Whiskey Fire

All the Feels

 by your old pal, Ripley

Contemplate, if you will...

Donald Trump’s Draft Deferments: Four for College, One for Bad Feet

Back in 1968, at the age of 22, Donald J. Trump seemed the picture of health.

He stood 6 feet 2 inches with an athletic build; had played football, tennis and squash; and was taking up golf. His medical history was unblemished, aside from a routine appendectomy when he was 10.

But after he graduated from college in the spring of 1968, making him eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam, he received a diagnosis that would change his path: bone spurs in his heels.

When you've contemplated enough, consider this:

At the age of 17, Iommi lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand in an industrial accident on his last day of work in a sheet metal factory. Iommi described how he "was told 'you'll never play again. It was just unbelievable. I sat in the hospital with my hand in this bag and I thought 'that's it – I'm finished. But eventually I thought 'I'm not going to accept that. There must be a way I can play'." After the injury Iommi considered abandoning the guitar entirely. However, his factory foreman played him a recording of famous jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, which encouraged him to continue as a musician.

And dig this. Seriously.

 

I guess it should be 'The Economically Anxious Rules'. Hard to fit into lyrics, though.

We need better. Always better. But you knew that.

 

Your humble Quarterly (if that) servant,

Rip -

Bigly School

There have been a few things published about what the Sir Lout Administration means as regards higher education policy. But as it happens, nobody knows. We knew a lot about what Clinton wanted to do, but basically all we know about Sir Lout is that he is all about "the opposite of that nasty woman," what congressional Republicans want to do, and this ghastly thing from last May. 

Sam Clovis, the national co-chair and policy director of Trump's campaign, outlined for Inside Higher Ed the ideas that the presumptive GOP nominee is preparing to put forth. While final decisions have not been made on when the ideas will be formally unveiled, not to mention many details worked out, Clovis said the Trump campaign expects higher education to be a major issue in the fall general election.

It wasn't. But anyway, here's Clovis, who I guess is still going to have something to bray about as regards the Sir Lout Official Higher Education Strategy, insofar as Sir Lout can even be bothered to consider it. The May IHE piece is, I'm sure, destined to become something of a historical curiosity to show. Have a drink first. I did.

First off, Clovis made clear that the Trump campaign will fight and not endorse Hillary Clinton's proposal for debt-free public higher education or the Bernie Sanders plan for free public higher education. The response on those ideas will be "unequivocally no," Clovis said. "How do you pay for that? It's absurd on its surface."

Further, Trump will also reject President Obama's proposals for a state-federal partnership to make community college free for new high school graduates. Community colleges are "damn near free" now, and "almost anyone can afford community college," he said.

You could pay for it pretty easily, and ha ha ha no, not almost anyone can pay for community college -- even with existing governmental assistance programs. 

Many of the ideas on which the Trump campaign is working involve a complete overhaul of the federal student loan system, moving the government out of lending and restoring that role to private banks, as was the case before President Clinton partially and President Obama fully shifted loan origination from private lenders to the government. "We think it should be marketplace and market driven," he said. Local banks should be lending to local students, he said, but colleges should be playing a role in determining loan worthiness on factors that go beyond family income.

This is basic GOP ideology, and also nuts. There are no such fucking thing as "local banks" anymore. Public colleges cannot and should not run credit checks on 18-year-olds -- that is a massive transfer of cash to the private sector. It's a huge mess for private schools as well. The reason for ending the private lending system in the first place was that it was a predatory system that failed. So, par for Sir Loutism.

Oh, and "factors that go beyond family income" is code. 

Further, he said that all colleges should have "skin in the game" and share the risk associated with student loans. Many in Congress (and not just Republicans) have voiced support for that idea. But many Democrats have argued that some institutions -- historically black colleges or community colleges, for example -- should be exempt, given their histories of educating many students from low-income families who may not have the financial resources of others. But Clovis said that the principle of colleges sharing risk must apply to all institutions.

The message to community colleges and HBCs? You're fired.

Further, he said that the risk needs to be substantial enough to change the way colleges decide whether to admit students, and which programs they offer.

So much for open admission. 

And this is fun:

And these reforms would make it legitimate for colleges and banks to make decisions in part on students' prospective majors and their likely earnings after graduation, he said.

"If you are going to study 16th-century French art, more power to you. I support the arts," Clovis said. "But you are not going to get a job."

A college should factor that in when deciding on a student's loan eligibility, and the requirement that colleges share the risk would be a powerful incentive to do so, Clovis added.

Oh my sweet Irish buttocks. If you can read 16th-century French and can competently discuss the culture of that place and time, you are one very smart motherfucker and would be hired in one fucking second by any company desperately needing someone highly literate in two languages who is capable of very advanced critical thinking. You will be turning down jobs, probably because you will have no desire to listen to cretins all day.

And Clovis said this does not mean the Trump campaign is against the liberal arts. "The liberal arts education is the absolute foundation to success in life," Clovis said, adding that he hoped business and engineering and health professions and education students would include liberal arts courses in their college educations. But it is a different thing altogether, Clovis said, to focus on such fields. "If you choose to major in the liberal arts, there are issues associated with that."

Indeed. If you choose such a major, you might just learn how to spot obvious logical fallacies. And what good would THAT do you. Of course, it is different for the swans, as opposed to the ducklings:

There may be colleges that decide they are comfortable backing loans for students who study the liberal arts. A prestigious college could legitimately decide that anyone it graduates -- regardless of major -- will do well in life, and so go ahead with approving the borrowing. "If you go to Harvard, you can major in anything you want, and once you get in the door, you'll be OK," Clovis said, so such a college might be fine with its students borrowing to study the liberal arts. "But not all colleges are in the same system," he said.

Right.

You know, I thought I had as many "fuck yous" stockpiled as I'd imagined I'd ever require. But now I fear a shortage. 

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. 

 

 

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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Whom Are the Most Oppressed Peoples Ever in Alla the USA?

Who is more oppressed?

Ferguson? Ferguson?

According to Johnson and other eye witnesses, however, the cop ordered the friends to "get the fuck on the sidewalk," but the teenagers said they had almost reached their destination. That's when the officer slammed his door open so hard that it bounced off of Brown and closed again. The cop then reached out and grabbed Brown by the neck, then by the shirt.

"I'm gonna shoot you," the cop said.

The cop shot him once, but Brown pulled away, and the pair were still able to run away together. The officer fired again. Johnson ducked behind a car, but the cop's second shot caused Brown to stop about 35 feet away from the cruiser, still within touching distance of Johnson. Multiple witnesses say this is when Brown raised his hands in the air to show he was unarmed. Johnson remembered that Brown also said, "I don't have a gun, stop shooting!" The officer then shot him dead.

Or, Gainesville, GA?

The American Humanist Association (AHA) is about to learn a very important lesson -- folks around Gainesville, Georgia don’t take kindly to out-of-town atheists trying to bully their children.

More than 200 people turned out in defiance of the self-described atheist group early Thursday morning for an impromptu prayer rally in the middle of the Chestatee High School football field.

The previous day, the atheists (acting on behalf of a single, unnamed citizen) sent a letter to school officials demanding that the football coaching staff stop participating in team prayers and that they remove all biblical references and religious messages from team documents.

To best of anyone’s knowledge around Gainesville, no one associated with the football team has a problem with the voluntary prayers. The atheists says that’s beside the point citing the Establishment Clause.

Clearly, it is the fine fucking citizens of Gainesville, GA, who are most fucking oppressed by the fucking government. Fuck.

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:


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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Only In America

Two more reasons to hate America. No, four.

The two (Yes, it took two.) buffoons who typed this lame something or other explaining the recent Republican shutdown fiasco. Ponnuru & Lowry sat down & "thought" for a while before reaching the radical conclusion that the reactionary elements simply didn't have the votes to do anything*. (No shit?)

And these two examples of where else-ism:

The anti-Obamacare passion we saw in the defunding fight, too, is welcome even if it needs to be better applied. That passion is, indeed, one of the wonders of American politics. Where else would an entitlement promising a kind of free lunch engender such strenuous populist opposition? For that matter, where else would a Tea Party be possible?

The answers:

There is nowhere else on this planet populated w/ so many sheep who are so gullible (& so racist that their concern that non-white others may get affordable care seems to trump any concern for their own well-being). Only in these United Snakes do citizens want to cut off their noses not only to spite their own faces, but to spite others. And not that damn exceptional & special: Children have refused what's best for them throughout human history.

Germany in the late 1920s.

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*They make the big wingnut welfare money because their stark & honest reasoning combined w/ their mad math skillz enabled them (sometime after the facts) to determine that the votes for whatever in hell Ted Cruz et al. were trying to do were not there. So the two of them are smarter than Ted Cruz. Damned again w/ faint praise!

— M. Bouffant

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.

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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Presidential News Conference, August 9, 2013

Carol Lee: Can you understand, though, why some people might not trust what you're saying right now about wanting to --

THE PRESIDENT: No, I can’t.

Carol Lee: -- that they should be comfortable with the process?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, the fact that I said that the programs are operating in a way that prevents abuse, that continues to be true, without the reforms. The question is how do I make the American people more comfortable.

By make us more comfortable, President Gas means feed us more horse crap.

In other beesness:




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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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!


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