Category: Wanker

Report: Prominent NeoCon Robert Kagan To Headline Fundraiser For Clinton

No Comments

Robert Kagan, the Neocon who has was a major force for invading Iraq (and has supported pretty much every single misbegotten use of force by the Pentagon since Pershing was on active duty), is fundraising for Hillary Clinton:

A prominent neoconservative intellectual and early promoter of the Iraq War is headlining an official campaign fundraiser for Hillary Clinton next month, Foreign Policy has learned. The move signals a shift in the Clinton campaign’s willingness to associate with prominent Republicans and is the latest sign of how far some GOP defectors are willing to go to block a Donald Trump presidency.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, will speak at a Hillary for America fundraiser in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood on July 21. According to an invite obtained by FP, the “event will include an off-the-record conversation on America’s continued investment in NATO, key European allies and partners, and the EU.”

………

On Wednesday, Clinton picked up the endorsement of Republican Brent Scowcroft, who served as a national security adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, and held formal or advisory positions in the administrations of former Presidents Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

………

But while Scowcroft hails from the GOP’s realist school of thought, a less-interventionist worldview that some liberals subscribe to, Kagan remains firmly in the neoconservative wing — an ideology centered around the use of military force, the forcible removal of dictators, and the importance of spreading democracy around the world.

The American people are in for a positively hideous next 4 years, with a choice between a life support system for a hair weave, and Attila the Hun.

Lovely.

H/t Talking Points Memo.

F%$# the Teabaggers

No Comments

I understand how the Teabagger wing of Republican Party gave us Donald Trump.

I also understand how Trump has done the nearly impossible, which is to make what is arguably the least electable candidate for President since Michael Dukakis the front runner, which must seriously roast Teabagger chestnuts:

………

This, then, is the ultimate outcome from the tea party takeover of the Republican Party by people like Wendy Day. She contributed to Trump’s ascent by blowing up the party and is now upset that it’s not her own candidate Ted Cruz who was the victor.

Cry me a river, Ms. Day.

And welcome to your worst nightmare: President Hillary Clinton.

I under the that is a schadenfreude moment, but what about the rest of us?

The rest of use are going to have to live with the consequences of this:  More war, more sucking up to Wall Street, more neoliberal economics, more privatization of essential government services, and more job destroying trade deals.

Thanks, Teabaggers.

This Reminds Me of the Railroad Industry

No Comments

I worked at GE Transportation System in the early 1990s aas a locomotive systems engineer.

After years of contraction and decay, they were recapitalizing.

Standard line was that they had gotten to the point where they had to recapitalize, but it was something more basic: The Wall Street types who believed that railroads were dying had finally looted all they could, and they had been replaced by management that actually believed in railroads.

Freight rail in the Us has been on a generally upward path since.

Well, we are seeing the same thing in the newspaper business these days, with the jargon of the official launch of Tronc, formerly Tribune Publishing being a particularly egregious example.

As Allison Hantschel observes, “Media Companies Hate News, the Internet, Employees and their Own Customers:

Or, as the Hip Happening Kids Today call it, #Tronc:

CasSelle: We produce tons of great content every single day. We’re really focused on how we we deliver it to people in a way they want to consume it more and more. 


Vasquez: One of the key ways we’re going to harness the power of our journalism is to have an optimization group. This Tronc team, will work with all of the local markets, to harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it so we reach the biggest global audience possible.
Yes, Tronc shall take the corn feed of journalism and funnel it into the optimization-group goose, to make delicious foie gras that will be consumed by the digital natives.

It arguably gets worse from there. And what’s genuinely sad is that people who talk like this typically don’t understand how the internet actually works—that’s why they lean on buzzwords—or have any notion of how to communicate with journalists, who tend to bristle at this stuff.

These are internal employee videos designed to PUMP YOU UP about your newfound place not at Tribune Publishing, a recognizable name that at least still sounded impressive, but at Tronc, which sounds like you stepped on a duck.

I understand that conventional journalism in general, and the newspaper business in particular, faces challenges, but the bigger problem is that upper management does not believe in the product: Journalism.  (Of course, there is also the fact that Sam Zell ran the company into the ground).

Our MBA/Wall Street/Private Equity management “Culture” does nothing but loot.

I’ll Take Self Entitled Clueless Assholes for $500, Alex

No Comments

Bill Gates has a solution for world hunger that is almost as brilliant as Windows Vista®.

He’s going to be sending chickens to the poor people of the world.

Brilliant.

And he has chosen Bolivia as one of the first recipients of his largess.

One problem: Bolivia is a major exporter of chicken, and they told him to go cluck himself:

The Bolivian government has rejected a donation of hens offered by the US billionaire Bill Gates………

 “How can he think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce?” the Bolivian development minister, César Cocarico, told journalists. “Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia.”

 ………

Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.

This is the charitable equivalent of the blue screen of death, which is amazingly apropos.

Not Enough Bullets

No Comments

What a surprise, Peabody Energy, the biggest coal company in the country, has been bankrolling pretty much every nutty climate change denier they can find.

Who cares about the destruction of the world, we have profits to make:

Peabody Energy, America’s biggest coalmining company, has funded at least two dozen groups that cast doubt on manmade climate change and oppose environment regulations, analysis by the Guardian reveals.

The funding spanned trade associations, corporate lobby groups, and industry front groups as well as conservative thinktanks and was exposed in court filings last month.

The coal company also gave to political organisations, funding twice as many Republican groups as Democratic ones.

Peabody, the world’s biggest private sector publicly traded coal company, was long known as an outlier even among fossil fuel companies for its public rejection of climate science and action. But its funding of climate denial groups was only exposed in disclosures after the coal titan was forced to seek bankruptcy protection in April, under competition from cheap natural gas.

Environmental campaigners said they had not known for certain that the company was funding an array of climate denial groups – and that the breadth of that funding took them by surprise.

………

“The breadth of the groups with financial ties to Peabody is extraordinary. Thinktanks, litigation groups, climate scientists, political organisations, dozens of organisations blocking action on climate all receiving funding from the coal industry,” said Nick Surgey, director of research for the Center for Media and Democracy.

“We expected to see some denial money, but it looks like Peabody is the treasury for a very substantial part of the climate denial movement.”

Peabody’s filings revealed funding for the American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate lobby group which opposes clean energy standards and tried to impose financial penalties on homeowners with solar panels, as well as a constellation of conservative thinktanks and organisations.

I really hope that someone can find a way to send their executives to a federal PMITA prison.

They deserve it.

Today In Idiocy

2 Comments

1,014 Miles Distance Might Explain the Coverage

Over at Tablet Magazine,Yair Rosenberg wonders what sort of liberal antisemitism makes The New York Times condemn single sex hours at a Brooklyn swimming pool for Orthodox Jews, but say nothing at all about a similar program for Muslims in Minneapolis.

Ummmm….Here is a clue: One happened in Minneapolis, the other in Brooklyn. Why would the New York Times would take more interest in one than the other?

Perhaps because one is happening in New York, the Times home town and the other is happening a about 1,014 miles away as the crow flies?

Mr. Rosenberg, were you dropped on your head as a youth?

The Clintons Really Do Hate the Working Man

No Comments

Yesterday in Cranford, NJ, Bill Clinton discussing Donald Trump’s surprising political success noted that “Non-college-educated Americans need to be brought along to the future.”

I shouldn’t be surpriaed.  After 40 years in politics, demonizing the poor, diminishing labor unions, embracing the powerful, helping send decent middle class jobs to Mexico and China, I guess the fact that they hold the ordinary working American in disdain should have been obvious.

The Clintons think that people who work on their feet, “need to be brought into the future.”

They are avatars of the professional class in the Democratic Party, and smug condescension drips from them.

Why Not Both?

No Comments

Angry Bear wonders if, “Economists Idiots or Just Delusional?”

If reducing the value of the policies If held by those who are continuously employed, either by taxing them or forcing those people to move to a less comprehensive plan than their risk-aversion preferences, is going to “reduce costly distortions in U.S. health care,” the only possible conclusion is that total health care spending is going to get costlier on average.

Yes, you might argue this will reduce “distortion.” But you would have to be an idiot—or, apparently, Alan Auerbach (Strongly) or Austan Goolsbee—to believe that is a good thing.

It does explain many of the policy shortcomings of the Obama animation.
Posted via mobile.

Quit Drawing Targets on Your Shoes, Morons

No Comments

The useless meat sacks known as “Senate Moderates” are now prostrating themselves before the possibility of President Trump:

As Democrats portray Donald Trump as a dangerous leader for his party, most of them barely acknowledge he could be president. But some centrist Democrats say they’re ready and willing to work with the business mogul should he defeat their party’s nominee.

 “The people will have a chance to vote. If Donald Trump is elected president there will be a great opportunity to sit down and have a conversation about what that agenda looks like,” explained Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who has long backed Hillary Clinton. “If he’s president, we’re going to have disagreement. But we’d better all figure out how to come up with an agenda for the American people.”

 Getting ready for a potential Trump presidency in their home states may just be good politics for moderate senators such as Heitkamp, Jon Tester of Montana and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. They’ll be top targets for Republicans in 2018, a midterm year that could favor the GOP if recent trends of lower turnouts in nonpresidential elections continue. And it’s a good bet that they’ll need Trump voters to keep their jobs.

Seriously?

These cheese eating surrender monkeys are panicking over the midterms, and so they are engaging in activities calculated to demoralize the base.

It’s stupid on a policy level, it’s stupid, on a political level, it’s even worse.

This is blind unreasoning panic.

I’ve seen zebras chased by cheetahs that carry themselves with more grace and dignity.

So Does Blowing Up Innocent Civilians, You Over Pampered Sack of Sh%$

No Comments

David Petraeus makes the point that anti-Muslim bigotry helps terrorists.

While it is an obvious point coached as deep meaning, which is kind of what Petraeus does, it misses the obvious point, which is that our mindless drone war, of which Petraeus was its most aggressive advocate, was an even more effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and Daesh.

We have been reigning down death from the skies on wedding parties, children, and first responders (“double tap” strikes), and this creates people who want revenge on the west in general and the US in particular.

There is a special place for you in hell.

This is Mindbogglingly Stupid

No Comments

At the Nevada state convention, it appears that the (Hillary supporting) convention chair decided to put her thumb on the scales even though her side had already won:

Organizers of the Nevada State Democratic Convention said they had to rush to wrap up the “unruly and unpredictable” event on Saturday after security became an issue and objects, including chairs, were being thrown.

State party officials said authorities at the Paris casino in Las Vegas informed them around 10 p.m. that they could no longer provide the necessary security for the event, where tensions between Bernie Sanders supporters and party leaders flared up. The convention was scheduled to end at 7 p.m.
………

Sanders supporters have accused state party leaders of rigging the process against them, and they objected to procedural votes to approve the rules of the event. They also questioned a credentials committee’s disqualification of 58 would-be Sanders delegates, who state party officials said didn’t provide evidence about their identities or weren’t registered to vote as Democrats by a May 1 deadline.

………

After casino officials told convention organizers to wrap up the event Saturday night, party chairwoman Roberta Lange accepted a motion to appoint delegates pre-approved by the Hillary Clinton and Sanders campaigns, organizers said. She also accepted a motion to elect the state central committee according to rules submitted by county party chairs.

Sanders supporters upset with the proceedings staged a protest outside the Nevada State Democratic Party headquarters on Sunday, writing in sidewalk chalk “Roberta Lange murdered democracy” and “Fire Roberta.” Officials also said Lange had received hundreds of phone calls and text messages, including death threats, after her cellphone number was posted on social media.

Sanders issued a statement Friday, as tensions simmered before the convention, saying all Democrats shared the common goals of defeating Donald Trump and electing Democrats to office. “Working together respectfully and constructively on Saturday at the Nevada Democratic convention will move us closer to those essential goals,” he said.

Hillary Clinton really has two things going for her in the race for the nomination, her “inevitability”, and her claimed ability to unify the party in November.

The actions in Nevada mitigate against these perceived advantages.

If the Clinton campaign is as sure as they claim about her victory in the nomination, they aren’t, (and neither am I) they need to stop going scorched earth.

Al-Gebra Terrorist Operative Uncovered on American Airlines Flight

No Comments

My bad, not Al-Gebra, Algebra.

It turns that an award winning economist of Italian descent was ethnically profiled for doing mathematics for a talk that he was going to give:

On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.

Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.

The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.

………

Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.

The wait continued.

Finally the pilot came by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn’t entirely sure of the agent’s affiliation, he would later say.

And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.

That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.

The curly-haired man laughed.

He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.

Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.

Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

We are a nation of panicked cowards, soiling ourselves at the smallest provocation.

What a Bunch of Hypocritical Pearl Clutching

No Comments
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.

Cue the Queen Song, and I Don’t Mean Bohemian Rhapsody

No Comments

Yesterday, Cruz dropped out, and today, Kasich threw in the towel:

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, a moderate voice who tried to portray himself as the adult in the Republican primary field but failed to win any state but his own, ended his long-shot quest for the presidency on Wednesday, cementing Donald J. Trump’s grip on the presidential nomination.

 Mr. Kasich’s departure, a day after Mr. Trump’s victory in the Indiana primary, leaves Mr. Trump as the only candidate remaining in the Republican race. His closest challenger, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, dropped out Tuesday night.

The Republicans have a nominee, and I am tremendously amused.

Then I remember who is leading in the Democratic primary, and I haz a sad.

Not Enough Bullets

1 Comment

It appears that the banks are asserting that they have a constitutional right to dividends from the Federal Reserve:

A trade group for the nation’s largest banks has asserted a constitutional right to risk-free profit from the Federal Reserve.

Rob Nichols, the chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Association, argued in a comment letter Thursday that a recent federal law reducing the dividend on the stock that banks purchase as part of membership in the Federal Reserve system, violates the Fifth Amendment clause banning the uncompensated seizure of property.

Congress reduced the dividend as part of a deal to pay for transportation projects. Dividends for the stock, which cannot be bought or sold, had been set at 6 percent since the Federal Reserve’s inception in 1913. Banks cannot ever lose money on the stock; they’re even paid out if their regional Fed bank disbands. So the dividend represented a risk-free profit, earning back its investment in full every 17 years.

………

Given those facts, [American Bankers Association chief lobbyist Rob] Nichols’s argument amounts to saying that the 6 percent dividend rate itself is constitutionally protected, because it’s been around for a long time. Nichols effectively asserts that the risk-free dividend is bank property.

Seriously?

I cannot see how a government subsidy can be considered property, particularly not a dividend which, as anyone who knows anything about investments, knows is subject to change without warning.

The Democratic Party Bears Far More Blame on This That the Republican Party.

No Comments

Over at Medium, Steve Five notes that, “If These Two Win, This is Going To Be The Sh%$tiest Election in US History,” with the charming sub hed of, “Dear God When Will It Be Over Please Make It Stop.”

He’s right:

After last night’s sweeping wins by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it appears even more likely that the two will become their respective party’s nominees. But according to multiple different polls and recent data, these are the sh%$tiest candidates in recorded history and this election will be a total mess.

 A recent CBS poll has Clinton at 52% unfavorable rating, with Trump at 57% unfavorable. These are the lowest favorability ratings of presumptive nominees since CBS began polling, and other polls show similar findings. Clinton’s sh%$tiness has been seen as a major problem for the Democratic party, while the only consolation to the Democrats is that Donald Trump is statistically sh%$tier, to the point that he is potentially starting a civil war within the Republican party. If either of these two are elected, they will be the least favored nominee to become president in the history of polling.

 ………

 If Clinton and Trump win their party nominations, we’re in for six months of peak sh$%tiness. Trump saving $2 Billion on ad revenue means he can outspend a cash-strapped Clinton after the primaries, and his sh$%ty rhetoric and fistfuls of money will force a hawkish Clinton to at turns go tough on him and differentiate herself with a market-tested party unification approach.

 ………

 One thing is certain, if Clinton and Trump become their party’s nominees, it will be a race to the bottom. With Trump’s schoolyard rhetoric and Clinton’s distrustfulness, a heated general election fight will turn off an already election-fatigued American populace. According to the data, no matter who wins, a majority of Americans will lose.

I think that the assessment is fundamentally accurate.

It’s a f%$#ing mess, but Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two different phenomena.

Donald Trump is the proverbial black swan. The Republican party could not have predicted him, or what he would be, or his ascendance.  No one could have predicted this.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been a known quantity for decades, and she record of failure that would make Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld blush, whether it is Iraq, NAFTA, Hillary Care, crime bill, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, or any other signature of her issues.

But the Democratic Party establishment, following the script to Blazing Saddles, has decided that, “”We’ve gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs, gentlemen!”

It is the Iron Law of Organizations Institutions, where power WITHIN an organization is pursued at the expense of the power OF that organization.

The Democratic Party establishment has consciously chosen its course for the most venal of reasons, and the rest of us will pay for this.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

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

No Comments

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

No Comments

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.