Month: September 2015

Let’s just put the following in the category of “no duh.”

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday blamed the United States for the spread of terrorism in the Middle East, saying America’s dual post-9/11 wars — and its alliance with Israel — allowed extremist ideologies to flourish.

“If we did not have the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and the United States’ unwarranted support for the inhumane actions of the Zionist regime against the oppressed nation of Palestine, today the terrorists would not have an excuse for the justification of their crimes,” Rouhani said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

That’s obviously not something an American politician is allowed to say or acknowledge, and, in fairness, it isn’t warranted to blame Americans for the moral atrocities of other people. What we did caused the sectarian warfare in the Middle East but this doesn’t excuse or absolve people who are engaged in that sectarian warfare.

The Iranian president and his government have their own share of responsibility for what has gone on Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.

Israel, too, is too convenient as a whipping boy. When I find any government in the region that has treated the Palestinians with kindness or fairness, I’ll let you know. These regimes treat their own citizens worse than their livestock and the refugees worse than that. And then they act appalled at what Israel does. It’s very convenient for them to have their people agitating against a foreign rather than a domestic power.

So, yeah, I’m impatient with lectures from people like President Rouhani. He can stick a sock it in as far as I am concerned. But that doesn’t mean that what he said isn’t basically accurate.

George W. Bush ruined the Middle East. It wasn’t a healthy region in the first place, and it couldn’t endure Bush’s “freedom agenda.”

Rush Limbaugh doesn’t know how, but he’s certain that the announcement that NASA has found flowing water on Mars will be used to advance a leftist agenda, probably on climate change. Also, he never gets tired of being right, even if it is lonely at times.

I woke up this morning thinking of Gary Webb. I’m not sure why, but these things sometimes happen. I just want to share a small snippet from the Second Day of his Dark Alliance series of columns:

Norwin Meneses, known in Nicaraguan newspapers as ”Rey de la Droga” (King of Drugs), was then under active investigation by the DEA and the FBI for smuggling cocaine into the United States, records show.

And [CIA agent Col. Enrique] Bermudez was very familiar with the influential Meneses family. He had served under two Meneses brothers, Fermin and Edmundo, who were generals in Somoza’s army. Somoza himself spoke at the 1978 funeral of Edmundo Meneses, who was slain by leftists shortly after his appointment as Nicaragua’s ambassador to Guatemala, hailing him as an anti-communist martyr.

A violent death — someone else’s — had also made brother Norwin famous in his homeland. In 1977 he was accused of ordering the assassination of Nicaragua’s chief of Customs, who was gunned down in the midst of an investigation into an international stolen car ring allegedly run by Norwin Meneses.

Though the customs boss accused Meneses on his deathbed of hiring his killer, Nicaraguan newspapers reported that the Managua police, then commanded by Edmundo Meneses, cleared Norwin of any involvement.

Despite that incident and a stack of law enforcement reports describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed into the United States in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a visa and a work permit. He settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the next six years supervised the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California.

It arrived in all kinds of containers: false-bottomed shoes, Colombian freighters, cars with hidden compartments, luggage from Miami. Once here, it disappeared into a series of houses and nondescript storefront businesses scattered from Hayward to San Jose, Pacifica to Burlingame, Daly City to Oakland.

And, like Blandon, Meneses went to work for the CIA’s army.

What Gary Webb actually reported was distorted. He never actually said that the CIA intentionally infected our ghettoes with crack cocaine or that this was part of some nefarious plot they had to destroy the people in our inner cities.

What he reported was basically what I’ve reproduced above. Our government welcomed people like Norman Meneses into our country despite being well aware that he was capable of murder and was assuredly a violent criminal involved in stolen car rings and major cocaine trafficking. That’s beyond dispute.

And they allowed these people to operate criminal enterprises in this country and then divert their dirty profits to support the Contras even after Congress expressly forbid the Reagan administration from supporting them in any direct way. This is also beyond dispute.

In the case of Mr. Meneses, he appears to have had some assistance in getting the cocaine he provided into the country, mainly through CIA-connected assets in the El Salvadoran air force, but what’s absolutely not contentious is that he sold the product to black dealers like Freeway Ricky Ross who turned it into crack and created a health and legal epidemic in cities from Los Angeles to Cincinnati.

Gary Webb understood the significance of this, which is why the opening paragraph of the Dark Alliance series opened this way:

FOR THE BETTER PART of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the “crack” capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America � and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.

It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting “gangstas” of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.

The army’s financiers — who met with CIA agents both before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. — delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.
Unaware of his suppliers’ military and political connections, “Freeway Rick” — a dope dealer of mythic proportions in the L.A. drug world — turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.

The cash Ross paid for the cocaine, court records show, was then used to buy weapons and equipment for a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the largest of several anti-communist commonly called the Contras.

While the FDN’s war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine — a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army started bringing it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.
And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving, turning entire blocks of major cities into occasional war zones.

“There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” former FDN leader and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during a recent cocaine trafficking trial in San Diego. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the FDN) told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the Contra revolution.”

I actually have a personal connection to this story because from 1989-1992, I frequently played pick-up basketball with members of the Venice Crips who were, indeed, involved in the trafficking of weapons, including Uzis. As far as I know, those particular chaps did not sell crack or other drugs. They sold semi-automatic guns and rifles. Their Compton brethren probably handled the crack, although they did not discuss these details with your author who they referred to in reverent tones as “that Danny Ainge motherfucker.” Let’s just say that I didn’t call a lot of fouls.

I saw what the cocaine epidemic did to Los Angeles and how it fueled other criminal activity and how it landed a whole generation of kids in either a cycle of prison and recidivism or a cold slab in the morgue. None of this is really is dispute, either.

It was at best criminal indifference on the part of our government which put anti-communist fanaticism above the health of our most vulnerable communities.

I think about this stuff when I see the Republicans complain about Latino immigrants being involved in drugs and other criminal activity. I think about how their hero, Ronald Reagan, utilized Latino car thiefs and drug dealers to finance his covert and illegal war on the Sandinistas. I think about the costs of those decisions.

And it pisses me off.

There are some things that, through either well-earned experience or cynicism, I just don’t expect to see a national politician do. For example, I never thought I’d see a vice-presidential candidate wink at me during a debate. And I never thought I’d see a presently serving president sit down with a bunch of black and Latino inmates at a prison and talk about their families, how they got into crime, why they copped a plea, what kind of businesses they’d like to start, how they might get financing to start those businesses, what kind of responsibilities they have as parents and to their communities, the reasons for and against the War on Drugs, and the impact of the cycle of mass incarceration on communities of color.

I won’t go so far as to say that watching VICE last night fried my synapses, but it was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

I woke up today and put on my Obama/Biden ’08 t-shirt in celebration.

Does anybody sincerely like anchovies?

So, now it’s Jeb’s turn to experience the joys of panicking sugar daddies who want to see a return on their investment beyond a 7% rating in the polls.

He’s got enough money (and the connections to raise more) that he can tough this out longer than Scott Walker, but this isn’t the kind of press his campaign wants to see.

I learned from watching John McCain’s campaign come back from the dead, so I’m not going to pronounce Jeb’s campaign…

…but it is definitely a very sick campaign. Very sick.

And they’re worrying about Rubio when I think they should be more worried about Kasich.

I don’t doubt that some Establishment types are ready to flee to Rubio, but these are the same people who thought Jeb was a cinch.

What part of Donald Trump’s success or John Boehner’s demise makes these folks think that the Republican base wants a pro-amnesty U.S. Senator of Cuban descent as their standard bearer?

Am I crazy?

We have a full-on white nationalist freak-out revolt on our hands and they’re worried about Rubio?

First, look at the fact that the Republicans’ top three choices now, who collectively have the support of over 50% of likely voters, are not members of Congress or even sitting or former governors. These folks hate Congress, hate the Republican leadership, hate the Republican establishment, and, above all, hate racial minorities.

Now, assuming that some basic desire to win at some point takes hold of these folks, I have to assume that they’d prefer a governor to a senator if only because a governor has nothing directly to do with Boehner or McConnell or any Bushes or Washington DC.

But Christie ain’t gonna work and Walker is already gone.

Kasich is going to seem a whole lot more electable than Trump, Carson, or Fiorina.

Now, Ted Cruz is a special case because although he’s a senator he’s a conservative purist who fits their mood. But he’s the most transparently unelectable of all the candidates, and at the end of the day he’s a racial minority, too.

I think you can make a case that Rubio is the strongest candidate among the senators, but Kasich just fits better as a consensus choice who doesn’t offend too many people and that all sides can basically live with.

I could see a Kasich/Rubio ticket, or vice-versa, I guess. That’s as good as the Establishment can possibly hope to do, I think.

I think Jeb can outlast these punks, maybe, but he’s an obvious dud. He doesn’t have it.

So, I’m not surprised that his donors are starting to lose their shit.

Getting lots of post-mortems on the seventy day Scott Walker campaign for President.  A major one seems to be at  Politico: Walker’s campaign manager unloads.  The opening paragraph is a decent summary of this and other reports:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pulled the plug on a bloated campaign that was headed into debt and was being undermined by furious donors, a warring staff and — at the root of it all — a candidate who was badly out of his league.

But what interests me more and seems not to  have been remarked upon or questioned is from this:

“We built the machine that we needed to get a governor in just phenomenal shape to take a stage in a presidential debate,” Wiley said. “I think sometimes it’s lost on people the largeness of the job. I think people just look at it and say, `Wow! Yeah, you know, it’s like he’s a governor and he was in a recall’ and blah, blah, blah — he’s ready.
…
By Wiley’s telling, the end came fast. “June and July, up through that first debate, were good, fundraising-wise — really good,” he said. “Hitting your numbers. And we thought maybe we could even project [that] outward, like tick our numbers up a little bit.
…
When Walker and Wiley began building the campaign team in January, they made a bold, and ultimately foolhardy decision: Go big. Walker was the front-runner in Iowa polls through the spring and early summer, and he tried to capitalize on that momentum by hiring former Republican National Committee aides and Washington operatives, plus a Beltway PR firm to target conservative media, a full-time photographer and well-known consultants for outreach to evangelicals.
…

Note this again:

“June and July, up through that first debate, were good, fundraising-wise — really good,” …

Scott Walker didn’t officially enter the race until July 13, 2015.  If June fundraising was “really good,” why no 6/30/15 FEC financial filing?

Before July 13, Walker had or didn’t have an “exploratory committee.”  There are reports from January that he opened a committee.  Then in February, Bloomberg reported: Walker May Skip Exploratory Committee in 2016 Run.  Big and bold in keeping with the January campaign decision.  Then — nothing for months.  What was the hold-up?

A potential legal difficulties or campaign creative financing?  Or both.

Here’s the deal from The Atlantic on exploratory committees. Per the FEC, an exploratory committee ends and a campaign begins under these circumstances:

• Makes or authorizes statements referring to him/herself as a candidate;
• Uses general public political advertising to publicize his/her intention to campaign;
• Raises more money than what is reasonably needed to test the waters, or amasses funds to be used after the candidacy is established;
• Conducts activities over a protracted period of time or shortly before the election; or
• Takes action to qualify for the ballot.

In addition to that exploratory committees are required to register with the FEC and donations from individuals are capped at $2,700, but the committee is not required to file financial statements and donor lists with the FEC.

That “really good” June fundraising was convenient.  The end of the second quarter and avoided FEC reporting and still allowed Walker another two weeks before he couldn’t avoid being an official candidate.

The minute you say you’re running, though, the no-disclosure honeymoon is over. You have to tell the FEC how much you have, where it came from, and how you spent it — whether it was raised by your “exploratory committee” or just by some guys you’re paying, which is basically the same thing.

But what was the state of his campaign before June?

From FoxNews June 18, 2015: “He’s sort of keeping up with the Joneses:” Governor Walker inches closer to a run for president

Walker has still not declared he is running for President. He has indicated that won’t occur until after the Wisconsin Legislature passes a state budget, but he has inched ever so closely to doing it with the appointment of a presidential fundraising committee.

This also means he no longer has to rely solely on his super PAC. [emphasis added]

“When he had a 527 supporting him, he had no legal control of it but there were no legal limitations or contributions. And there was no disclosure of contributions. The step he took today was a step toward becoming a formal candidate but it means that now there will be disclosure on contributions and there will be limits on contributions,” said Mordecai Lee, UW-Milwaukee Urban Planning Professor.
…

Ah, so it was a 527 and not an exploratory committee that covered his presidential campaign operation from January through at least May.  How exactly could that function with no coordination with Walker and those whoever may or may not have worked for him for his ephemeral  “exploratory committee?”  Who exactly did Wiley work for during that period?

If they followed the letter of the law, an iron curtain between Walker and the 527, it’s no wonder that such a naturally clueless Walker jumped onto the campaign stage in July.  Too dumb to know that he’s ignorant of national public policies and nobody around him to coach him in all the months of preparation for his really big shew.

Too clever by half on the part of Wiley and others on the team milking the sugar daddies and mommies over those months, but also too dumb to recognize that Walker lacks breadth, depth, smarts, and charisma.

What was Walker’s cash burn rate in April through June?  We do know what an  authentic “go big” campaign costs because that’s what Hillary did in building a campaign infrastructure during the first three months.  $19 million.   The other campaigns(1) spent far less.  So, was Walker up there with Clinton, down among the pikers, or somewhere in between?

In addition to the Clinton campaign, he can be seen from the 6/30/15 FEC filings that Paul and Sanders were building their campaign infrastructure out of their campaign funds.  (Less sure as to what Carson and Cruz have spent their money on.)  Is it plausible that team Walker’s notion of “go big” was comparable to Paul and Sanders’ total of $5 million before July?  What were their estimates for third quarter campaign fundraising and spending?

All we know is that in just over two months they blew through whatever they actually raised in just over three months.

My “back of the envelope” estimates for the Sanders’ campaign from July 1 through half of Super Tuesday was $60 million.  That was for a heavy ground operation campaign and approximately a third expended on media buys.  More media and fewer troops, the Walker campaign could have made it with $30 million (SuperPac covering $30 million or more in media buys).   Only a couple thousand maxi- ($2,700) donors per month or approximately $5 million/month from all donors.  (Right on target with Wiley’s half a million dollars expected from a three day fundraising swing in Texas.)

They may have hit that $5 million/month target in June and July (although I suspect that even then they came up a bit short), but that likely tapped out all the Walker’s pre-campaign pledges from maxi-donors and all the other expected drips and drabs from “little people.”  Wiley is correct that once Walker began speaking fundraising fell off a cliff.   Who could have predicted that?

Back in her day, Molly Ivins pointed out that there are almost no campaign finance laws in Texas.  And yet, Tom DeLay managed to violate it.  Nationally, a few laws still exist, but it’s now more nearly like the wild west of campaign spending.  Yet, it sure looks as if Walker was and Fiorina is trying to cheat their way to the WH.  If they are allowed to get away with this, it will make it that much easier for the oligarchs to install their puppets.

(1)
The others – campaign committee spending In round numbers as of 6/30/15:

Carson $6 million
Cruz $6 million
Paul $5 million
Sanders $5 million
Bush $3 million
Rubio $3 million
Graham $3 million
Huckabee $1 million

SuperPac Spending* from Open Secrets:

Christie $5 million
Bush $4 million
Carson $2 million
Walker $2 million
Perry $2 million
Kasich $2 million
Clinton $1.5 million
Jindal $1 million
Paul $0.5

*(overview – for illustration; not precise in part because the reports are incomplete; so, don’t quote without doing your own research)

(Note: Bush’s SuperPac has recently committed to $24 million for media ads in IA, NH, and SC)

Combined known spending by 2016 Presidential candidates:

Clinton $20.5 million
Carson $8 million
Bush $7 million
Cruz $6 million
Paul $5.5 million
Christie $5 million
Sanders $5 million
Rubio $3 million
Graham $3 million
Perry $2.6 million
Walker $2 million
Kasich $2 million
Huckabee $1 million
Fiorina $1 million
O’Malley $1 million
Jindal $1 million

Assuming that you watch and enjoy sports, do you play fantasy or would that interfere with your enjoyment of the games?

At the always ahead of the times, always racially enlightened National Review, Andrew McCarthy takes issue with Charles Krauthammer’s criticisms and defends Ben Carson’s Islamophobia. McCarthy makes an extended, if sometimes circuitous, argument, but his conclusion isn’t the better for it.

There is wisdom, not shame, in concluding that we’d rather not have to worry about the potentially divided loyalties of a Muslim president, just as the Constitution relieves us of worry over the potentially divided loyalties of a foreign-born president.

Like naturalized citizens, Muslims can be extraordinary Americans. But until Islam is reformed in such a way that a pluralistic, pro-liberty Islam is the world’s dominant Islam — and Islamic supremacism is the marginal exception, not the all-too-familiar rule — it is perfectly reasonable for Ben Carson, and any other American, to oppose the idea of a Muslim president of the United States.

Fortunately, we have a recent example of a presidential candidate who adhered to the teachings of a minority religion. And Mitt Romney wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill Mormon.

In 1977, he became a counselor to the president of the Boston Stake. He served as bishop of the ward (ecclesiastical and administrative head of his congregation) at Belmont, Massachusetts, from 1981 to 1986. As such, in addition to home teaching, he also formulated Sunday services and classes using LDS scriptures to guide the congregation. After the destruction of the Belmont meetinghouse by a fire of suspicious origins in 1984, he forged links with other religious institutions, allowing the congregation to rotate its meetings to other houses of worship during the reconstruction of their building.

From 1986 to 1994, Romney presided over the Boston Stake, which included more than a dozen wards in eastern Massachusetts with almost 4,000 church members altogether.

Now, I’m neither a Mormon nor a Catholic, so please forgive me any errors here, but my understanding is that a Mormon stake is the rough equivalent of a Catholic deanery, and a deanery is provided for in (lord help us) the Code of Canon Law. In his leadership positions, Mitt Romney advised people on how to avoid running afoul of the faith’s religious rules and regulations. In addition to the aforementioned fact that, as the Bishop of Belmont, Romney “formulated Sunday services and classes using LDS scriptures to guide the congregation,” as Stake leader, “he counseled women to not have abortions except in the rare cases allowed by LDS doctrine, and encouraged single women facing unplanned pregnancies to give up their baby for adoption.”

I mention this not by way of criticism of the man, but only to question how McCarthy would feel about a Muslim who was basically in charge of the religious instruction and enforcement for all Muslims in the Boston area. I imagine that he’d think such a person was someone whom who’d have “potentially divided loyalties.”

Now, considering how much suspicion has been cast on the current president on account of his absent father’s (lapsed) Islamic faith, I can only wonder what McCarthy might think about some of Mitt Romney’s direct ancestors. For example, his great-grandfather Miles Park Romney who was so dedicated to polygamy that he moved his family to Mexico to avoid arrest. And lest we think that’s the extent of the connection, consider the full name of the 1890 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law against Mormon polygamy: LATE CORPORATION OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS et al. v. UNITED STATES. ROMNEY et al. v. SAME..

Is there anything about Mormon religious law or the hierarchy of the Church of Latter-Day Saints that is inconsistent with taking an oath to preserve and protect the Constitution? I doubt it, but it’s at least potentially a problem, right? I mean, it’s an insular leadership team and they don’t advertise how they go about their internal deliberations. What would Boston Stake leader Mitt Romney do if he got instructions from Salt Lake City? Ignore them? Use his own independent judgment?

Did that change when he became the governor of Massachusetts? Would it have changed if he had become the president?

We can ask all the same questions of any religious person, and the more hierarchical their church, the more credibility those questions will have. At the time this country was formed, several of our states were pretty well controlled by a single religious denomination and its religious leaders. The Anglicans of Virginia were less concerned about shutting Muslims out of government than being shut out of government themselves by the Congregationalist leaders in the Bay State. For good reason, the Baptists of the Carolinas were suspicious of the Quakers of Pennsylvania, and vice-versa, not to mention the Catholics of Maryland.

For these people, the oath of office was important because it was an assurance that the federal government was open to their sect. The impossibility of excluding people from other sects was the price they paid to assure their own rights.

The people of Massachusetts may not have been free of worry about the potentially divided loyalties of Anglican presidents from Virginia, and the people of Virginia may have harbored concerns about the fealty of John Adams. In any case, these folks were already heretics in their own style, who were well on their way into Enlightened thinking.

I say all this because it’s instructive to look at McCarthy’s case against Muslims to find ways in which what he says about them is not equally true of other sects and religions.

If you want to say that you’re not comfortable with being led by people of certain faiths, that’s kind of natural. I had qualms about George W. Bush’s faith, for example, and how it affected his decision making. But the oath is there to calm those concerns.

Krauthammer made a good point when he said that the Constitution is didactic in the sense that it not only tells what we must not do but we ought not do. It precludes us from prohibiting a Muslim from becoming our president but it also instructs us that we shouldn’t want to do such a thing.

McCarthy obviously disagrees, but his argument that the Constitution is not a pedagogical tool is weak. He insists, for example, that it teaches us the virtues of limited government. That’s true, as far is it goes, but it also teaches us the necessity of religious tolerance.

Even of Mormons.

I don’t know what happened to this Republican’s brain, but I hope it isn’t something that happens to you:

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) — a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, which had been the epicenter of many of Boehner’s problems — suggested that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may need to be the next GOP leader on the chopping block, particularly for his unwillingness to get rid of the Senate filibuster.

“We made a lot of promises to the American people, that if we took the Senate, that we would do certain things and those things have not been accomplished,” Salmon said in an interview with reporters. “A lot of the problems we are engaged in is because the Senate doesn’t take any action on anything and there’s nothing that any presidential candidate on our side says that will ever be realized as long as the modern-day filibuster is enacted in the way it is today.”

Even if there were no filibuster in the Senate, there would still be a presidential veto. While it’s true that the Republicans might get slightly more mileage out of their unhinged agenda if they could force the president to use his veto pen on must-pass legislation, the things that Republicans really seem to care about would not have been accomplished and will not be accomplished even without the Senate rules.

The president would still have gotten his deal with Iran, and he’ll never consent to defund Planned Parenthood or to rip up the Affordable Care Act.

At least there a few House Republicans who have an actual grasp on reality:

“To be perfectly honest with you, the results we get are probably going to be the same thing, it’s just going to be a different face,” Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) told reporters. “The natives are restless, and they want to see something change. So how much change somebody can bring about, we’ll see.”

…”We are going to have Obama as President, we are going to have Pelosi and Reid as minority leaders, and we have McConnell who continues to fail to lift the filibuster, so we’re not going to get our agenda done as it comes out of the House,” Rep. Bill Flores (R TX) told reporters Friday. “And you’re going to have a new Speaker, who is going to have to wonder if he or she is the next person to lose their head.”

Yeah, this Flores dude couldn’t help taking a shot at McConnell and the filibuster either, but he said this more as a reflection of the true situation than as some kind of belief in ponies and the secret powers of some hypothetical alternative Speaker of the House.

So, what’s going to change?

Well, the new Speaker won’t take the gavel until November, presumably after some of the more nettlesome problems facing Congress have been settled. That’s the idea, anyway, although we’ll have to see if that actually works out that way it is supposed to. You know, we’ve got to get some transportation money appropriated and lift the debt ceiling and there’s some business to be decided with the Export-Import Bank. Yeah, and an omnibus spending bill to keep the government open has to get done. So, I’m a little skeptical that will all happen before Halloween.

But, assuming it does, the next Speaker will simply be under more pressure not to do any of this next year in a sane, compromising, and timely manner. And, since the chances are that the next Speaker will still be in charge of the House in January 2017 when Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders is sworn in, we can expect more and worse of what we’ve been getting with Boehner.

The Conservative Movement will not reconcile itself to modern America and we can’t seem to sideline them.

So, the nightmare will continue and get worse.