Whiskey Fire

The TPP: Our President Drops The Mask

My last post on the topic. Dean Baker continues to do an excellent job of exposing this shameless sellout.

One Democratic Senator (Tom Carper of Delaware) joined 51 Republicans voting for fast track. Mitch McConnell voted against it when it was clear it would fail so that he can bring it up again. So who will benefit from the TPP?

The People's View:

Big labor unions and liberal members of Congress have picked a fight against the global expansion of the rights of workers by mounting do-or-die opposition against the Trade Promotion bill moving through Congress that will allow the President to bring the Trans-Pacific Partnership to Congress for an up-or-down vote. In doing so, American labor is displaying key symptoms of its self-inflicted collapse.

Rep. Paul Ryan, on CNBC with Joe Kernen shilling for the TPP this morning, does not give a hairy rat's behind about the rights of workers. Neither does the Chamber of Commerce, also shilling for this execrable multinational corporate government deal.

I remember when President Obama's fans explained his Catfood Commission as "eleventy-dimensional chess." It wasn't. He's been working for Wall Street the entire time.

President Gas is tap dancing
For the banker he's a thief
He isn't very honest
But he's obvious at least

P.S. This isn't over. There will be another vote tomorrow, after a couple fig leaves have been added. Our President and the GOP only need 7 or 8 Democrats to switch votes to get this through the Senate. Some who voted against it yesterday are just hoping for token concessions in order to cover their fealty to the richest few.

The people won this round because Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown effectively organized opposition and because voters persistently called their Congresscritters to let them know it's a bad deal. Keep calling!

Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place.
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Eric Holder Resigns

Here's John Cassidy at the New Yorker: Why Didn’t Eric Holder Go After the Bankers?

Amid all the coverage of Eric Holder’s resignation, I still haven’t seen a convincing answer to one question: Why didn’t the Justice Department, under his leadership, prosecute some of the senior bankers whose firms were largely responsible for the subprime-mortgage blowup and the Great Recession? It’s a gap in Holder’s record that historians will ponder at the same time they criticize his record on civil liberties, particularly his endorsement of the surveillance state, and praise him for trying to tackle some enduring problems in the American criminal-justice system, such as the imposition of long prison sentences for minor crimes and the scandalously high rates of incarceration, especially among minority groups.

Yes, John, if you ignore the fact that both Holder and Lanny Breuer (Assistant Attorney General, head of the DOJ's Criminal Justice division) came from white shoes criminal defense firm Covington and Burling, it might be difficult to answer that question. And if you don't mention it in your article, you're doing a disservice to your readers. Scot J. Paltrow (Reuters): Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."

Covington in 2004 also wrote a crucial opinion letter commissioned by MERS, providing legal justification for its electronic registry. MERS spokeswoman Karmela Lejarde declined to comment on Covington legal work done for MERS.

A President doesn't pick people like Holder and Breuer for the top positions at the DOJ if he wants Wall Street criminals brought to justice...quite the opposite in fact.

That youtube is parody, of course, but it's also your answer, John Cassidy.

The actual Frontline piece was damning enough that Lanny resigned shortly after it was aired. (We needn't cry for him, he's back at Covington in the newly-created role of vice-chairman of the firm, his reward for servicing the clientele while at the DOJ.) And speaking of Bill Black:

William R. Black on Prosecuting Criminal Banker CEOs: Obama and Holder Don’t Even Care Enough to Fake It

P.S. Here's Mario A. Murillo on one of Holder's cases at Covington: Holder, Chiquita and Colombia. I find it notable for mentioning candidate Obama's opposition to our free trade agreement with Colombia as a reason for disappointment with his nomination of Eric Holder. Of course, Our President would forget about his opposition to agreements like this just months after he was sworn in.

Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place.

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Filling In

Trying to avoid politics & idiots because I'm barely able to control my raging anger & can not type anything w/o cheap (but sincere, if any of these clowns ever cross my path) threats of criminal violenceslapping the smug morons (political & otherwise) surrounding me; how about some nice pictures instead, so Thers doesn't get in trouble when I wax nihilistic?

(Later, pictures demonstrating that we live in a world of shit & pain that is visually polluted by advertising that we can't fucking escape.)

— M. Bouffant

Where I Stopped Reading

In the second paragraph of this Jennifer Rubin drivel:

Jonah Goldberg has an exceptionally insightful piece explaining just how ...

— M. Bouffant

President Gas Is Tap Dancing

A banker in a tired suit
Is counting in his head
He's standing in your overcoat
He's lying on your bed
President Gas is tap dancing
For the banker he's a thief
He isn't very honest
But he's obvious at least

Critics scoff at Obama's professed desire for a debate.

"When he says he wants to have a debate on this issue, he passed on every opportunity to have a debate about it," said Jennifer Hoelzer, a former aide to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who has been a top critic of the secret programs. "You had to wait until someone illegally disclosed it? That seems disingenuous."

Jameel Jaffer, a top official at the American Civil Liberties Union, said a genuine debate was difficult as long as so much information still remains secret.

"The president said he welcomes a debate and we welcome one too, but it's very hard to have one when so much information is classified," he said. "Information that's been released through unofficial channels in recent weeks makes clear that what was being withheld should never have been classified in the first place."

On the other side of the spectrum, Marc A. Thiessen, a former aide to Bush and defender of his counterterrorism policies who wrote a book subtitled "How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack," has spent the last couple weeks defending Obama for authorizing the secret programs.

New PRISM slides: more than 100,000 'active surveillance targets,' explicit mention of real-time monitoring

Notably, the new slides appear to confirm whistleblower Edward Snowden's claims that PRISM allows the NSA and FBI to perform real-time surveillance of email and instant messaging, though it's still not clear which specific internet service providers allow such surveillance. (As originally reported, PRISM providers include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL, and Apple.)

In notes accompanying the new slides, the Post claims that "depending on the provider, the NSA may receive live notifications when a target logs on or sends an email, text, or voice chat as it happens."

Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place.
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Your WaPo Headline of the Day

Headlines coming to the WaPo soon:

"No clear answers why Social Security hasn't been cut despite my demands" by Fred Hiatt

"No clear answers why Iran and Syria haven't been bombed back to the Stone Age despite our wildest dreams" by Hiatt, Diehl, Lane, Krauthammer, Gerson, Thiessen, and Rubin

P.S. Seen at Atrios' place:



From McClatchy: Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S.

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. They also show how millions of federal employees and contractors must watch for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers and could face penalties, including criminal charges, for failing to report them. Leaks to the media are equated with espionage.

Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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Litmus Test

National joke Reince Priebus didn't pass.

I loved the way he started: “I just wanna let you know. I’m a Christian. I’m a believer. God lives in my heart. And I’m for changing minds, not changing values. Are you with me?” That was intended as an applause line. To call the response indifferent would be so kind as to be irresponsible.

While I'm on the War Between The Republican Factions (as performed by the inmates of the Daily Beast under the direction of Tina Brown) Rich Lowry just came out against the Southern Strategy, & (having read almost to the end) he's pimping a book (which is not linked here as I am not a pimp for Amazon or any other hive of worker exploitation & villainy) about rail-splittin' Abe Lincoln (who, by the way, not only split rails & freed the slaves but invented the luxury automobile); the "stop pickin' on Lincoln" schtick is obviously complete bullshit designed to mess w/ his competition in the Lincoln-book field & is w/o any other meaning.

It is the Lincoln-Hating Right. You can't belong unless you feel a compulsion to write "bloody-minded tyrant" immediately before or after the name "Abraham Lincoln." Some members of this fraternity are old-style Lost Cause romantics, deluding themselves about the “War for Southern Independence,” as some Southerners have been doing since about 1866, while others are a peculiar breed of libertarian. Libertarianism is supposed to make the Republican Party sleek and modern, but this variant of the creed—associated with Ron Paul—is stubbornly perverse and highly unappealing.

See, no meaning. And no mention of Nixon or the Southern Strategy either, because what could any of that have had to do w/ anything; the libertarians are the real (albeit sleek & modern) racists!! Remember, he needs a reason to mention Lincoln so he can pimp his book; an even-close-to-accurate item comparing the present-day Republican Party to Lincoln would not go over well w/ those who must be pleased. So he concludes by admitting he wasted his time high-horsing it over a bunch of losers.

Operationally, they are pro-Confederacy. Their influence shouldn't be exaggerated. The vast majority of people will never hear of them. They exist only as a small but foul temptation on the right. If American conservatism ever wants to commit suicide, they offer the ready means. And it begins with the root-and-branch rejection of Abraham Lincoln.

And I'm going to do a little high-horsing myself (& laughing) by sharing the title of Rich's opus. Ready? Food & drink out of mouths & away from keyboards? Here it is:

Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream—and How We Can Do It Again, on sale June 11 from Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins.

Really? There are still young rail-splitters? Do not hold your breath.

— M. Bouffant                                      Slightly different version (if it isn't edited) here.

Tonight's Youtuber Is Dedicated to Dianne Feinstein

Luminaries such as Karl Rove, Lindsey Graham, Ari Fleischer, Saxby Chambliss, and John Yoo are all defending Obama's NSA spying.

Isn't that fine company? Doesn't that make you feel good about this policy? But tonight's song is dedicated to Dianne Feinstein, who is very upset that some criminal/patriot let the people know what the government is doing.

How did Dianne become one of the richest members of Congress? That's right...the old fashioned way.

For you, DiFi.


UPDATE: That is, of course, Dianne Banker Buttlicker Margaret Thatcher Feinstein, a dragon-lady with no fuckin' heart.


Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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Wishful Thinking

Not quite as crazy as some, nonetheless entirely delusional Canadian Republican & former Bush speechwriter David Frum types:

Fortunately, the Republican 2016 field thus far remains mercifully free of the charlatans and crackpots who came to the fore in 2012. The early field is intelligent and hard-working. Paul Ryan has immense policy knowledge, Ted Cruz is a brilliant litigator and debater, Marco Rubio has made himself central to the most important legislative initiative of the year. Even Rand Paul has carefully repositioned himself as a sober-minded U.S. Senator, distancing himself from paranoia and bigotry.

Clap louder & harder, Dave, that always helps.

— M. Bouffant (Et chez moi.)

West By God

This God

As we know, to err is human.
But forgiving is for liberals who aren't tough enough to waterboard.

P.S. Yes, the Whiskey Fire filter is on the rampage again.

But I can only rescue ones that are on posts I write.

Posted by ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© and cross-posted at my place. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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