makes me ………………

Hell, I need some better drugs to handle this sh%$.

Mission Creep Already?

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Now we have Barack Obama saying that “limited and proportional strikes” will create Freedumb:

President Barack Obama said Tuesday that “limited, proportional” military strikes against Syria would degrade President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons capabilities and allow that nation to “free itself” from political conflict.

And we have John Kerry leaving an opening for boots on the ground:

Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday appeared to leave the door open to the U.S. deploying ground troops in Syria in the event the country “imploded, for instance.”

“In the event Syria imploded, for instance or in the event there was a threat of a chemical weapons cache falling into the hands of somebody else and it was clearly in the interest of our allies — all of us, the British, the French, and others. I don’t want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to the President of the United States to secure our country,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, debating whether to authorize President Barack Obama’s punitive strike in response to a reported chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime.

Asked by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), the ranking Republican on the committee, whether the secretary of state truly believed combat troops could be an option, Kerry walked the comment back by saying he was only “thinking out loud.”

Yeah, like that is reassuring.

This is so going to turn into a complete cluster-f%$#.

Obama’s “Independent Panel” to Review Domestic Spying Isn’t

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Outside experts, you say?
Note: this is the actual caption of the photo used in Washington Post story

As you may be aware, Obama has promised to bring in “Outside Experts.” What will surprise no one, including the graphic editors at the Washington Post, (See pic and caption) is that these “experts” are all
tightly connected to the administration or the state security apparatus:

ABC reports that the Obama administration’s surveillance review panel will include former intelligence and White House staffers, including Michael Morell, Richard Clarke, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire. An official announcement of the members of the panel is expected soon.

 The review panel was first announced in a White House press conference on Aug. 9, when Obama said the administration would form “a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies.”

 Privacy advocates aren’t happy with the composition of the group revealed so far. Some privacy groups believe that the White House will insist on all members having top secret clearances, effectively barring most independent privacy watchdogs from consideration for the panel.

 Amie Stepanovich, director of the domestic surveillance project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) found the choices reported by ABC troubling:

An independent evaluation of the NSA’s surveillance programs is needed. But a worthwhile review requires an independent team of evaluators. We continue to learn how each of the oversight mechanisms that the Administration has pointed to have continuously failed. The background of this panel indicates that it, too, is unlikely to be meaningful or effective.

True dat.

First, it was James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, a man who unequivocally perjured himself to Congress over the program who was supposed to run the program, but when there was too much push-back over that, so they backed off, and now they have a panel of faux independent experts.

It’s so bad that the some anonymous graphic editor felt compelled to call out the lie in the accompanying photograph.

The Post also reports an interesting factoid about Cass Sunstein, one of the proposed members, has written a paper supporting the idea of government paid trolls to combat the tin-foil hat conspiracy crowd:

The Obama administration is reportedly proposing Cass Sunstein as a member of a panel to review the surveillance practices of the National Security Agency (NSA), among other former White House and intelligence staffers. Sunstein was the head of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs until last year, when he returned to teaching at Harvard Law School.

 As one of our intrepid commenters pointed out yesterday, while at Harvard in 2008, Sunstein co-authored a working paper that suggests government agents or their allies “cognitively infiltrate” conspiracy theorist groups by joining ”chat rooms, online social networks or even real-space groups” and influencing the conversation.

 Sunstein’s paper defined a conspiracy theory as “an effort to explain some event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role,” and acknowledges that some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true. It also specifically notes that his plan of “cognitive infiltration” should only be used against false conspiracy theories that could be harmful to the government or society.

The Washington Post is perhaps the 2nd most authoritative source (Politico being number 1) of the vapid blather that qualifies as villager “wisdom” in Washington, DC, and their pattern is to be relentlessly support of the security state, so this is a statement against interest.

What they are saying is not that Obama cannot be trusted, they are saying something far more radical, that the Obama administration’s statements are simply laughable.

They have quite literally become a laughing stock of the “very serious people”.

What a Surprise, General Alexander Lied

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The NSA still is not sure what information Edward Snowden took from the NSA, despite the firm assurances of NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander:

More than two months after documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden first began appearing in the news media, the National Security Agency still doesn’t know the full extent of what he took, according to intelligence community sources, and is “overwhelmed” trying to assess the damage.

Officials, including NSA Director Keith Alexander, have assured the public that the government knows the scope of the damage, but two separate sources briefed on the matter told NBC News that the NSA has been unable to determine how many documents he took and what they are.

Sources said authorities believe the trove of unreleased materials includes details of data collection by U.S. allies, including the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These English-speaking allies, known along with the U.S. as the “Five Eyes,” are critical to U.S. intelligence efforts.

So, not only is the NSA lying with impunity, but they cannot find their ass with both hands.

That makes me feel much better about their spying on me.

What a Bunch of Misogynistic Assholes

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In the Washington Post, Neil Irwin looks at the Federal Reserve Chairman selection process, and discovers that the Obama administration is full of a bunch of sexist assholes:

Why don’t they like Janet Yellen?

  • She actually has an opinion, “Yellen has a perfectly solid relationship with Bernanke, as best as I can tell, but she’s more of her own thinker within the institution.“
    • Because a Fed Chair should not have their own opinions?  (The Fed Chair is supposed to be independent).  I call this the “Uppity Woman” objection.
  • She has never been a part of the Obama “team”, as in “They are big on the team player concept, people diving in together to sort through the hard and messy challenges they face……… In the early months of the Obama administration, the same could be said of the group that included Geithner, Summers, Gene Sperling and others who are now influential voices advising the president on the decision.“
    • Notice, not a woman in the group.  Romer and Bair were marginalized too.
  •  She is too cautious and well prepared, “A second, and related, reason that Yellen’s leadership style isn’t a great mesh with the Obamaites is also one of her strengths. She is always meticulously prepared, a careful and systematic thinker who chooses her words carefully. In a Fed policy committee meeting or a gathering of international central bankers, she typically scripts herself in advance and reads those prepared comments. ……… She is methodical, not manic.“
    • Let me get this straight, they WANT a shoot from the hip, shoot from the hip loose cannon at Fed Chair?   This is the last thing you want from a Federal Reserve Chairman, or for that matter any central banker in any nation.  They are asking for something that would not pass muster for a central banker for Zimbabwe!
  • And then there is concerns about policing bubbles, “Third, the president very clearly frets about the risk of financial bubbles and wants a Fed chief who will be attuned to staving them off.”
    • Because Yellen was the first, and the most strident, Fed Governor to warn about the housing bubble.  

It’s no wonder that Anita Dunn told Ron Suskind that the Obama administration, “Actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.”(She later denied it, but Suskind had the tape)

And all this is about making Larry Summers the Fed Chair.

Larry Summers, who is pretty much the epitome of, “Does not work well with others,” is the guy that Barack wants to head a consensus driven organization.

Larry Summers is bad policy, and its bad politics, and that is ignoring Summers’ record of cashing in on Wall Street, which makes him suspect as a regulator.

Worst………Speaker………Ever

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The Republicans in the House of Representatives, led by John Boehner, decided to pass appropriations bills based on the Paul Ryan budget.

The problem is that, unlike a budget, which is general, the appropriations bills have to contain specific spending levels, and the Republicans in the House are terrified of having to pass the actual cuts required by Ryan’s smoke and mirrors numbers:

Republicans have dealt with some embarrassing moments on the House floor over the past year, but none so revealing or damning as today’s snafu, when they yanked a bill to fund the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development. Even the recent farm bill fiasco wasn’t as significant an indictment of the GOP’s governing potential.

It might look like a minor hiccup, or a symbolic error. But it spells doom for the party’s near-term budget strategy and underscores just how bogus the party’s broader agenda really is and has been for the last four years.

In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But these aren’t normal times. Republicans have refused to negotiate away their budget differences with Democrats, and have instead instructed their appropriators to use the House GOP budget as a blueprint for funding the government beyond September.

………

But many close Congress watchers — and indeed many Congressional Democrats — have long suspected that their votes for Ryan’s budgets were a form of cheap talk. That Republicans would chicken out if it ever came time to fill in the blanks. Particularly the calls for deep but unspecified domestic discretionary spending cuts.

Today’s Transportation/HUD failure confirms that suspicion. Republicans don’t control government. But ahead of the deadline for funding it, their plan was to proceed as if the Ryan budget was binding, and pass spending bills to actualize it — to stake out a bargaining position with the Senate at the right-most end of the possible.

But they can’t do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you don’t just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who won’t vote for any appropriations unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly you’re nowhere near 218.

John Boehner decided to follow the lead of Paul Ryan, a preening Ayn Rand inspired peacock with a limited grasp of what mathematics really mean in the real world, and now he is unable to make it work.

Heh.

The Joys of Children are Without Number

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We took Natalie to  Camp Tizmoret Shoshana, a Jewish performing arts camp.

It is at Capitol Camp, about 50 miles from home.

So, we packed up in the morning, and drove her to camp.

100+ miles round trip, and then Sharon and Charlie had to get ready for their performances at Open Space Arts this afternoon.

Only Natalie forgot a few things: her music theory notebook, Portman (her marionette), and her towels.

Then, after the play, we get a text that she had also forgotten her asthma inhaler.

So, instead of getting her stuff to her tomorrow, we had to go back tonight.

So, back we went, another 2 hour round trip.

At one point, we drove through a thunderstorm that felt like the apocalypse.

We had zero visibility, and the almost constant lightning had the wipers strobing across the windshield.

We are now headed back home (Sharon is driving), finally.

I swear, Natalie would forget her own head if it weren’t attached.

What Yves Smith Said

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She makes a compelling case against Larry Summers being the next Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that he is a polarizing personality who refuses to listen to others:

The big problem with Summers is not his record on deregulation (although that’s bad enough) or his foot-in-mouth remarks about women in math, or for suggesting that African countries would make for good toxic waste dumps. No, it’s his appalling record the one time he was in a leadership position, as president of Harvard. Summers was unquestionably the worst leader in Harvard’s history.

Summers, unduly impressed with his own economic credentials, overruled two successive presidents of Harvard Management Corporation (the in-house fund management operation chock full of well qualified and paid money managers that invest the Harvard endowment). Not content to let the pros have all the fun, Summers insisted on gambling with the university’s operating funds, which are the monies that come in every year (tuition and board payments, government grants, the payments out of the endowment allotted to the annual budget). His risk-taking left the University with over $2 billion in losses and unwind costs and forced wide-spread budget cuts, even down to getting rid of hot breakfasts.

………

So Summers couldn’t keep his ego out of the way, bullied the people around him, ignored the advice of not one but two presidents of Harvard Management, and left a smoldering pile of losses in his wake. And serious adults are prepared to allow someone with so little maturity and such misplaced self confidence to have major sway over much bigger economic decisions?

Summers’ second big problem is the scandal that led to his ouster at Harvard, which was NOT the “women suck at elite math and sciences” remarks. The university has conveniently let that be assumed to be the proximate cause.

In fact, it was Summers’ long-standing relationship with and protection of Andrei Schleifer, a Harvard economics professor, who was at the heart of a corruption scandal where he used his influential role on a Harvard contract advising on Russian privatization to enrich himself and his wife, his chief lieutenant Jonathan Hay, and other cronies. The US government sued Harvard for breach of contract and Shleifer and Hay for fraud and won.

And yes, he was also hip deep in the ouster of Brooksley Born for her demands that derivatives be regulated.

So, he doesn’t listen, he alienates those around him, he is deeply involved in a massive corruption scandal, and he has been wrong on basically everything outside of academe.

Given this record, I expect him to fail up into the Federal Reserve.

Well Duh!

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The Washington Post notes that, “Lawmakers say administration’s lack of candor on surveillance weakens oversight.”

Gee, you think?

Lawmakers tasked with overseeing national security policy say a pattern of misleading testimony by senior Obama administration officials has weakened Congress’s ability to rein in government surveillance.

Members of Congress say officials have either denied the existence of a broad program that collects data on millions of Americans or, more commonly, made statements that left some lawmakers with the impression that the government was conducting only narrow, targeted surveillance operations.

The most recent example came on March 12, when James R. Clapper, director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the government was not collecting information about millions of Americans. He later acknowledged that the statement was “erroneous” and apologized, citing a misunderstanding.

“Misunderstanding,” my ass.

Clapper was given a day’s notice that the question was going to be asked, and he was given an opportunity to further clarify immediately after the fact.

He simply lied, because he knew that he could.

It’s Like a Slow Motion Car Wreck

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So, the little people will be required to buy health insurance under the PPACA (Obamacare), but the requirement for big employers has been pushed back a year:

Businesses won’t be penalized next year if they fail to provide workers health insurance after the Obama administration decided to delay a key requirement under its signature 2010 health-care law.

The government will postpone enforcement of the so-called employer mandate until 2015, the administration said today. Under the provision, companies with 50 or more workers face a fine of as much as $3,000 per employee if they don’t offer affordable insurance.

The move addresses complaints from employer groups to President Barack Obama’s administration about the burden of the law’s reporting requirements. The decision pushes the issue past the 2014 midterm congressional elections, as Republicans have sought to make the health law a symbol of government overreach.

“In our ongoing discussions with businesses we have heard that you need the time to get this right,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama, said in a White House blog post announcing the decision. “We are listening.”

The move may lead some employers to delay providing coverage to workers. The law’s individual mandate remains in effect, a provision that requires most Americans to carry health insurance.

You knew that this was coming.

When big business talks, they, “Are listening.”

When it’s civil libertarians, , the poor and elderly, advocates for financial reform, the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, etc., it’s, “talk to the hand”.

H/t to my Dad, who sent me a link to a (subscription only) WSJ article.