Category: Wanker

Useless Meatbag of the Day

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Former Senator Jim Webb, who seems to think that a little genocide is just a misunderstanding between friends:

Former Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) is not happy about former President Andrew Jackson being bumped from the front of the $20 bill.

Webb joined conservatives in blasting the Treasury Department’s decision to bump Jackson to the back of the bill in order to put legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the front. He wrote Sunday in a Washington Post op-ed that the decision was “an indication of how far political correctness has invaded our educational system and skewed our national consciousness.”

“This dismissive characterization of one of our great presidents is not occurring in a vacuum,” he wrote. “Any white person whose ancestral relations trace to the American South now risks being characterized as having roots based on bigotry and undeserved privilege. Meanwhile, race relations are at their worst point in decades.”

This racist asshole argued that despite, “Jackson’s involvement in the events that led to the Trail of Tears, he argued that the former President was not genocidal because he raised an orphaned Native American baby as his son.”

Andrew Jackson ignored a Supreme Court ruling, and sent in troops to send the Cherokee on a death march to Oklahoma.

F%$# Webb, and f%$# his Neo-Confederate bullsh%$.

OBama Really Wants His Poodle to Stay in the EU

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Obama is now saying that if Britain votes to leave the EU, there won’t be a free trade deal with Britain for over 10 years.

This is, of course, a shameless attempt to threaten the British voters into staying in the EU, so that US influence on this body is not diminished.

The US (IMNSHO correctly) that the UK will blindly promulgate US policies and US interests within the European Union:

The UK could take up to 10 years to negotiate trade deals with the US if it leaves the EU, Barack Obama has said.

In a BBC interview, the US president said: “It could be five years from now, 10 years from now before we were able to actually get something done.”

Britain would also have less influence globally if it left, he added.

His warning over trade has angered UK campaigners for leaving the EU – with UKIP leader Nigel Farage dismissing Mr Obama’s comments as “utter tosh”.

As much as it pains me to agree with him, Nigel Farage is right.

How Utterly Proper

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George Osborne, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has decided to exempt people that he sees as significant from money laundering regulations:

………

George Osborne this afternoon accepted an amendment to the Financial Services Bill which will see some Politically Exposed Persons and their families exempted from these anti-money laundering rules. Ministers will now “exclude… specified categories of persons” from the list of so-called PEPs, as Osborne says it is “disproportionate” for banks to include MPs and relatives on the watch list. Mossack Fonseca will be able to whisk MPs and their families through the account opening process…

(emphasis original)

And once again, I have to note that this is not The Onion, it is reality ……… reality completely indistinguishable from the the pages of a parody magazine.

I am beginning to wish that Guy Fawkes had succeeded in the Gunpowder Plot.

H/t Naked Capitalism

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.

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.

Why You Cannot Rely on the Cloud

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Google, or more accurately its evil twin Alphabet, bought the a leader in the “smart home” industry, Nest.  

Flush with money, Nest bought competitor Revolv, but they didn’t want the technology, they just wanted the staff.

And now Google/Alphabet/Nest has announced that they will be shutting down all Revolv home control units.

I don’t mean that they will stop supporting the units, I mean that they will shut the units down.

They will go dark.

They are now door stops:

Nest, a smart-home company owned by Google’s holding company Alphabet, is dropping support for a line of products — and will make customers’ existing devices completely useless.

It’s a move that has infuriated some customers, and raises worrying questions about the rights of consumers in the ever-more connected future.

In October 2014, Nest acquired Revolv, a smart-home device maker, nine months after it was itself bought by Google. The terms of the Revolv deal were not disclosed, and as Re/code reported at the time, the deal was an acqui-hire — buying a company for its talent rather than its products or users.

Nest cofounder Matt Rogers praised Revolv as “the best team out there,” and Revolv immediately stopped selling its $300 (£210) home hub, which could be used to control lights, doors, alarms, and so on.

Revolv’s team was to work on “Work with Nest,” Nest’s API program, but customers’ existing Revolv products continued to be supported — until recently.

Just over a month ago, Revolv updated its website to announce that it is closing down completely, pulling the plug on its existing products in May. “We’re pouring all our energy into Works with Nest and are incredibly excited about what we’re making,” wrote Revolv founders Tim Enwall and Mike Soucie. “Unfortunately, that means we can’t allocate resources to Revolv anymore and we have to shut down the service.”

Shutting down Revolv does not mean that Nest is ceasing to support its products, leaving them vulnerable to bugs and other unpatched issues. It means that the $300 devices and accompanying apps will stop working completely.

As one customer puts it, Google parent company Alphabet is “intentionally bricking” the devices on May 15, 2016.

Arlo Gilbert, CEO of medical app company Televero, is infuriated by Nest’s decision. He has written a Medium post about the impending closure, labelling it a “pretty blatant ‘f–k you’ to every person who trusted in them and bought their hardware.”

I’ve experienced this on a smaller scale, when “upgrades” to blogger have made the product less capable and less powerful.

But this is just a blog, and until such time I own/rent my own server, I have to live with this.

If you let Google or cloud type company control your business or your phone, they are going to f%$# like a drunk sorority girl, whether it is product shutdowns, or upgrades that you hate.

I still use Office 2003, but if I used Google docs, I would be forced to work when they changed their interface and went with their low contrast “flat design”, and it would no longer support Office 2003 formats.

If you want to control how you get your work done, you cannot rely on the cloud.

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

Yeah, He Endorsed Joe Lieberman Too.

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Barack Obama just endorsed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, because while he killed Osama bin Laden, he really hates liberals:

While President Barack Obama won’t tell us who he will be supporting in the general election, one candidate he has fully endorsed is Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Wasserman Schultz is currently running for her life in Florida against the first Democratic congressional opponent she has faced during her time in the House. Opponent Tim Canova is running on the idea that Wasserman Schultz is far too corrupt and indebted to Wall Street to effectively represent the people of her district. Canova has endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders and has been backed by some of the same groups that Sanders is.

President Obama does not often endorse candidates in House primaries, so his support for Wasserman Schultz is telling.

Interestingly enough, this came shortly after the Florida Democratic Party was shamed into providing voter lists to Mr. Canova:

Last week, the Florida Democratic Party — and Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz — took some serious heat after it banned upstart congressional candidate Tim Canova from using the party’s voter data files, which help candidates research and contact supporters. But the Florida Democratic Party reversed its decision yesterday, party spokesperson Max Steele has confirmed to New Times.

Improbably, this was the second voter-data scandal to ensnare Wasserman Schultz this election cycle. In December, Wasserman Schultz, acting as chair of the Democratic National Committee, temporarily banned Bernie Sanders from accessing the DNC’s voter data files after his campaign staffer was caught hacking into Hillary Clinton’s campaign data. (The information allows candidates to research and contact potential supporters in their area.) But the move backfired, and Wasserman Schultz has since been accused of intentionally trying to sink Sanders’ chances at the presidency. Sanders sued, the move was overturned, and critics across the country have called for her ouster. She’s had a bad few months.

In something of a twist, Canova, who once advised Sanders on Wall Street reform, then said he had also been denied access to that very same data. This was due to a Florida Democratic Party rule, instituted in 2010, which bans candidates running against incumbents from using the information. In an interview, Canova called the rule “undemocratic” and said the party was acting to protect Wasserman Schultz.

The party did not offer data access “to candidates challenging incumbent members of Florida’s Democratic congressional delegation,” Steele told New Times earlier this month. “This policy has been applied uniformly across the board since 2010. We stand with our incumbent members of Congress, and we’re proud of the job they do representing the people of Florida. The Voter File is proprietary software created and owned by the Democratic National Committee that is maintained and operated by the Florida Democratic Party here in state.”

………

After Canova put up a fight, the Florida Democratic Party reconsidered how Canova’s case looked to the outside world, Steele says. The party made the choice today to give Canova, and only Canova, access to the file.

“Given the unique circumstances of having an incumbent member of Congress who is also the DNC chair who is being challenged by a Democrat (a situation that as you can imagine has never arisen), the FDP has decided to grant Mr. Canova access to the Voter File,” Steele said via email. The file will cost $3,500 to access.

Steele reiterated that this will be a one-time policy change: “Given the dual nature of an incumbent who is also a national party chair, we’ve decided to grant Mr. Canova access to avoid any appearance of favoritism,” he said. Other candidates who run against incumbents will be out of luck.

As an aside, they would not have done this, or at least not have done this so soon, unless there was a significant amount of loathing directed towards Wasserman Schultz in the state party.

Considering her refusal to support challenges to reactionary Cuban-American Republicans in competitive districts, I rather expect that there is no small amount of loathing among the locals there.

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.

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.

There Is Stupid, Mind Bogglingly Stupid, and Then There Is Education Department Stupid

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Administrators at the South Orangetown School District decided that the Tappan Zee High School theater production of the Tony Award winning Mel Brooks musical The Producers:

Administrators have ordered the removal of swastikas from a high school production of The Producers, the famous Mel Brooks film that makes fun of Nazism.

The New York school district that oversees Tappan Zee High School considers the inclusion of a swastika to be offensive and, possibly, a hate crime—regardless of the context.

“There is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate,” South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard told the local CBS station.

The kids in the play had a different reaction.

“It’s satire, not supposed to be taken seriously,” said Tyler Lowe, a student performer. CBS notes that Lowe is himself Jewish.

It’s not surprising that the teens understand the play better than the district does. The plot concerns a pair of producers who put together a deliberately bad, patently offensive pro-Hilter play in order to profit from its commercial failure. They are thwarted when the play is a hit—the audience assumes it’s satire.

………

The danger comes when authority figures try to shelter kids from offensive ideas and symbols. It’s better to let them behold the swastika, and laugh at it, than live in fear of it.

As Mel Brooks—creator of The Producers—said in a 2001 interview:

“I was never crazy about Hitler…If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator you never win…That’s what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can’t win. You show how crazy they are.”

These guys are responsible for seeing our kids educated, and I wouldn’t trust them to cut their own meat.

She’s Fundraising with Theranos? Seriously?!?!?

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For a while, I have been talking about the smoke and mirrors show that is the lab test company Theranos.

The short version is that they have a multibillion dollar valuation for a technology that allows one to make blood tests from a drop of blood from a finger tip.

Unfortunately, they have not been able to make the technology work, and so they have been doing conventional tests to generate some revenue.

But they are f%$#ing this up too, having been cited by the FDA.

And now the Clinton campaign is having this den of fraud hold a fund raiser for them.

I guess that Enron was busy:

Theranos is a unicorn that may soon be sent to the glue factory. The biotech start-up was once the toast of Silicon Valley. Its signature technology — a blood-testing machine so sensitive it requires a mere pinprick of blood to make accurate diagnoses — attracted a $9 billion valuation. ……… And then, last October, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the company’s breakthrough technology doesn’t actually work.

In recent days, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that the company’s lab in Newark, California, was in violation of five federal regulations, thereby posing “immediate jeopardy to patient health and safety.” Last week, the release of that investigation’s full report revealed that “quality control issues” may have compromised the blood-test results of 81 patients.

……… But for god knows what reason, it hasn’t cost the company the chance to host a fund-raiser for the Democratic front-runner. Next week, Chelsea Clinton will join Holmes at Theranos’s Palo Alto headquarters to help raise money for her mother’s campaign. According to an email obtained by Re/code, the event will be held next Monday night and will cost most attendees $2,700 a head.

One of Clinton’s primary liabilities in her race against Bernie Sanders is the perception that she is overly friendly with corrupt corporate interests. So it’s pretty bizarre that she has decided to have a (reportedly) corrupt corporation host her next big fund-raiser. And it’s only one of several unforced errors the campaign has made since last Friday. 

Someone in the Clinton sure picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

On the bright side for the Campaign, at least this time Hillary was not caught on camera doing it, so she can blame some lowly staffer.

This really is a complete cock up.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Needs to Be Fired ……… Out of a Cannon ……… Into the Sun ……… Part Gazillion

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As I have mentioned before, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz has a primary challenger, who I have endorsed, Tim Canova.

Well, it appears that our lady of the unmanageable hair is spooked, because she has changed DNC policies to protect her own sorry political career:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s reputation as DNC chair has plummeted to the point where she is being challenged in the Democratic Primary for her congressional seat for the first time ever. Her poor leadership of the DNC contributed to significant losses in the 2014 midterm elections for Democrats, and the way she has handled the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries has irked both Bernie Sanders’ and Hillary Clinton’s supporters, as well as many of her colleagues. Just a few weeks ago, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, one of five DNC vice chairs, resigned from her position to support Mr. Sanders.

To help save her public image, Ms. Wasserman Schultz has authored desperate Op-Eds for various news outlets in attempts to come off as relatable. “Having a perspective of a working mother has helped in the role as a legislator,” the Florida congresswoman wrote (poorly) for US News. Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s explanation of how being a mother in government poses challenges fails to mention her privileged financial status. Most working mothers do not have the salary of a U.S. congresswoman plus a husband’s banker income to pay for things like childcare.

And now, to help rig her own election in the Democratic primaries, Ms. Wasserman Schultz is blocking any challenger to a Democratic incumbent from accessing the voter file database—a vital campaign tool for any election.

“Last week, I called the Florida Democratic Party to request access to the voter file database and software known as VAN that is routinely used by Democratic candidates across the country,” wrote Tim Canova, Ms. Wasserman Schultz’s primary challenger, in an article on Medium. “I was told that our campaign would be denied access to this database because I am running against an incumbent Democrat, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I was also told that any Democratic candidate running against an incumbent Democrat would be denied access — even a lifelong progressive challenging an out-of-touch incumbent.”

Actually, it’s especially for an out of touch incumbent hack.

BTW, the DNC is not supposed to choose sides in a contested primary.

Seriously.  She  ……… Needs  ……… To  ……… Be  ……… Fired, both from the DNC, and from Congress.

She shouldn’t be elected dog catcher.