Month: September 2014

The sun continues to rise in the east (or the earth continues to revolve around the sun – depending on your religious views, that is) despite the failure of the Roger Goodell, NFL Commissioner, to resign for failing to do the right thing regarding the recent domestic violence scandals that have damaged the the one of the most profitable non-profit 501(c)(6) organizations in the US of A.

So, here’s a few of the “less significant” stories TV cable news isn’t obsessing over that caught my bleary eyes this evening:

In Ukraine, there’s another ceasefire deal – MAYBE – in the works.

Participants in Ukrainian peace talks have agreed to create a buffer zone to separate government troops and pro-Russian fighters, as well as withdraw foreign fighters and heavy weapons from the area of conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The deal reached early on Saturday by representatives of Ukraine, Russia, the Moscow-backed rebels and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) marked an effort to add substance to a ceasefire agreement that was signed on September 5 but has been frequently broken by clashes.

The new deal signed after hours of talks that dragged late into the night envisages setting up a buffer zone that would be 30 kilometres wide.

Personally, I’m not optimistic that this ceasefire proposal will work out any better than the prior ones.

Meanwhile, the Rick Perry and his very serious spectacles continues to troll for media attention to boost his hopes for another futile attempt at obtaining the 2016 GOP Presidential nomination. This time he has ordered the Texas National Guard to find where all the dead immigrant bodies are buried.

(Reuters) – Texas Governor Rick Perry on Friday ordered the Texas National Guard to search for the bodies of undocumented immigrants who have died by the hundreds in a remote part of the state as they attempted to walk to southern cities hundreds of miles (km) away.

Good luck with getting anyone other than Fox News to cover this story, Rick. Well, on television, that is.

And how about that member of the Axis of Evil that no one talks about anymore, Iran? Well, there’s something going on that involves stopping lots of ‘bad’ tubes from spinning around and around too much according to David Sanger, writing for the New York Times:

Over the years, the United States has shown considerable ingenuity in its effort to slow Iran’s production of nuclear fuel: It has used sabotage, cyberattacks and creative economic sanctions.

Now, mixing face-saving diplomacy and innovative technology, negotiators are attempting a new approach, suggesting that the Iranians call in a plumber.

The idea is to convince the Iranians to take away many of the pipes that connect their nuclear centrifuges, the giant machines that are connected together in a maze that allows uranium fuel to move from one machine to another, getting enriched along the way. That way, the Iranians could claim they have not given in to Western demands that they eliminate all but a token number of their 19,000 machines, in which Iran has invested billions of dollars and tremendous national pride.

Hopefully, the Iranians agree to this ‘plumbing’ solution to their centrifuge infestation. I mean considering they are now one of our undeclared allies in our not a war against ISIS or ISIL (or whichever acronym you prefer), we probably ought to play nice with one another, or at least pretend to do so. Unlike our other Islamic allies in the region of whom John McCain is so fond:

“Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” John McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends,” the senator said once again a month later, at the Munich Security Conference.

McCain was praising Prince Bandar bin Sultan, then the head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services and a former ambassador to the United States, for supporting forces fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. McCain and Senator Lindsey Graham had previously met with Bandar to encourage the Saudis to arm Syrian rebel forces.

Oh Johnny Boy, always so wrong and yet always so available to provide soundbytes to our friends in cable news. By the way, thank-you, again, Sarah Palin, for helping John McCain not become our President in 2008.

That’s all I got folks. Feel free to post links to other important (or not) stories our cable news media is ignoring at the moment in the comments.

Ireland has been producing some fairly decent economic statistics for a couple of years now – despite the general stagnation in the Eurozone and the continuing “consolidation” of the public finances as the Troika imposed austerity plan seeks to reduce the current budget deficit to below 3% by next year. But the latest figures showing 9% GNP growth and 7.7% GDP growth in the last 12 months take the breath away, and even if they prove to be something of an anomaly, would seem to indicate that the Irish economy has reached take-off velocity despite the heavy gravitational pull of public sector spending cuts, a 125% debt to GDP ratio, and stagnant external markets.

About 5% of Irish GNP and GNP can be attributed to the tax avoidance strategies of (mainly US) corporates basing themselves in Ireland for tax purposes, whilst in reality, the vast bulk of their activities take place elsewhere. The
marked divergence between GNP and GDP growth above can also be attributed in large part to the so called “Patent Cliff” which has resulted in a large fall in the value of pharmaceutical exports as blockbuster drugs like Lipator and Viagra come off-patent.

Ireland is the fifth biggest exporter of drugs in the world, and Irish chemical and pharmaceutical exports surged by more than a quarter in the five years to 2011 when they peaked at €56bn, a figure equivalent to almost a third of gross domestic product.  But the employment content of those exports is relatively small, and what is clear from these recent figures is that there is a much more broadly based recovery taking place in the Irish economy which is now even making up for the fall in drug export revenues.
The composition of the Irish workforce has been transformed into a much more knowledge based workforce, and the unemployment rate has declined steadily – from 15 to 11.5% – below the Eurozone average rate of 11.8%, aided, to some extent, by continuing net emigration.

However the size of the total workforce has yet to recover to pre-recession levels and there is controversy as to the actual number of real additional jobs being created:

Property price in Dublin have risen 25% from their bottom at the height of the recession and are now also starting to rise again in the rest of the country prompting some fears that we may be back into a boom and bust property price cycle.  However they are still over 30% below their peak at the height of the boom, and there are signs that the construction industry is beginning to ramp up output again from very low levels to meet pent-up demand. These price rises are also helping to reduce the number of households in negative equity and the number mortgages in arrears or in default – which should enable the banks to survive the stress tests due to be published on October 26th.

Partly as a result of this and increased employment levels, consumer confidence is at a 7 year high and private spending is beginning to increase from a low level – even as households continue to deleverage and rebuild their balance sheets after the recession. Government tax revenues are running about €1 Billion ahead of target which means that the c. €2 Billion adjustment which was expected to be required in next months budget to meet the Troika (and EU) 3% deficit target can be met without further tax rises, and indeed some income tax reductions and spending increases are being signaled as forming part of the budgetary arithmetic. The Irish state can now borrow on the markets at O% interest and is negotiating with the EU and IMF to repay bail-out loans early and save c. €400M p.a. in interest payments in the process.

The government remains under pressure to reform its corporate tax code but claims that the 12.5% corporate profit tax rate will become progressively more attractive as all countries are forced to close their corporate tax loopholes. One of the unstated reasons why the Government remained largely silent on the Scottish independence debate was that it feared an independent Scotland would become a more aggressive and successful competitor for FDI. There also appears to be considerable optimism that a British exit from the EU could leave Ireland inundated with banks and other corporations  relocating from London to Dublin in an attempt to retain access to the Single Market.

So are we witnessing the emergence of a Celtic Phoenix from the ashes of the Celtic Tiger, or is Ireland once again in the throes of an irrational exuberance which could have a very sorry ending? Certainly the strategy of attracting FDI partly through tax competition has been very successful, at least in the short term, but this is not a strategy which the rest of the Eurozone could pursue without diluting the benefits for all. Ireland’s national debt is due to peak at c. 125% of GDP next year – up from just 25% in 2008 – and this will remain a headwind for the public finances for many years to come. Much of the burden of adjustment during the recession fell on those dependent on state benefits and services and Ireland’s GINI index has yet to recover to pre-recession levels.

It will be some considerable time before the bulk of the people actually feel that the recession is over for them personally, and in the meantime the Government is trying to “manage expectations” by limiting expansionary policies as much as possible until the 2015 Budget where it will have maximum impact on electoral perceptions ahead of the next general election due in 2016.  Some will no doubt benefit from improved employment prospects in the meantime, but if you are dependent on state benefits and services your situation will still take quite some time to improve.

As Krugman has noted, if you measure success as any improvement on the disastrous consequences of austerity, you are setting the bar for success very low indeed. Ireland is recovering, but it is from a relatively low base, and it will still be quite some time before those who felt the brunt of austerity the most see any tangible benefits in their real lives.

So the Obama administration and US Congress are openly breaching International Law to continue intervention in Syria by supplying mercenaries of the Sunni sect to do our evil deeds. Nothing new of course.

Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas): Don’t be Stampeded into War | Informed Comment|

The Middle Eastern tragedy, in which this resolution will further entangle America, is directly related to the wholly unnecessary Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq. Having learned so little from the sacrifices of that conflict, the Congress now approves greater involvement in a Syrian civil war that has already taken almost 200,000 lives.

The Administration has affirmed this very day that what it is talking about is definitely a “war” – a declaration of war, while it seeks to avoid this Congress declaring that war – a Congress in which too many of the people’s representatives fear making a decision today on whether to declare war.

Instead, we vote on an amendment here to authorize the Administration to do what it is already doing in Jordan, while declining to consider a vote on what it should not do without specific Congressional authorization.

Reliance on the resolutions approved by this Congress, on this Floor, over a decade ago, in 2001 and 2002, is very instructive. First, it shows the dangers of open-ended authorizations. Such a resolution as we have today will likely govern not only the actions of President Obama, but of future Presidents.

Second, once begun, this Congress, even under Democratic control, has shown little ability to contain war. And third, despite billions expended and with courageous Americans on the ground, the results of more than a decade of trying to successfully train Iraqis and Afghans, have not been particularly encouraging. Indeed, the reality is American taxpayers have been compelled to pay for the arms for our enemies as well as for our allies.

Nor do we have any explanation today as to how taking a few Syrians for training in Saudi Arabia, a country with its own brutal history of regular beheadings, financing extremists around the world and opposing democracy most everywhere- –how that will work better than our previous training on the ground with Americans.

House Floor Speech Rep. Lloyd Doggett: Don’t be Stampeded into War

WASHINGTON DC — U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), who was actively involved in opposing the authorization for President Bush to invade Iraq, spoke on the House floor concerning the legal basis for any future action in Iraq:

“This Congress has a constitutional obligation to approve military action before any President decides to shoot first and ask questions later.  A twelve-year-old resolution, enacted in the aftermath of 9/11, should not provide a basis for endless war.”  

“Some of the same self-certified smart people, who were talking about mushroom clouds and weapons of mass destruction, are once again trying to stampede us into war.  We’ve been there and done that, and America is still paying a terrible price for their past failures, though they refuse to acknowledge them.”

“Protecting our embassy in Baghdad, that’s one thing, or responding to a true emergency, but if any president wants to launch offensive military action, they need to come and make  specific case to this Congress for  authorization, Just as President Obama said he would do last year regarding Syria, not some convoluted interpretation of a resolution from a different time and circumstance.”

“If there is a case for war, have the courage to come here and make it, but don’t rely on an open-ended authorization of military force from long ago.”

Perpetual War Fuels Terrorism

○ Syria Drama In the Making – the Bush and Obama Years 2005-2013
○ Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth (2010) by Elie Elhadj
○ Obama Meddling in Lebanon Politics – 2009
○ NSC Chief Stephen Hadley asked Italy for a Bashar Assad Replacement – Oct. 2005

This morning, Ed Kilgore ruminates on the contrast between non-statistical political prognosticators like Stu Rothenberg, Charlie Cook, and (heh) S.E. Cupp, who are very bullish on the Republicans’ prospects in the midterms, and more rigorous analysts at 538, the Election Lab, and The Upshot, who began as Republican bulls but become more bearish everyday. There’s also San Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium who has been bullish on the Democrats from the beginning, and remains so.

The thing to remember here is that if you are going to compare the bias of liberal statisticians to the bias of conservative pundits, the statisticians have a built in advantage in that they are mainly driven by data. They may make assumptions based on “feel” but they are less susceptible to letting their heart determine their predictions. In other words, the statisticians have an anchor that keeps them from sailing very far afield from reality. This is not true for Stu Rothenberg, who just last week allowed himself to get caught up in irrational exuberance.

Both Rothenberg and Cook are well-respected analysts who have a reputation for disinterested prognostication, but they both have a clear record of overestimating the Republicans’ strength. S.E. Cupp is a partisan hack with no demonstrated record of predicting anything accurately.

A long time ago I predicted that the Democrats would win every competitive Senate race. I’ve had to back off of that because the data in Kentucky don’t support that conclusion right now. Unforeseen events in Montana also caused that election to fall out of the competitive category. And, while I was one of the first to realize that Kansas could become competitive, I only foresaw that about a week before it became a reality, and only with the assistance of Sam Wang.

But there were concrete reasons that I thought that Kay Hagan, Jeanne Shaheen, Michelle Nunn, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu and Mark Begich would win, regardless of what the early polls were saying. And those reasons were a combination of the weakness of opponents and the historical strength of either the candidates or the candidates’ families in their particular states. The Nunn, Pryor, Landrieu, Grimes, and Begich families have a long history in their respective states that gives them strong cross-over appeal. In the case of Landrieu, she has a lot of support from the business community and, as Chairwoman of the Energy Committee, she’s invaluable to the oil and gas industries. In the case of Shaheen, she’s a popular ex-governor with a record of competence free from any whiff of scandal. In the case of Hagan, her opponent is the incredibly unpopular Speaker of the incredibly unpopular North Carolina House. With the exception of Michelle Nunn and Alison Lundergan Grimes, these are also incumbents who have large financial advantages over their opponents.

These are concrete race-specific reasons for favoring the Democrat in the race, and I am not at all surprised that the polls have stubbornly exceeded expectations, even in Kentucky where Grimes has fallen a little bit behind. Those who relied on historical markers or polls about the president’s popularity have been forced to respond to the difference between their expectations and reality, but the statisticians (excepting Wang, who did not rely on those factors) have seen their models move towards reality. Meanwhile, Rothenberg has to explain why the results he predicted and the momentum he observed have become become less likely (in the former case) and proven non-existent (in the latter) in the models.

Good analysis requires a reliance on polling analysts combined not with historical markers but with very race-specific inspection.

I’m off to the U.S. Open Cup Soccer Championship. It’s a pre-birthday present to me, and I’m pretty excited.

Talk among yourselves.

Robert Stacy McCain is a real piece of work. It offends him that women would ask to be treated equally and then turn around and act outraged when a woman gets knocked unconscious by a man.

“You wanted equality? BOOM! There’s your equality. I decked you just like I would deck a man who irritated me.”

Do you see the perfect logic of that argument?

It’s infallible.

Elizabeth Warren conceived the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and President Obama got it enacted into law. This is one of the results:

Today, we announced a lawsuit against for-profit college chain Corinthian Colleges, Inc. We allege that the company lured in tens of thousands of students to take out private loans to cover expensive tuition costs by advertising bogus job prospects and career services. Our lawsuit also alleges that Corinthian used illegal debt collection tactics to strong-arm students into paying back those loans while still in school.

Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is one of the largest for-profit college companies in the United States, operating more than 100 school campuses under the names Everest, Heald, and WyoTech.

Of course, as Daniel Luzer explained back in July, the Washington Monthly played a huge role in this, too.

It started with a piece that Stephen Burd wrote for the November/December 2009 issue of the Monthly. Senator Tom Harkin saw the article shortly after becoming chairman of the HELP committee, and that led to a lot of hearings that exposed Corinthian colleges and the whole for-profit industry. It’s been a long road, but now the hammer is coming down.

I just wanted you to know who you should thank.

WTFU.

U.S. General Backs Limited Ground Operations Against ISIS if Needed

WASHINGTON — Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Tuesday that he would recommend deploying United States combat forces against Islamic extremists in specific operations if the current strategy of airstrikes was not successful, raising the possibility of the kind of escalation that President Obama has flatly ruled out.

—snip—

This is not just some wacko “general”…well, maybe he is…but he’s a big, big, wacko general, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This particular runup to Irag War v.3 reminds me of nothing so much as the classic vaudeville “Niagara Falls/Slowly I Turned” routine made most famous by Abbot and Costello.. You know. The one where a certain phrase…”Niagara Falls” in the Abbot and Costello version…prompted an apparently harmless guy to go ballistic on whoever was closest?

“Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…” etc.

In this case the word is “ISIS,” and the “Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch…” part is being strung out by these particular vaudevillians over a series of weeks and months. Step by step, inch by inch we are closing in on Iraq v3.

Watch.

I been tellin’ ya!!!

Read on.
Probably nothing too drastic will happen until after the November elections unless the ISIS people fuck up big time and poke the (paper) tiger once too often or once too hard. But when the November votes are finally counted (or miscounted, if absolutely necessary) and the next quorum of the PermaGov is all set up…and with it most likely the 2016 presidential fix as well, because that all depends on which party supposedly controls the legislature (as if the corporate powers that run the U.S. don’t own it lock, stock and barrel)…once all of their little ducks are all in a nice, bipartisan row, then all hell’s going to break loose in the Iraq/Syria neighborhood once again. (Unless of course Putin decides to take a stand there or elsewhere that derails the action due to military necessity.)

I been tellin’ ya!!!

WTFU.

Yer “Peace President” is actually  nothing but a “Piece President.” He is a piece of the well-functioning, well controlled Permanent Government, the basic foreign policy of which is permanent economic imperialist war pursued by any and every means necessary.

Watch.

You been had.

For going on 7 years now.

Ain’tcha getting a little tired in the various Oval Orfices…errr, ahhh, I mean Offices…that are involved in this ongoing sham?

Please.

WTFU.

Please!!!

Thank you and goodnight.

Later…

AG

P.S. Have a nice day, as they say at the cash register after ripping you the fuck off.

Have a very nice day!!!

As Sam Wang has been predicting, once there was a more robust set of polls, the other polling models would begin to converge with his own, improving the Democrats’ odds of retaining control of the Senate. The reason? More dependence of the actual average of polls and less speculation about “fundamentals.”

…[A]s the election approaches, other sites are decreasing the bias that they add by using fundamentals. This will inevitably make them approach the PEC snapshot, day by day. If everything converges on the PEC Election Day prediction, I would score that as an argument in favor of using polls only – or at least letting readers see the difference added by the use of fundamentals.

Nate Silver speculates that the real reason for the convergence is the Democrats’ money advantage, but that should already be baked in the fundamentals cake. It’s at least as important to Kay Hagan’s reelection prospects that she has more experience than Thom Tillis as it is that she has a lot more money, but both factors should be considered if you’re going to just begin speculating about factors other than the actual polling.

Another problem with speculating is that there’s no way to really measure the superiority of one get-out-the-vote effort versus another one. People assume that the Democrats have a more robust GOTV strategy, but how do you account for it? Not every close contest is getting the same amount of resources.

Here are a few other observations on the polls.

1. Polls out of Georgia disagree about whether Carter and Nunn are ahead or behind, and the differences are explained entirely by different assumptions about turnout. This is also true with recent polls out of New Hampshire of the Shaheen/Brown race.

2. Sen. Pat Roberts is looking something close to doomed. He has a 29% approval rating, only gets 34% in a four-way race that includes Democrat Chad Taylor skimming 6% of the vote even though he has dropped out of the contest. If Taylor succeeds in getting himself taken off the ballot, Greg Orman’s road to victory looks assured, but he’s beating Roberts by 7% as it is. If they knew for certain that Orman would caucus with the Democrats, the election modelers would all be predicting a Democratic hold of the upper chamber.

3. There’s a new poll out of Arkansas that shows Sen. Mark Pryor up by four and Mike Ross (of Blue Dog fame) tied with Asa Hutchinson 44%-44%. Why are the Republicans doing so poorly in Arkansas? What happens when the Clintons descend on the state to make the case for the Democratic candidates?

4. Great news that a new poll is out showing Senator Mark Begich with a five point lead in Alaska. Unfortunately, if history is any guide, a five point lead in the polls in Alaska is not good enough for a Democrat to actually win.

Finally, as things stand, I think Begich, Mark Udall, Kay Hagan, Jeanne Shaheen, and Mark Pryor should all be favored to win. Our candidates in Iowa and Michigan are moving in the right direction and should be narrowly favored. Michelle Nunn and Mary Landrieu look strong enough to force run-off elections at the very worst. Pat Roberts will lose, giving Orman the option to caucus with the Democrats. And Mitch McConnell is holding strong, at least for the moment.

Assuming things stay as they are and election day goes as I expect it to, the Dems will lose three seats (Montana, South Dakota, and West Virgina) putting us at 52 seats. Orman will caucus with the majority, bringing us to 53 seats. And there will be runoffs in Louisiana and Georgia that could lead to either a 51, 53, or 55 seat majority.

If I’m right, and remember things can and will change, the runoffs will not determine the outcome. Even if we lost both runoffs and Orman chose to caucus with the Republicans, causing a 50-50 tie, Joe Biden would cast the tie-breaking vote.

I am worried about Alaska however, as polling there has consistently overestimated the strength of Democratic candidates.