Category: Stupid

What a Bunch of Hypocritical Pearl Clutching

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Over at the former Kaplan Test Prep company, now a division of Amazon, Dana Milbank is having the vapors over Donald Trump’s sometimes salty language.

This from the guy who joked about Hillary Clinton drinking Mad Bitch Beer.

Seriously? If there is anyone in the Washington commentariat who is less well qualified to talk about misogyny and profanity, I haven’t read them yet:

Here’s a serious question for Republican officeholders: WTF?

Now that Trump has a lock on the presidential nomination, many top Republicans — too many — are moving to embrace this vulgar man for the sake of party unity. It is a real [expletive] show.

The man who would be the Grand Old Party’s standard-bearer has said the following things (among many others) in front of thousands of men, women and children (and millions more via the media):

On U.S. companies relocating overseas: “You can tell them to go f— themselves.”

On China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea: “They’re ripping the sh– out of the sea.”

On the Islamic State? “I would bomb the sh– out of ISIS.”

Earlier, on dealing with China: “Listen, you motherf—ers, we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”

And on climate change: “This very expensive global warming bullsh– has got to stop.”

Republicans: This vulgarian speaks for you?

Seriously Dana, go Cheney yourself.

And Jeff (Bezos) make Dana do some useful work for his paycheck.

I Really Thought That It Was Impossible for Him to Make Me Loathe Him Any More

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But Ted Cruz proved me wrong when he announced the wildly premature choice of Carly Fiorina as his running mate:

Ted Cruz just suffered one of the worst drubbings of his presidential campaign, losing badly in five states, falling further behind Donald Trump and watching his dim hopes of capturing the Republican nomination fade further.

Yet less than 24 hours later, the senator from Texas did something normally reserved for presumptive nominees rather than struggling underdogs: He announced a vice presidential running mate.

In choosing Carly Fiorina for that spot here Wednesday, Cruz reached for a political lifeline at a time when he is running out of them. Facing a must-win situation against Trump in next Tuesday’s Indiana primary, Cruz is trying one un­or­tho­dox maneuver after another in hopes of extending the race and forcing a contested Republican convention in Cleveland — his only hope for becoming the nominee.

The announcement was designed in part to sharpen the contrast with Trump that Cruz is trying to draw. Introducing Fiorina at an afternoon rally in downtown Indianapolis, Cruz highlighted the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive’s fierce exchanges with Trump and her refusal to back down from him when she was a candidate.

The juxtaposition of the two of them is way worse than either one of them alone.

This is like watching a dog vomit, and then eat its own barf.

These Guys Could not Find their Ass with Both Hands

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In what is a clear desperation move, Ted Cruz and John Kasich have divided up at least three upcoming primaries:

Donald Trump’s two remaining Republican presidential opponents campaigned Monday after striking an agreement on a strategy to divvy up three states holding primaries in the coming weeks — an unusual and urgent arrangement aimed at stopping the mogul from clinching the GOP nomination.

The campaigns of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Ohio Gov. John Kasich released written statements within minutes of each other Sunday night calling for Kasich to stop competing in Indiana and for Cruz to clear the way for Kasich in New Mexico and Oregon. They called on allied third-party groups to do the same.

Speaking to reporters here in Borden before a Monday morning rally, Cruz said it was “big news today that John Kasich has decided to pull out of Indiana to give us a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump.” He said the division of resources in key primary states “made sense from both campaigns.”

As Charlie Pierce notes, “With conspirators like these, Caesar would have spent March 15 in a brothel, avoided the Senate for a month, and died of old age in his summer place in Gaul.”

The level of incompetence here buggers the mind.

F%$# Me, I Agree with Michael F%$#ing Kinsley

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Michael Kinsley is the epitome of a mindless contrarian.

I refer to this mindset as “Michael Kinsley Disease”.

And after nearly 4 decades of being shallow, and facile, and wrong, he finally gets one right when he calls out the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC as immoral and incompetent:

Can our nation survive without taking advantage of the wisdom of self-described “foreign policy elites”? That is the question posed on Page 1 of The Post’s print edition on Saturday, under the headline “Foreign policy elites indecisive on Trump.” The Post’s Karen DeYoung reports that 121 Republican national security experts have signed a petition saying they would not serve in a Donald Trump administration, should democracy serve them up such an opportunity. Actually, in their eyes, it is less an opportunity than a possible obligation. We all have to decide whether to vote for Trump, which is a pretty easy decision for most people I know. But “foreign policy elites” have the further obligation of deciding whether to work in a Trump administration. This, apparently, is not an easy decision at all.

………

If you ask me (which no one is doing), I think our country might survive quite well without the advice of “foreign policy elites” — or without the guidance of retired generals such as David Petraeus. A Post columnist last week recommended retired generals in general, and Petraeus in particular, as a good source of presidents. This is a brilliant idea. Petraeus had to resign as director of the CIA after he got caught in a scandal involving both sex and classified information, so he covers all the bases in competing with the Clinton machine. And he certainly qualifies as a member of the foreign policy elite.

What, after all, have foreign policy elites of either party done for us lately? Paying attention to “foreign policy elites” has given us nothing but heartbreak in the past three and a half decades. That’s right, three and a half decades, or a third of a century if you prefer. That’s how long we’ve been mired in the Middle East. At first it was considered gauche and naïve to use the Vietnam-era term “quagmire” to describe the United States’ situation in the Middle East. No one objects to calling it a quagmire anymore.

………

Perhaps what’s so remarkable about this terrible recent history is how many countries we have managed to screw up without affecting our own very much. That’s what allows us to give ourselves credit for good intentions, without the need for any beneficial result. Or perhaps what’s so remarkable is that we’re still paying the slightest attention to foreign policy elites.

 I will put this down to a stopped clock being right twice a day.

Yet Another of My Cousin’s* Brilliant Ideas

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As you may be aware, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein* (D-CA) have proposed a bill requiring that all encryption include a back door for the authorities. It appears that the bill as written also outlaws things like MP3 and JPEG files:

The proposed bill put forward by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to force US companies to build backdoors into their encryption systems has quickly run into trouble.

Less than 24 hours after the draft Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016 was released, more than 43,000 signatures have been added to a petition calling for the bill to be withdrawn. The petition, organized by CREDO Action, calls for Congress to block the proposed law as a matter of urgency.

Meanwhile, in the technical world, experts have been going through the legislation and pointing out glaring holes in the draft bill. Bruce Schneier, the guy who literally wrote the books on modern cryptography, noted that the bill would make most of what the NSA does illegal, unless No Such Agency is willing to backdoor its own encrypted communications.

“This is the most braindead piece of legislation I’ve ever seen,” Schneier – who has just been appointed a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard – told The Reg. “The person who wrote this either has no idea how technology works or just doesn’t care.”

He pointed out that it isn’t just cryptographic code that would be affected by this poorly written legislation. Schneier, like pretty much everyone, uses lossy compression algorithms to reduce the size of images for sending via email but – as it won’t work in reverse and add back the data removed – this code could be banned by the law, too. Files that can’t be decrypted on demand to their original state, and files that can’t be decompressed back to their exact originals, all look the same to this draft law.

In the, “Has no idea how technology works or just doesn’t care,” issue, I will go for both.

This bill is a mindbogglingly stupid idea.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

Yeah, I Guess Kasich Is the Best They Have

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Today, Donald Trump (but you already guessed that) wondered in a speech how former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno was doing.

It appears that Trump forgot that:

  • Paterno was fired a because he covered up the activities of a serial child rapist.
  • Jo Paterno is dead.

Oops:

Speaking at a rally in Pittsburgh, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump mentioned late Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who died in 2012. Paterno was fired from the school and his statue removed after Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children came to light. (Reuters)

Pandering to local crowds is a staple of political campaigns everywhere, and Donald Trump’s is no different. But the key to successful pandering is knowing to whom you’re speaking and, of course, what you’re saying.

Trump was way off base on both those counts Wednesday, when he spoke before a crowd of supporters at a rally in Pittsburgh.

“I know a lot about Pennsylvania, and it’s great,” Trump said. Which is standard-issue stuff, but then things got awkward.

“How’s Joe Paterno?” Trump asked. “We’re gonna bring that back? Right? How about that whole deal?”

Paterno, for those who may have forgotten (including, possibly, a certain presidential candidate) died in 2012. (Wait, is bringing him back from the grave an essential part of making America great again?)

His campaign is now claiming that he was asking if the coach’s statue was returning to the State College campus.

No.  Trump had a brain fart that makes John Kasich look like Stephen f%$#ing Hawking, only, of course, Stephen Hawking is a far more inspiring speaker.

This Is the Best That They Have?

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I am referring, of course, to John Kasich, who gave a speech at a Yeshiva (Jewish religious school), and decided to tell them about an obscure bible story, the story of Joseph:

John Kasich’s travels in New York brought him yesterday to a Jewish bookstore, where he met students of the Talmud. Having thus met people who spend their entire day scrutinizing religious texts, Kasich’s reaction was to ask them if they were aware of facts about those texts that they probably knew as very small children. “They sold [Joseph] into slavery, and that’s how the Jews got to Egypt. Right? Did you know that?” For those who never attended Sunday school, this is a bit like visiting MIT, wandering into a physics lab, and asking people if they ever heard of this guy named Isaac Newton.

But it gets even better: He then went to a Jewish bakery, and drew an analogy between the blood of the Pascal lamb, and the blood of Jesus:

If Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s visit to Hasidic Brooklyn this week had yielded only one amusing moment, Dayenu – it would have been enough.

But, thank God, there were many in the Republican presidential candidate’s visit to a Jewish bookstore, shmura matzah bakery and Hasidic school in Borough Park on Tuesday.

 “It’s a wonderful, wonderful holiday for our friends in the Jewish community – the Passover,” Kasich told reporters after emerging from the matzah bakery, a box of the fresh-baked stuff in hand.

 Yes, Jews are known to love The Passover, almost as much they love The Pre-Election Drop-By from vote-seeking politicians.

 Flanked by Hasidic publicist Ezra Friedlander, Kasich then launched into a brief appraisal of the links between Passover and, um, the blood of Jesus Christ.

 “The great link between the blood that was put above the lampposts” – er, you mean doorposts, governor — “the blood of the lamb, because Jesus Christ is known as the lamb of God. It’s his blood, we believe …”

Kasich’s only saving grace was that his remarks kept getting interrupted by the subway rumbling on the elevated tracks overhead.

Talking about Christ’s blood during a visit to Borough Park? Oy vey. Please, somebody, prep this guy. Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn want to hear about food stamps, affordable housing, Medicaid. Ix-nay on the Esus-jay.

This is definitely the silly season in politics.

Remember though, that according to all the “very serious people” Kasich is the only adult in the proverbial room.

I would say, “The stupid, it burns!” but this wasn’t even the stupidest thing that a Republican said today.

Take a guess who it was who was even stupider. No peeking.

Our IP Regime Has Gotten Out of Hand

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An artist has now gotten an exclusive license to a color:

Anish Kapoor, the famed sculptor, who created the ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture for the 2012 Olympics, has provoked the fury of fellow artists this week by acquiring the exclusive rights to use the blackest shade of black in the world. Vantablack, as the hue is known, derives its name from the terms Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays. Created in 2014 by scientists at UK-based company, Surrey NanoSystems Limited, for the purpose of disguising satellites, it is the blackest substance known to man, absorbing a maximum of 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum. With its light-absorbing properties, it has also been used to hide Stealth fighter jets from enemy eyes.

While aerospace companies will continue to be able to use the shade, in the art world, its use will be limited to Anish, as confirmed by a NanoSystems spokesman on Tuesday. Sir Anish did not respond to requests for comment. He did, however, speak about Vantablack last year, saying: “The material is astonishing, so deeply black that your eyes can’t really see it at all. It is like staring into the kind of black hole found in outer space.” According to reports, it seems as though a license-type of relationship exists between Anish and NanoSystems. There has been no word, however, on how much Anish paid in exchange for the exclusive right to use the Vantablack substance.

Portraitist Christian Furr is one of the artists that has spoken out about the limited availability of the color, telling the Daily Mail: “We should be able to use it. It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.” Furr, who had planned to use Vantablack in a series of paintings called Animals, elaborated, saying: “I’ve never heard of an artist monopolizing a material. Using pure black in an artwork grounds it.”

This is f%$#ed up and sh%$.

It will Still Be #ASSoL or #ASSLaw

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It appears that in response to the internet discovering the potential initials of the Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason is attempting a re-branding:

Days after George Mason University’s law school announced that it was renaming itself after Justice Antonin Scalia, the school is slightly adjusting what it’s calling itself — thanks to unforeseen and unfortunate wordplay.

The name, officially, remains “The Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University” in honor of the late justice who died in February. But on its website and marketing materials, the name now reads: “The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University”.

That’s no accident.

The first five words of the “School of Law” version form an acronym that has a phonetic resemblance to a vulgarity, a source of amusement for some bloggers and tweeters and a source of non-amusement for George Mason’s administration, which agreed to rename itself after Justice Scalia at the request of an anonymous donor who pledged $20 million.

It’s not going to work.

When Allegheny (aka “Agony”) Airlines changed its name to US Air, it got nicknamed “Useless Air” at the press conference announce the renaming.

You need to embrace this, not try to sweep it under the rug.

I would suggest changing the name the the Scalia Hieratic Institute of Tutalge in Higher Educational Excellence in the Law.*

*Yes, it took me longer to come up with the acronym than it did to write the rest of this.

Why Listening to your Generals is Overrated

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In Europe the US general in charge of NATO seems hell bent on triggering a confrontation with Russia, while in the Asia-Pacific, an admiral is determined to lobby for similar dick swinging with regard to the Chinese.

I would remind Barack Obama that it was this sort of sh%$ that had Harry S Truman making his well justified decision to fire Douglas MacArthur:

The U.S. military’s top commander in the Pacific is arguing behind closed doors for a more confrontational approach to counter and reverse China’s strategic gains in the South China Sea, appeals that have met resistance from the White House at nearly every turn.

Adm. Harry Harris is proposing a muscular U.S. response to China’s island-building that may include launching aircraft and conducting military operations within 12 miles of these man-made islands, as part of an effort to stop what he has called the “Great Wall of Sand” before it extends within 140 miles from the Philippines’ capital, sources say.

Harris and his U.S. Pacific Command have been waging a persistent campaign in public and in private over the past several months to raise the profile of China’s land grab, accusing China outright in February of militarizing the South China Sea.

………

Harris and PACOM officials have been lobbying the National Security Council, Capitol Hill and Pentagon leaders to send a clear message that they won’t tolerate continued bullying of neighbors. Part of the approach includes more aggressive, frequent and close patrols of China’s artificial islands, Navy Times has learned.

These guys want to force humiliating back-down from the Chinese, which isn’t going to happen.

This is John Foster Dulles style brinksmanship, and in addition to being batsh%$ insane, it is not something that should be decided by the uniformed military.

How about reasserting civilian control of the military, Mr. Obama?

Notice How They are Not Discussing This on the Merits

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In discussing the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, supporter have have stopped talking about the merits of the deal, and instead are suggesting that its defeat would be a blow for American prestige:

“Failure to move forward … would be a profound setback for American interests in the region,” Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser, said Tuesday of the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership. “It would be a signal that we do not have staying power and cause countries to hedge on their alignment with the United States.”

The administration is running out of time to get the accord ratified by Congress and faces an uphill slog to win approval with the leading presidential candidates in both parties opposed to the deal. Republican front-runner Donald Trump has denounced free trade deals as harmful to American workers and a drag on the U.S. economy. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, who supported the TPP as secretary of state under Obama, has come out against the TPP under pressure from the left, including labor unions and her opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), who also opposes it.

But in a conference call with reporters, administration officials warned that China is poised to step into an economic and leadership void if the U.S. falters in the pact with 11 other nations, including Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia. While Trump and Sanders have called outsourcing and trade imbalances with China detrimental to the United States, White House allies said that the economic competition from China, which is not included in the TPP, is a reason to endorse the deal.

So apparently it’s not a trade deal, and it won’t provide meaningful benefits, it’s a political and diplomatic ploy to be used in a war against China.

Do you want to lose your job just to f%$# with China?

Well, I don’t either.

Bad Bosses Strike Back!

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In Oregon Maine, where they are proposing raising the minimum wage, along with eliminating the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, the worst boss in the world wrote an editorial saying that her workers hated the idea of being paid fairly.

Her workers responded by resigning en masse and described their dysfunctional workplace, and their dysfunctional boss, in exquisite detail:

Oh hey, it’s a Maine story (about the minimum wage, no less) that doesn’t directly involve Gov. Paul LePage!

Five servers at a restaurant in Portland called Five Fifty-Five have quit in one hell of a mic drop, giving their notice in a Portland Press Herald op-ed. The inciting incident was when their boss, Michelle Corry, wrote an op-ed that claimed to speak for her employees about the citizen-initiated ballot referendum in the state to both increase the minimum wage to $12 and eliminate the tip credit (also known as the “sub-minimum wage”). It’s the latter point that had Corry in such a huff.

………

Opponents of eliminating the tip credit say that doing so would bring about a restaurant industry apocalypse and there would be much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth. Restaurant owners in states like California, Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota, which pay their servers a guaranteed living wage and, at last check, had not devolved into a Road Warrior-esque hellscape, say “Um, not so much?”

Right, back to Maine and Michelle Corry’s op-ed. So, Corry argued strongly for a counter-proposal to the ballot initiative that would raise the minimum wage to only $10 and keep the tip credit intact. Since at last blush 75 percent of the state is in favor of raising the minimum wage, anti-minimum wage douchebuckets (even LePage — dammit, he showed up in this post despite our best efforts) know they’re going to have to compromise at least a little bit here, and the counter-proposal is that compromise. But in arguing for it, Corry tried to speak for those it would directly affect:

Ask any tipped employee at a restaurant near you if they would prefer to make a set wage or hustle and create their own destiny. The employees at my restaurant would always choose their own initiative.

Putting words in her servers’ mouths turned out to be a less-than-ideal move on her part.

There have been many issues at the restaurant, from capricious schedule changes to questionable practices on wages and tips. This latest insult of our boss falsely claiming to speak publicly on our behalf on an issue we care deeply about is just the final straw. We are submitting our notice and will be leaving her employment.

Translation: whatever the incredibly white Maine equivalent is of “oh HELL naw.”

The kicker to all of this is that Michelle Corry is the vice chair of the Maine Restaurant Association.

It is highly unlikely that I am going to be in Portland, Maine in the near future, but if I do, I won’t be going to Five Fifty-Five.

H/t Atrios.

How Utterly Proper

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George Mason University, a welfare program for reactionary economists and lawyers, has, with significant funding from the Brothers Koch, Decided to rename the George Mason University Law School to ASSoL, the Antonin Scalia School of Law:

George Mason was a founding father. He was one of the men who was responsible for the Bill of Rights — he wouldn’t sign the constitution without it (or at all, ultimately). Now, the law school at the university that bears his name is changing its name to the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University.

 ………

 Good lord. You are deemphasizing the name of a founding father to honor a man who fetishisized the beliefs held at the founding? A guy who didn’t go there, or have any connection to the school, who wouldn’t have hired a George Mason law student as a bathroom attendant, much less a Supreme Court clerk? That’s the guy you are renaming your law school after? Your Twitter hashtag is now #ASSLaw (Antonin Scalia School of Law). Who was in second place, Donald Trump?

 ………

 We talk a lot about the law school application crunch, and how that crunch disproportionately dings middling law schools like George Mason. There is a flight to quality, there is a flight to “free,” and schools that are neither are having a heck of a time filling their seats.

 But branding themselves as “Antonin Scalia,” who most people even lightly interested in law have heard of before, versus “George Mason,” who you should have learned about in AP History but probably didn’t because he’s not a Kardashian, might help them.

Even if Scalia Law generates some push in application and matriculation revenue, especially from right-of-center students, would it be enough to offset the negatives? Changing the school’s name in this way is sure to piss off some alumni.

Reports are that this was in response to, “$30 million in donations, $10 million of which came from the Charles Koch Foundation.”

This may very well be beyond parody, even ignoring the irony of naming a law school after a justice is on a fast track to be considered among the caliber of Roger Taney, James Clark McReynolds, Clarence Thomas, Henry Billings Brown, etc.

#ASSLaw #ASSoL

This is a New Level of Low

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The Clinton campaign is saying that they won’t debate Sanders unless he stops criticizing her:

A top aide to Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Monday dodged questions about setting up a debate with Bernie Sanders in New York, saying it depends on the senator’s “tone.”

“This is a man who said he’d never run a negative ad ever. He’s now running them. They’re planning to run more,” Joel Benenson, Clinton’s chief strategist, said on CNN. “Let’s see the tone of the campaign he wants to run before we get to any other questions.”

After winning a trio of states over the weekend, Sanders on Sunday called for a debate in New York ahead of that state’s April 19 primary. The Vermont senator is looking to cut into Clinton’s delegate lead and says he has the “momentum” heading into the latter half of the race.

The pair faced off in a Miami debate earlier this month, and a Sanders campaign letter on Sunday said the two campaigns had agreed to a California debate in May but had not agreed to terms on a debate in April, according to The New York Times.

How long before someone says, “If she can’t debate Bernie Sanders, how can she stand up to Vladimir Putin?”

Never mind, I just did.

Worst ……… Fairy Tales ……… Ever

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The National Rifle Association has decided to rewrite classic fairy tales, because they need more guns: (Not The Onion)

The National Rifle Association has taken some heat this week after attempting what it saw as a family-friendly approach to to gun rights: inserting guns into classic fairy tale stories.

As part of its new family-oriented website, NRA Family, the organization reimagined popular fairy tales by arming the main characters with guns. The stories, which the NRA posted on its site and in the site’s newsletter, feature illustrations and stories by Amelia Hamilton, a conservative blogger and author.

The first, published on March 17, is called Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns), a new spin on the classic Brothers Grimm story. Instead of being nearly eaten by the witch, the brother and sister duo rescue another boy with guns loaded. They then to return to their village and tell their parents, who storm back guns-a-blazing to capture the witch.

Another story published Friday is a take on Little Red Riding Hood called—you guessed it—Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun). It follows a similar narrative, with both granny and Little Red packing heat and using their guns to scare the wolf so he can be tied up and carried away.

I guess that this makes sense in a twisted way.

Most of the classic fairy tales have their origins in pre-Christian tales of pagan gods, and the NRA worships at the altar of Smith & Wesson, so at least there is symmetry.

Mealy Mouthed Weasels At PBS

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Editor’s Note: In our report Tuesday night on a North Carolina family that’s supporting Donald Trump, we were continuing a long NewsHour tradition of talking directly to voters.

We want to hear from them, in their own voices, speaking about what motivates their political preferences.

Regrettably, none of us at the NewsHour recognized the questions that could arise from Grace Tilly’s tattoos, and we didn’t raise them with her until after the report aired. At that point, our producer contacted Ms. Tilly and she insisted the tattoos are religious in nature and have nothing to do with a neo-Nazi theme or white supremacy.

We referenced her comments in an editor’s note, posted on our website.

Many of our online commenters have since let us know they reject that explanation. We’re now posting this note as a follow up.

We at the NewsHour remain committed to being as transparent as possible in covering this election.

She had a code for Heil Hitler (88) tattooed on the back of her hand.

You got taken in by a Neo Nazi, and you need to acknowledge this.

Remember this screw up, and more importantly their unwillingness to man up, at pledge time, folks.