Category: Wanker

Thank You Megan McArdle………

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I frequently write about Meghan “Math is Hard” McArdle, and when I do, I frequently portray her as  one of the most completely useless pundits out there.  (which says a lot)

I have finally discovered that she serves a purpose.  She is an excellent reverse barometer:  If you reflexively disagree with her, you are almost certain to be right.

Case in point, her Op/Ed suggesting that police blotters should be made private.

Because some scumbags on the internet are posting people’s mugshots online, and demanding extortion a fee to remove the pictures, she wants to further restrict public records.

My initial reaction was, “I’m against it.”

Then I looked at her examples.  They were all hipster trustifarians who got caught with a joint, or some X, or got busted for drunk driving, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and because daddy has some money, they lawyered up and got a deferred adjudication.

We as a society need to have this information, even if there are ratf%$#s are out there who are attempting extortion.

I knew I was right as soon as I knew that I disagreed with McArdle, and on closer examination this was confirmed.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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Obama’s war on whistle-blowers and the press has been examined by former WaPo editor-in-chief Leonard Downie, Jr., and is described in his report as, “The most aggressive since Nixon.”

The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent.

The former counsel for the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case is far less circumspect about this:

Since 2009, the Obama administration has prosecuted more people as whistleblowers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all former presidents combined, a fact often rehashed in journalistic circles. In some of those cases, officials seized journalists’ phone and email records to use in their investigation. James Goodale, who was The New York Times’ chief counsel during Pentagon Papers coverage, has told CJR that Obama’s aggressive crackdown on whistleblowers is “antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon. He thinks that anyone who leaks is a spy! I mean, it’s cuckoo.”

There is a pathology in the White House about leaks, and considering the vehemence, it has to come from the top, and it has to be deeply felt.

Ironically, this attitude is probably causing more harm than good for the Obama administration, though I would argue that the damage to the idea freedom of the press as a counterweight to government excess is far greater.

This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.

So, Now We Know What Makes Andrea Mitchell Go Postal………

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It was former “Real World” cast member and current Congressman Sean Duffy, who was arguing that Obamacare is to blame the Republicans holding military death benefits hostage: (at about 11:20 in the vid)

With all due respect, this is about military death benefits to kids, 19-year-old kids who died in Afghanistan and who are not returning home, this is about what their families are entitled to by law and what they are not getting.

This is not about what you want in Obamacare and not about what the president wants on the debt ceiling.

And yes, for Andrea Mitchell, this is going postal.

Also, how did this guy get elected when he is too stupid to cut his own meat?

He keeps going back to the his belief that Jon Stewart gave a puff interview to Kathleen Sebelius, head of HHS as evidence that journalists are biased.

Hello, Jon Stewart is a f%$#ing commedian. Jeebus.

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.

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.

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.

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%$.

The Only Two Things You Need to Know About Larry Summers as Fed Chair

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Item 1: He’s controversial because he is such a horrifically bad choice:

The Washington Post’s Neil Irwin looked this morning at what he sees as the many reasons the upcoming nomination of a new Federal Reserve chair became a circus, unlike past low-controversy nominations.

………

But among Neil’s four factors, only one really matters at the margin: The White House appears poised to make a demonstrably bad choice for Fed Chair.

If Larry Summers withdrew himself from consideration, or the White House announced that it isn’t going to pick him, the circus tents would pack up and we could all go home. The Fed Chair race would become uncontroversial and boring again, Business Insider’s existence notwithstanding.

People oppose Summers for all sorts of reasons, but here are my two.

One is that while we don’t know exactly where he (or Janet Yellen) would lead on monetary policy, I suspect Summers shares the White House’s unhealthy lean toward tight money. It’s particularly hard to figure out what Summers would do since he’s not actually a monetary policy scholar.

The other is that I fear Summers would squander the comity and collaboration that make the Federal Reserve Board work, since he’s had a tendency to do that at other institutions he’s been tapped to lead.

Item 2: Wall Street, which has spent millions cultivating him, appears to be terrified at the prospect of Summers as Fed Chair:

The spreading expectation that President Obama will name Lawrence H. Summers to lead the Federal Reserve Board appears to be working against the central bank’s efforts to stimulate the economy.

The jitters even have some analysts betting that a Summers nomination could lead to slower economic growth, less job creation and higher interest rates than if the president named Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s vice chairwoman.

Businesses raising money and people buying homes and cars all have faced higher interest rates in recent months as the Fed’s campaign to suppress borrowing costs has faltered. The rise in rates reflects optimism that the economy is gaining strength, and an expectation that the Fed will begin to pull back later this year. But a wide range of financial analysts also see evidence of a Summers effect.

Many investors expected that Ms. Yellen would be nominated to replace Ben S. Bernanke as head of the central bank, a choice that would have sent a clear message of continuity. Instead, investors are now trying to anticipate how Mr. Summers might change the Fed.

The unease is the product of a little information and a lot of speculation. Mr. Summers, a Harvard University economist who served for two years as Mr. Obama’s primary economic adviser, has said little about monetary policy in recent years. Investors are left parsing a handful of comments in which he has expressed some doubts on the benefits and concern about the consequences of the Fed’s policies.

“People don’t know what Larry might do,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, the giant bond fund manager. “There’s a lack of a lot of information on Larry’s views. We don’t have enough information to make an assessment, just some second- and thirdhand accounts.”

Wall Street owns Larry Summers, but they don’t want him to be Fed Chair.

The only thing to argue for him is cronyism and corruption.  Seriously.

If Obama nominates him, I am calling both of my Senators bring up his role in Andrei Schleifer’s corruption in the market reforms in Russia.

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”.

I’m a Little Bit Less Enthused About Martin O’Malley Now

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It turns out that he campaigned with corrupt Joe Lieberman wannabee Cory Booker:

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) will campaign for New Jersey Senate candidate Cory Booker (D) on Thursday.

The governor, considered a likely 2016 presidential contender, sent out a tweet on Tuesday alerting his followers to his plans.

“Excited to join @corybooker on the campaign trail in New Jersey this Thursday,” he tweeted.

According to PolitickerNJ, O’Malley will make stops on his own in Trenton and Paterson and appear with Booker in Newark, N.J.

He’s previously helped another New Jersey Democrat, gubernatorial candidate Barbara Buono, to raise cash, lending his name to a fundraising email sent out by her campaign last month.

I understand the motivation, he wanted to hook up with a winning campaign to show that he has some political pull to aid his embryonic presidential bid, but Booker is a corrupt bankster loving SOB.

Oh, well.

More Lying Liars

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This time it’s Attorney General Eric “Place” Holder, and he is lying about prosecutions for mortgage fraud.

Not only did he puff up the about the numbers and amount of mortgage prosecutions, but the DoJ retroactively edited the transcript of his speech on this subject:

Not sure that even the Bushies ever tried pulling the “modify the text of old archived speeches a year later” trick.

Yes, this is a level of mendacity that would impress Karl Rove.

Bait and Switch on Healthcare ……… Again

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This time, it is the out of pocket limits for group plans that has been delayed:

In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.

The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed. When asked in recent days about the language — which appeared as an answer to one of 137 “frequently asked questions about Affordable Care Act implementation” — department officials confirmed the policy.

The discovery is likely to fuel continuing Republican efforts this fall to discredit the president’s health care law.

Under the policy, many group health plans will be able to maintain separate out-of-pocket limits for benefits in 2014. As a result, a consumer may be required to pay $6,350 for doctors’ services and hospital care, and an additional $6,350 for prescription drugs under a plan administered by a pharmacy benefit manager.

Some consumers may have to pay even more, as some group health plans will not be required to impose any limit on a patient’s out-of-pocket costs for drugs next year. If a drug plan does not currently have a limit on out-of-pocket costs, it will not have to impose one for 2014, federal officials said Monday.

The health law, signed more than three years ago by Mr. Obama, clearly established a single overall limit on out-of-pocket costs for each individual or family. But federal officials said that many insurers and employers needed more time to comply because they used separate companies to help administer major medical coverage and drug benefits, with separate limits on out-of-pocket costs.

Gee, they had only 4 years to get this working, and they “can’t get their computers to work”.

Am I the only one who is beginning to suspect that maybe the real intent of Obamacare is to eliminate employer sponsored health plans?

This is exactly the sort of thing that Obama’s economic brain trust ***cough*** Cass Sunstein ***cough*** would like.

There are a lot of academic economists out there who hate employer sponsored health insurance.

He is Probably Going to Win the Primary Tomorrow, but Cory Booker is a Corrupt Rat-Bastard

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You may remember his wankitude in the 2012 elections, when he said that Obama being mean to Bain Capital gave him a sad, but it’s worse than that.

He is deeply and openly on the take:

The conference room in the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters of LinkedIn was packed with the stars of Silicon Valley. Top executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter gathered around a table; the billionaire Sean Parker looked on from a back row. The guest of honor: Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark.

 The stated purpose of the gathering was to give Mr. Booker, already a Twitter fanatic, a seminar on social-networking technologies. But hanging in the air was an electrifying sense of being in the presence of an ascendant politician they believed understood the potential of the new digital world they were shaping.

 “He’s part of this tide,” said Gina Bianchini, an entrepreneur who was at the meeting, in May 2009. “It feels like he’s one of us.”

 Two and a half years later, some of those same Silicon Valley leaders joined forces again on Mr. Booker’s behalf. But this time, their efforts resulted in giving Mr. Booker, until then an admired outsider, the equivalent of full-fledged membership in their elite circle: an Internet start-up of his own.

 Mr. Booker personally has obtained money for the start-up, called Waywire, from influential investors, including Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman. A year after its debut, Waywire has already endured a round of layoffs and had just 2,207 visitors in June, according to Compete, a Web-tracking service. The company says it is still under development.

 Yet in a financial disclosure filed last month, Mr. Booker, 44, revealed that his stake in the company was worth $1 million to $5 million. Taken together, his other assets were worth no more than $730,000.

 That revelation, with just a week left in Mr. Booker’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, shows how a few tech moguls and entrepreneurs, many of them also campaign donors, not only made a financial bet on the mayor’s political future but also provided the brainpower and financing to help create a company that could make him very rich.

Why is this blatant influence peddling?

Well, the tell is that Waywire hired the 15 year old son of the head of CNN and gave him stock options:(Yes, it’s NY Post, but echos the New York Times story linked above, and it is far less oblique)

He isn’t even old enough to drive — but CNN President Jeff Zucker’s teenage son has already resigned from a cushy position at Cory Booker’s closely watched Internet start-up.

 After somehow scoring a seat on the advisory board of the rising Democratic star’s Waywire video-sharing site, 15-year-old Andrew Zucker abruptly quit yesterday amid questions over his qualifications.

 The rich kid’s consulting career as a “millennial adviser” ended just hours after it was revealed that he had been granted stock options in the firm co-founded by Booker, the Newark mayor who polls show is a shoo-in for the US Senate after a special election.

 “Despite the fact that his affiliation with Waywire was extremely limited to only an advisory capacity, in order to avoid even the perception of a conflict, Jeff’s son has resigned from the Waywire advisory board, effective immediately,” CNN said in a statement.

 News of Andrew’s stock deal lit up social media yesterday, with critics on Twitter branding it a “gross nepotism alert.”

 Corporate-governance experts also called his hiring highly unusual, saying they’d never before heard of anyone so young getting such a cushy gig.

 Advisory boards are usually stocked with “seasoned folks who have been through the process of making that kind of a start-up work, or enhancing the capacity of a company so it can move to an IPO [initial public offering] or the next level of business,” said Eleanor Bloxham, CEO of The Value Alliance. “So you’re not generally looking in the high-school age range.”

The defense is that he got less than qualified than, “Lady Gaga’s manager.”

Seriously, the royalty of Silicon Valley is showering their largess on this guy because it’s such a good idea? For a web site that got 2,207 visitors in June?

Seriously, I got 1,457 unique visitors in June, and I’m the worst writer on the internet.™

But wait, there’s more. There is also the case of his old law firm, which continued to pay him for years while getting lucrative contracts from the city:

Cory Booker pocketed “confidential” annual payouts from his former law firm while serving as Newark mayor.

 Booker, the front-runner in New Jersey’s Senate race, received five checks from the Trenk DiPasquale law firm from 2007 until 2011. During that time, the firm raked in more than $2 million in fees from local agencies over which Booker has influence.

 “This was a settlement buyout for my interest in the firm,” the mayor told The Post at a campaign stop in Jersey City yesterday. “I had an equity stake, and we had a negotiated settlement.”

 Booker worked at the West Orange firm for five years, leaving in 2006 when he was elected Newark’s mayor to avoid “the appearance of impropriety.”

 He refused to answer how much he received in the five years after leaving.

 “It’s all been disclosed for the last seven years,” Booker said.

 Not quite. Booker’s state financial disclosures from 2006 to 2011 list two sources of income — the city of Newark and the law firm. The forms mandate reporting of income over $2,000 a year, but do not require an exact sum or range.

 Booker’s closed lips on the earnings fly in the face of his public stances. In 2002, he released his tax returns during his unsuccessful race against incumbent Mayor Sharpe James, and ripped James for not doing the same.

 The returns “provide the only clues as to how many deals the mayor is involved in . . . and the only record of the money he’s making on the side,” Booker said at the time.

 When The Post asked Friday for Booker’s recent returns, his campaign refused to turn them over.

And then there are his positions on the issues:

  • He supports privatizing public education and handing it to Wall Street.
  • He has repeatedly allied himself with religious organizations that have sponsored Uganda’s “Kill the gays” bill.
  • His close relationship with Scaife/Olin/Koch funded political organizations.
  • His founding an organization heavily funded by the Walton (Wal-Mart) family.

If he wins the primary, he is almost certain to win the general.

First, New Jersey is very blue now, and second, the Republican field is best defined as a clown show.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever………

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Look at the White House transcripts of the most recent press conference:

Q: Can you understand, though, why some people might not trust what you’re saying right now about wanting to —

 THE PRESIDENT: No, I can’t.

This is wrong on so many levels:

  • The constitution was explicitly created to make sure that we did not have to trust the authorities.  It was intended to create contention, and quite honestly distrust, to make sure that powers are limited.
  • He does not understand how people might be concerned that he might not be completely forthcoming.

I am not sure what is more alarming, his complete lack of understanding of the critical in the Constitution concept of the separation of powers, or the pervasive narcissism.

I would be hard pressed to find a better illustration of why the founding fathers were concerned about the possibility of excesses by the executive.

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.

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.

I Don’t Give a Crap

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It has been reported that Britain’s biggest welfare family is expecting their first child.

Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, is reportedly in labo(u)r.

To quote George Washington, “Let there be no Kings.”

Americans should not be following this news with baited breath.

I can’t wait to hear what Vonners, my (small R) republican British friend has to day about this.

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