Whiskey Fire

Marinus van der Lubbe, You're on in Five

Among the most predictable events of the next two years is a terrorist, or "terrorist," attack on a Trump property somewhere in the world, perhaps even in America.

The intention behind this attack will be the destruction of American democracy.

It will probably work, too.

If I were evil, that's how I'd play it. 

 

 

Are there hats?

John Oliver: You don’t need people’s opinion on a fact. You might as well have a poll asking: ‘Which number is bigger, 15 or 5?’ or ‘Do owls exist?’ or ‘Are there hats?’

 

“Are there hats?” — I laughed my ass clean off. - tengrain

TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!

 

FURTHERMORE:

 

In other news:

Two teams of scientists say the long-feared collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has begun, kicking off what's likely to be a centuries-long process that could raise sea levels by as much as 15 feet. "There's been a lot of speculation about the stability of marine ice sheets, and many scientists suspected that this kind of behavior is under way," Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a news release about one of the studies released Monday. "This study provides a more qualitative idea of the rates at which the collapse could take place."

THIS CARDINAL REMAINS UNCONVINCED:


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The Saddest Place In The World?

A White (W/ upper case "W"!) losers-too-dense-to-recognize-their-privilege get-together where this sort of thing may be overheard:

In the lobby outside of the Polaris room, young men debated whether Ayn Rand’s message of individualism served the white race or fragmented it. During a coffee break, a discussion about whether whites of different ancestry could ever live together in an ethno-state erupted from one of the tables.

Elaborate performance art? We ask because this is beyond mockery. What could possibly top that?

But really the conference was open to any number of overlapping topics that might attract disaffected white youngsters. Jack Donovan, an anti-feminist writer and “advocate for the resurgence of tribalism and manly virtue,” served up his shtick.

His shtick: Poetry, or a run-on sentence?

Donovan has argued that feminists are trying to create “gender-neutral utopias” that will make men into “doughy bonobos and chunky Chaz Bonos playing out their endless manic-depressive melodramas in a big bean-flicking circle of sterility, sickness and desperation.”

Whichever one, I'm (easily) amused.

Bonobos?

— M. "Doughy Bonobo" Bouffant

(Who is not chunky Chaz Bono, 'cause M.B. spells it old school: "Chas." Can't deny the "chunky" though.)

Mr. Andrea Mitchell Speaks, You Listen

Why don't you warm up the crowd with a few jokes, Sir Alan?

In his new book "The Map and the Territory," to be released on Tuesday, Mr. Greenspan, 87, goes on a hunt for what has gone wrong in American politics and in the U.S. economy. He doesn't blame the current administration for today's partisan divide. The culprit? "It's the benefits," he says, pointing to the disagreements between Republicans and Democrats over how to deal with the growth of entitlements.

Everything will be fine, once we put granny on a catfood diet.

He said he is baffled by all the blame that has been piled on him. Since the recession, critics have said the increased money supply and low interest rates during his tenure at the Fed from 1987 to 2006 led to bubble investments. Mr. Greenspan first heard that theory, he says, in 2007, when John Taylor, a professor of economics at Stanford University who has advised Republicans, made the connection between easy money and the housing bubble.

Here's a tip for you, WSJ: There are other critics who don't buy the magic of the markets, greed is good claptrap that you do.

"I've always considered myself more of a mathematician than a psychologist," says Mr. Greenspan. But after the Fed's model failed to predict the financial crisis, he realized that there is more to forecasting than numbers. "It all fell apart, in the sense that not a single major forecaster of note or institution caught it," he says. "The Federal Reserve has got the most elaborate econometric model, which incorporates all the newfangled models of how the world works—and it missed it completely."

Oh, sure.

Mr. Greenspan set out to find his blind spot step by step. ... Studying the minutiae of the events leading to the financial crisis brought to mind some lessons from his famous friendship, from the 1950s on, with the late Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. He says that Rand didn't influence him politically—he was always a libertarian—but she did point out tensions in his philosophy about life. "She caught me in contradictions, which shook me, and I said, 'My God, she is right,' " he says.

That first blind step was a doozy. A shame that you didn't retrace far enough.

With his new book, Mr. Greenspan hopes to provide politicians and the public with a road map to avoid making the same mistakes again. His suggestions include reducing entitlements, embracing "creative destruction" by letting facilities with cutting-edge technology displace those with low productivity, and fixing the political system by encouraging bipartisanship. He hasn't yet sent a copy to Janet Yellen, the nominee to be the next Fed chief. Though they are good friends, he says, "she and I don't agree on lots of things and never have, but I enjoy talking to her because she has arguments and logic behind it."

While you have a crazy lady's 'philosophy' and a burning desire to make granny pay for the mess. And of course, a Nobel Prize that ought to be rescinded.

P.S. The crooks were allowed to abscond with the loot. This does not mean there were no crooks.

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Not Happy, Still Crappy

Big Papi: Not Happy


Our Politicians: Still Crappy

Digby, re: The NSA and Saxby

Austerity is no longer the new black, notes Duncan Black.

When you hear the words "Public-Private Partnership", watch your back.

Why hang chads when you could hang an Admiral instead?

And here are the Ramones!


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Better Than Ezra

Here's a Wonkblog post about the Administration's efforts to further screw the American worker:

How Congress might have already tied Obama’s hands in trade negotiations

Quoted in the post are:

James Bacchus, a former member of Congress who served as a judge at the World Trade Organization and now chairs Greenberg Traurig’s global trade practice.

Thomas Bollyky, a former negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative who’s now at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Stanford professor Judith Goldstein, who calls this emerging dynamic (foes of granting fast-track authority) a “Baptist-bootlegger coalition.”

Chris Wenk, the Chamber of Commerce’s point person on trade issues.

And just one opponent: Lori Wallach of Public Citizen. Even the caption "Obama needs leverage with the Europeans. Congress could help." is slanted in favor of granting fast track authority to get these trade deals done.

So here's Dean Baker:

Of course there is no reason the deals have to be complicated. If the trade deals focused on removing traditional trade barriers such as tariffs and quotas, there would not be "a zillion different interests and moving parts." There would be some formulaic wording written into the agreement that specified the rate at which these restrictions would be pared back.

The reason there are a zillion moving parts is because the Obama administration went to the oil and gas industries to ask how they can use the trade agreement to get around environmental restrictions on drilling. It went to the food and agricultural industries to ask how they could get around food safety rules. It went to the pharmaceutical industry to ask it how it can use these deals to increase patent protections and jack up drug prices. It went to the entertainment industry and asked how it can use these deals to strengthen copyright enforcement and require Internet intermediaries to take responsibility (and incurr expenses) to help enforce copyrights.

Note: The Wonkblog post was written by Lydia DePillis, not Ezra Klein. However, I wanted an excuse to put up this youtuber.



NAFTA was begun by President G.H.W. Bush, and finished by Bill Clinton.

"First of all, because NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement." - Bill Clinton, September 14, 1993

"In a few moments, I will sign the North American free trade act into law. NAFTA will tear clown trade barriers between our three nations. It will create the world's largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone. The environmental and labor side agreements negotiated by our administration will make this agreement a force for social progress as well as economic growth. Already the confidence we've displayed by ratifying NAFTA has begun to bear fruit. We are now making real progress toward a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it could make the material gains of NAFTA for our country look small by comparison." - Bill Clinton, December 8, 1993

So what happened? "As of 2010, U.S. trade deficits with Mexico totaling $97.2 billion had displaced 682,900 U.S. jobs. Of those jobs, 116,400 are likely economy-wide job losses because they were displaced between 2007 and 2010, when the U.S. labor market was severely depressed." - Robert E. Scott, Economic Policy Institute, May 3, 2011

Similarly, it was G.W. Bush who began Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations. And neither the results of NAFTA nor five years of high unemployment due to the financial meltdown have dissuaded our President Hope and Change from pursuing "NAFTA on steroids" one iota. Serving "our" multinational corporations by screwing the American worker has been bipartisan ever since 3rd Way corporatists captured the Democratic party.

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

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Since the Affairs of Men Rest Still Incertain, Let's Reason with the Worst That May Befall

THE FUTURE! It is not at all difficult to predict the effects of the latest Scandals on any future election: that would be, none. None effects.

I'll here just lay odds; what I think ought to matter is not in it. This is just Sports Talk. Who is in and who is out as if we were God's spies and so forth, ahem.

DRONES. Drones aren't even a "scandal"; the brutal reality is that it's impossible to get Americans to give a shit about where the bombs land. Or, relatedly, about who is in Guantanamo, or what Guantanamo even is, exactly.

Abu Ghraib didn't move any polls.

IRS. This is the one that might matter, but the GOP is not remotely capable of doing anything with it. Here, read this...

If you can give a flying fuck after a single sentence of that article, you are Rocky the Only Flying Squirrel Ever Who Fucking Gives a Flying Squirrel Fuck.

To paraphrase Ken Starr, "thank Christ for the blowjob."

That was the only goddamn thing about the Clinton impeachment that anyone could remotely understand, because the rest was stupid. And then -- nobody cared much about the blowjob. Sanely.

A lotta funny dick jokes though...

But back to 2013.

To the extent that what happened was the IRS squabbling with the Tea Party... oh look, those two kids nobody likes are fighting. How sad they have knifed each other in the groin. Ochone.

BENGHAZI. The talking points!

AP & FOX PRESS STUFF. Nobody will  vote based on the government abuse of the press, because nobody likes the press or the government. Who cares who exactly is screwing you, when they didn't even buy you dinner?

My conclusion is that nothing is likely to change and that the United States as presently constituted is far too topheavy with crazy douchebags in leadership positions to survive very much longer.