Month: March 2018

A single spark can start a prairie fire, as the old saying goes. A successful strike by teachers in West Virginia a few weeks ago appears to have inspired Oklahoma’s long-beleaguered educators.
Vox has the skinny on the strike. The bottom line is that public educators in Oklahoma have not seen a raise in something like a decade. Even a decade ago, Oklahoma’s educators were poorly-paid compared to their colleagues in other states. They have fallen further behind in the interim.

Once upon a time, Oklahoma was a “purple” state. Oklahoma tended to vote GOP for President, and often voted GOP in statewide offices, but had a reliably Democratic state legislature. That all started changing a little over a decade ago, starting a process that led to the current predicament. The state cut income taxes, oil extraction, etc. Something had to get cut in the process, and that meant funding for public goods. Social services got cut, salaries stagnated, and tangible funding for schools suffered to the point that about a fifth of the state’s school districts switched to a four day school week. The state’s legislators finally gave in enough to offer some half-measures, but the teachers collectively have said that what the legislature and Governor offer is not good enough. And so it looks like a strike is in the cards starting next week. I often visit this state, and know people who rely on the public schools there. What has happened over the last decade is a travesty. I wish the teachers success. They deserve it, and so do the students.

As an aside, the article I linked to made note that Arizona’s teachers are also talking about taking actions similar to the colleagues in West Virginia and Oklahoma. Maybe we have the beginnings of a prairie fire.

Suspected cybercrime mastermind behind US$1.2 billion bank hacks is arrested in Spain

The person suspected of being behind malware attacks known as “Carbanak” and “Cobalt” was arrested in Alicante, a port city on the southeast coast of Spain, after cooperation between police forces in the United States, Asia and Europe, Europol said.

The Interior Ministry said “Denis K“, who had directed the criminal organisation from Spain since 2013, was arrested with three members of his organisation, who originally came from Russia and Ukraine, it said. The Ukrainian police did not provide further details.

“Denis K” used financial platforms in Gibraltar and the United Kingdom to load prepaid cards with bitcoin and spend them in Spain on cars, homes, and other goods.

He also set up an “enormous network” to mine bitcoin which he used as a means of laundering money.

More below the fold …

The Great Bank Robbery: Carbanak cybergang steals $1bn from 100 financial institutions worldwide

Kaspersky Lab, INTERPOL, Europol and authorities from different countries have combined efforts to uncover the criminal plot behind an unprecedented cyberrobbery. Up to one billion American dollars was stolen in about two years from financial institutions worldwide. The experts report that responsibility for the robbery rests with a multinational gang of cybercriminals from Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Europe, as well as from China. The Carbanak criminal gang responsible for the cyberrobbery used techniques drawn from the arsenal of targeted attacks. The plot marks the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of cybercriminal activity, where malicious users steal money directly from banks, and avoid targeting end users.

Since 2013, the criminals have attempted to attack up to 100 banks, e-payment systems and other financial institutions in around 30 countries. The attacks remain active. According to Kaspersky Lab data, the Carbanak targets included financial organizations in Russia, USA, Germany, China, Ukraine, Canada, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Romania, France, Spain, Norway, India, the UK, Poland, Pakistan, Nepal, Morocco, Iceland, Ireland, Czech Republic, Switzerland, Brazil, Bulgaria, and Australia.

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It is estimated that the largest sums were grabbed by hacking into banks and stealing up to ten million dollars in each raid. On average, each bank robbery took between two and four months, from infecting the first computer at the bank’s corporate network to making off with the stolen money.

Cobalt/Carbanak bank malware gang’s alleged leader arrested

Police have arrested the alleged mastermind behind the Carbanak gang: a group of cybercrooks that’s targeted banks since late 2013, phishing their way into networks, infecting servers and gaining control of automated teller machines (ATMs) that they’ve caused to spew cash to waiting money mules.

According to Europol, the alleged crime boss, whom it didn’t name, was arrested in Alicante, Spain, following a joint investigation by the Spanish National Police, with the support of Europol, the US FBI, the Romanian, Belarussian and Taiwanese authorities and private cybersecurity companies.

Since 2013, the gang has gone after banks, e-payment systems and financial institutions using their malware, which is known as Carbanak and Cobalt. They’ve hit banks in more than 40 countries: attacks that have resulted in cumulative losses of over €1 billion (USD $1.24 billion).

Europol said in an announcement on Monday that just the Cobalt malware alone allowed the crooks to steal up to €10 million per heist.

A spokesman for the European Banking Federation (EBF) noted in a conversation with Fortune that the gang’s sophisticated Cobalt malware campaign only began in 2016, making it “fair to say” that the total amount stolen must be significantly above €1 billion at this point.

The gang’s malware evolution started with the launch of the Anunak malware campaign.

Europol provided this infographic that shows how the criminal network, and their malware, work.

○ A Cyber Gang Stole $1 Billion by Hacking Banks and ATMs. Now Police Say They’ve Caught the Mastermind

Apparently, the Secret Service has been studying the profiles of people who carry out mass casualty shootings and they’ve discovered that most of these people showed signs of mental illness prior to going on their rampages. I guess mental illness can be easy to define in some cases, like when a person has been taking prescribed medications for a mental disorder. But I have a problem with how people discuss this issue.

If you decide, for whatever reason, to kill a bunch of strangers, there’s something wrong with your brain. I’d say that you’re ill. We can debate whether individual shooters know right from wrong and just want to do wrong, or if they’re too mentally impaired to realize that what they’re doing is immoral and illegal. In other words, insanity can be a defense in some cases. But it seems wrong to ask whether or not these people are mentally ill. Of course they are.

An organization like the Secret Service wants to know if they can predict if someone will become a threat, so I have no problem at all with them trying to identify common warning signs. Even from a policy point of view, you’d like to know if the data can support the idea that doing a better job of treating mental illness can be a fruitful way of lessening the frequency of mass casualty shootings.

But it’s silly to make a statement like “64% of suspects suffered from symptoms of mental illness.” What they actually mean is that sixty-four percent of the shooters had suicidal thoughts or suffered from paranoia or other delusions. This is what is supposed to be predictive, but the research is being done retroactively and only deals with what they can find in the record. If someone shoots themselves after gunning down a church full of people, can we really say they had no suicidal thoughts just because they never mentioned them or sought treatment? Does anyone kill themselves on purpose without thinking about it first?

It’s useful to go back and see if the shootings could have been prevented and, if so, how this might have been done. But I don’t think it makes sense to suggest that any of these killers were mentally fit. For the purpose of sentencing the perpetrators who survive their massacres, we’d like to know if they are simply insane, but it’s a safe bet that their worldview is so warped that it could never be defined as healthy.

There are all kinds of potential problems with treating gun violence as a mental illness problem, so I think we should be very specific about what kinds of symptoms and behaviors have predictive value. The broad umbrella of “mental illness” doesn’t cut it. And policymakers need to be extra careful that they don’t disincentivize people to seek treatment for themselves or their loved ones. That’s bad enough in itself, but if guns remain as readily available as they are today, such a policy would create more untreated mental illness without reducing the ease with which sick people can arm themselves and create mass tragedies.

(I originally wrote the following as a reply to a comment from Jonf on Booman’s recent post “Why are Trump’s Polls So Stable?” It grew, so here it is as a standalone.)

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Jonf wrote:

So the question is then how can we help degrade or replace some of those signifiers? [See below.] We had a good start after the Nazis in Charlottesville but seemed to let it go. So too with others you noted. Or is it hopeless?

It is not hopeless, Jonf….it simply is what it is. Those signifiers…misogyny, belligerent nationalism, white supremacy, Devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, etc…are symptoms of bone-deep stupidity. If history tells us anything, it is that you cannot eliminate “stupid” from the human genome. Round up every hater and eliminate them? First of all, you would necessarily become what you are fighting, and secondly the entire society would disintegrate. As Lenny Bruce once remarked on a similar topic, “But…but…who’ll clean the shithouse?”

50 or 60 years ago that was a valid question, but we are now at the edge of a robotic answer to that question, and also at the edge of a possible reactionary movement by the “stupids” who reside at the lower end of the economic and evolutionary ladder. Why are Trump’s polls so stable? Because..dumb as they are…these people are feeling the heat of the technological revolution in which we are becoming progressively enmeshed.

And…they are strong, prone to violence and well armed.

Plus…and it is very important to remember this…they are human beings. They are you and me and the rest of the people who tend to complain about their existence and their stupidity, 2 or 4 or 20 or 100 generations ago. They are part of the living, ever-evolving tree of humanity, and when we mess with that system, we do so at our own peril. It’s kind of like saying “Oh…let’s get rid of all of the dirt and mess of root systems for our food, all of the blood and guts. Let’s clean that whole thing up, why don’t we? We’ll just take supplements, instead!!!” Have you ever noticed how unhealthy-looking, how pallid and slow-thinking the majority of people are who work at healthfood stores? I have, and I eat almost entirely organically. They rely on too many vitamins and not enough living food.

As above, so below.

Read on for more.
Successful societies create systems that utilize the talents of all of their members. Some of those societies do so through the use of slavery and/or serfdom/rigid caste systems, but the most successful, dominant societies over the last several hundred years have evolved into places where talents and work are rewarded sufficiently to create livable lives for most of their members.

Including the stupid.

The hard, generational trek up the class ladder is evidence of evolution at work, and the more our system includes all of its citizens equally in terms of possibilities, the better it will become. Use what talents people possess. Sure, reward the brilliant, but make life palatable for the ditchdigger as well.

The U.S. has failed to keep up with much of the rest of the developing world in this matter, and it is finally reaping the whirlwind created by its greed and folly. All you need to know on that account is our world-leading percentage of prison residents.

In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

We are not taking care of “the stupids,” and when they get mad, they steal and kill. End of story. All races, all sexes. That’s the way it works.

How best to do this?

Keep on humping along, I guess. Distrust so-called leaders…no what matter their supposed politics may be…if they take huge money from corporate entities that are dedicated to the bottom line even if that means sending jobs from our “stupids” to others elsewhere that are paid a fraction of what U.S. workers are paid.

Or used to be paid, anyway. Ross Perot pinned it 25+ years ago.

From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates:

Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.

PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.

So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.

It took a little longer than he thought it would take and the revolt of the “stupids” ended up with Trump in the White House, but here we jolly well are, aren’t we.

The best bet for the 2020 presidential election if we do not wake the fuck up?

A Republican centrist vs. a Democratic centrist…and by “centrist” I mean someone who takes money from those corporate interests that have…in pursuit of the bottom line…fulfilled Perot’s prediction.

…when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.

Welcome to the wreckage of the good ship “S.S. United States.”

As Perot also said:

We’ve got to cut it out.

Trump isn’t going to do it, despite his populist, nationalist spiel. All he really wants is power and profit for himself and the new gang that he represents. And the mainstream Republicans aren’t going to do it, for sure!!!

That leaves the Dems.

Who are controlled by the corporate-funded DNC establishment.

The prospects don’t look too good right about now, do they.

So it goes.

But we do keep trying.

Don’t we.

Don’t we?

Please!!!

Later…

AG

There’s no better place to look to see how freaked out the Republicans are than the state of Wisconsin. Gov. Scott Walker enjoys majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. The GOP holds 18 of 33 state Senate seats and 63 of 99 state Assembly seats. The Senate majority is admittedly narrow but wouldn’t change with the loss of a single seat. Nonetheless, after Walker created one vacancy in the Senate and another in the Assembly by appointing the incumbents to serve in his administration, he refused to schedule special elections to fill the seats.

There was a very specific event that caused him to make this decision.

…Walker has been reluctant to call the special elections after Democrats won another vacant seat in a heavily Republican district earlier this year. In that district, which covers several counties in northwest Wisconsin, Trump won by 17 points in 2016, raising alarm bells among Republicans. Walker said in a tweet that the election should serve as a “wake-up call” for the GOP.

The two districts in question are similar.

The two legislative districts — a state Senate district south of Green Bay and a state Assembly district north of Madison — have been vacant for months, after the incumbents quit to take jobs in Walker’s administration. Both are heavily Republican districts that favored President Trump by 18 points and 14 points, respectively, in 2016.

Walker was unwilling to risk losing these heavily Republican seats even though they would not change the balance of power in Madison. But his arguments did not prevail in court.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) will call special elections to fill two vacant legislative seats after two courts ruled against his efforts to delay and eventually cancel those elections…

…Walker’s lawyers had argued that holding special elections would amount to a waste of taxpayer money, because the legislature will have concluded their sessions for the year by the time new legislators are elected. They also said state law allows Walker to avoid calling special elections to fill vacancies created in non-election years.

A Dane County circuit judge appointed by Walker rejected the latter argument. Both the Dane County judge and an appeals court judge shut down the former argument, ordering Walker to comply by today’s deadline.

Before Walker acquiesced to the courts late yesterday afternoon, he first floated a really incredible idea. He asked the appeals court to give him enough time to comply with their order that he could call a special session of the state legislature and change the law so that he would not be compelled to call for the special elections.

Walker faced a court-ordered deadline of noon on Thursday to call the special elections. He had asked an appeals court to delay the deadline by eight days, to give the legislature time to return to Madison to rewrite state election law and make the initial court order moot.

This is becoming a pattern for the Republicans. After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the state’s congressional districts were too gerrymandered and violated the state Constitution, the GOP seriously contemplated impeaching all the Democrats who had been elected to the bench. Something similar and even more extreme is going on in North Carolina.

RALEIGH, N.C. — In Washington, efforts by this state’s Republicans to cement their political dominance have taken a drubbing this month. On May 15, the Supreme Court struck down a North Carolina elections law that a federal appeals court said had been designed “with almost surgical precision” to depress black voter turnout. A week later, the court threw out maps of two congressional districts that it said sought to limit black voters’ clout.

And it could get worse: Gerrymandering challenges to other congressional and state legislative districts also are headed for the justices.

But if North Carolina Republicans have been chastened in Washington, there is scant evidence of it here in the state capital. Quite the opposite: Hours after the court nullified the elections law, for example, party officials said they would simply write another.

Here’s a list of some of the ways the Republican legislature in North Carolina has been abusing its power.

“What we’re seeing in North Carolina is an effort at political entrenchment that is unparalleled,” said Allison Riggs, a senior staff lawyer at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, a Durham advocacy group that sued Republican leaders over the election law. “It requires a complete disregard for the will of the voters and political participation, and a disregard for the independence of the judiciary.”

After a toxic election campaign, the veto-proof Republican majorities in the State House and State Senate moved to defang Mr. Cooper even before he took office. A special session in December stripped the governor of most power to appoint state employees and university trustees, choose a cabinet without legislative approval and install majorities on state and local election boards. The latter move was stayed, pending a trial.

Now the legislators are taking aim at the state judicial system. In December, after voters elected a Democratic majority to the nominally nonpartisan State Supreme Court, the legislature expanded the jurisdiction of the Republican-led Court of Appeals and made the legal path toward other Supreme Court hearings more tortuous. Last month, Republicans voted to shrink the Court of Appeals by barring replacement of the next three retiring judges, denying Mr. Cooper a chance to nominate successors.

In March, a state commission charged with improving the state’s courts urged the legislature to scrap the requirement that judges win election to the bench, saying it forced candidates to seek contributions from people who appeared before them.

Eight days later, the legislature voted to change lower-court elections from nonpartisan to partisan affairs, requiring nearly 400 judges to run under party labels in a bid to put more Republican loyalists on the bench. (The legislators had earlier made appeals and Supreme Court elections partisan.) Two Republican legislators filed a bill to split Charlotte’s Democratic-leaning Mecklenburg County judicial district into three new ones that would give Republicans a better shot at victory.

“It’s straight-up political,” one of the sponsors, Senator Jeff Tarte of suburban Charlotte, told The News & Observer of Raleigh.

You can see that there’s a preference to hold elections when the GOP thinks it will benefit them. But that’s the only time they’re interested in elections. The only unifying principle here is to pursue power and to deny it to the Democrats, and they continue to seek every angle even though they are getting slapped down by courts at every stage. They have plans for that, too.

I think the best way to look at this is to imagine what it would look like if the Republicans were not stopped by the courts and instead got their way. The legal system would cease to exist as we know it. Judges that ruled against the GOP would be replaced through a variety of means, depending on the state. Unwelcome rulings would be dealt with by rewriting the law to make what was illegal yesterday legal tomorrow. Democratic governors would be stripped of all their powers and districts down to the school boards would be redrawn to favor the Republicans. Vacancies in the legislature would be left vacant if they have any chance of being filled by Democrats, but seats that favor Republicans would be filled immediately. Civil rights enforcement would not exist and black populations would either be corralled or split up and weakened. All manner of voter disenfranchisement would become legal and the new norm in our elections.

The Democrats aren’t sitting still for this. They’re making it easier for people to vote wherever they have the power to do so. For example, in Washington state the legislature just passed automatic registration, Election Day registration, pre-registration for 16 & 17-year-olds, and a state Voting Rights Act. Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed these reforms into law last week.

At a bill signing ceremony in Tukwila, Inslee called it a historic day. And the Democrat contrasted Washington to states that have passed voter ID laws.

“In 20 other states, there have been venal, evil efforts to suppress voters, to suppress the ability of people to get to the ballot box,” Inslee said. “I’m proud in our state we’re making it easier to vote, not harder. That’s what Washington state is about.”

Maybe too much is said about swing voters who seem more and more not to actually exist. But I think most people are not overly political and while they may lean right or lean left, they don’t want a political and legal system based on the exercise of raw power. It ought to mean something to them that the Democrats are trying to increase civic participation in our elections and that the Republicans are using a huge percentage of their energy and resources devising ways to game the system so that voters have no say.

I’m not a constitutional law expert but I think it’s common sense to believe that there’s a limit to the presidential pardon power. It’s true that the president can pardon whomever he wants and there’s nothing people can do about it as far as undoing the actual pardon. We can’t for example, reimpose penalties on a convicted criminal just because we determine his or her pardon was corruptly obtained. But I also don’t believe that the only penalty for a corrupt pardon is or should be for Congress to use its impeachment power. If the president issues a pardon with the clear purpose of obstructing justice, particularly if they do so to protect themselves from either prosecution or impeachment, then I think they should be brought up on criminal charges, and we shouldn’t have to wait until after they’ve left office to see those chose charges pursued.

With news breaking that the president’s former lead attorney, John Dowd, floated pardons to Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn’s lawyers, this is no longer a theoretical conversation. On the one hand, we have here a case where the pardons had a corrupting influence even though they haven’t yet and may never be issued. On the other hand, we can now more clearly imagine what it will look like if they are issued.

The New York Times piece on this emphasizes that scholars and experts of two minds about what the president can and cannot do.

But even if a pardon were ultimately aimed at hindering an investigation, it might still pass legal muster, said Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration and a professor at Harvard Law School.

“There are few powers in the Constitution as absolute as the pardon power — it is exclusively the president’s and cannot be burdened by the courts or the legislature,” he said. “It would be very difficult to look at the president’s motives in issuing a pardon to make an obstruction case.”

The remedy for such interference would more likely be found in elections or impeachment than in prosecuting the president, Mr. Goldsmith added.

But pardon power is not unlimited, said Samuel W. Buell, a professor of law at Duke University.

“The framers did not create the power to pardon as a way for the president to protect himself and his associates” from being prosecuted for their own criminal behavior, he said.

Under Mr. Buell’s interpretation, Mr. Dowd’s efforts could be used against the president in an obstruction case if prosecutors want to demonstrate that it was part of larger conspiracy to impede the special counsel investigation.

Since Jack Goldsmith (along with John Yoo) was the legal architect of torture during the administration of George W. Bush it does not surprise me that I completely disagree with his interpretation of the president’s pardon power. I find it impossible to disagree with the logic employed by Mr. Buell. It simply cannot be the case that the Founding Fathers intended to give the president of the United States a weapon that could be used to obstruct justice or to run any kind of criminal syndicate without any fear other than impeachment.  At best, they simply failed to account for the possibility that we’d ever face a situation where the pardon power would be used in this way.

Congress could end this controversy right now by simply asserting that pardons in the Russia investigation that amount to efforts to protect the president and obstruct the prosecutors will be considered a slam-dunk impeachable offense. But if they won’t exercise their oversight responsibilities, then I see no reason why the president should be able to hide behind his absolute power to pardon to argue that he has an absolute right to be completely above the law.

There are so many things in the news every day that make me angry but for some reason this bit from Politico’s Playbook makes me absolutely livid:

HOUSE REPUBLICANS will take up a balanced-budget amendment when they return from recess, several sources tell us. This follows on the heels of their $1.3-trillion budget bill and their massive tax bill. WHY DO THIS NOW? Here’s what we think: It’s almost election season, and it would be helpful if GOP lawmakers could go home and be able to say they voted to support balancing the federal budget, even though they voted boosted discretionary spending by a ton, and have not touched entitlement spending, which, they have said for years, is the driver of U.S. budget deficits.

It’s only one little paragraph but it contains enough effrontery to make me see red. And I think it’s unique in the sense that it should make everyone spitting mad no matter where their beliefs lie on the ideological spectrum. Anyone with even a modicum of policy chops knows that the Balanced Budget Amendment is the dumbest idea ever devised. It would take one of America’s greatest advantages, that we have great credit and can borrow almost unlimited amounts of money because we print our own money and alway have customers for our bonds, and make it illegal for Congress to utilize it in times of economic peril. If we could not use debt to stimulate a down economy, we’d be as vulnerable as Greece or Argentina to downward spirals, and considering the importance of our economy to the world economy, this would be a very dangerous development for everyone.

But it’s true that deficit spending comes with problems. The most consequential of them is that money spent financing the interest on debt is money that cannot be spent on real things like Social Security checks, college loans, nutrition assistance, research and development, or even ill-advised wars in Asia. This is why giving out an enormous tax cut to the wealthy doesn’t trickle down the way it is supposed to. Half the point of these tax cuts is to deny the federal government money to spend on programs that people like and find useful, or, in the words of Grover Norquist, to shrink the government down to a size small enough that it can be drowned in a bathtub. Partly this is done by taking in less revenue to begin with, and partly this is done my making us spend an ever-increasing percentage of our revenues on interest payments. If you go into debt to stabilize a cratering global economy, you are saving people from losing their businesses or their jobs and perhaps helping to ensure domestic tranquility and keep the peace between nations. If you go into debt for no particular reason at all other than to enrich your donors, you’re weakening the nation and hurting the vast majority of its people.

Still, if you’ve bought into the idea that the government should be smaller and that deficit spending is always a bad thing, then you should be outraged to see the Republicans in Congress completely disregard all their deficit hawkery with their tax cut and their huge appropriations omnibus bill, and then turn around and pretend that they’re really concerned about deficits. And it’s even worse than it seems.

If you had an alcoholic in your family who had just gone on a months long binge and then came to his senses, handed over the car keys and offered to enter a rehabilitation center, then you’d probably see that as a positive development. But the Republicans only support the Balanced Budget Amendment because they know it will never become law. This is more like an alcoholic who says all the right things when the family comes together to confront them on their drinking, but who has no intention of actually changing his ways.

What they’ve done, after howling like banshees about the deficit for the totality of President Obama’s term, is to turn on a dime and fund the government at the same or even higher levels than Obama. And they decided to do this with much less revenue. Then, realizing that a good segment of their base wasn’t in on the joke from the beginning, they seek to appease them by pretending to be deficit hawks by voting for the stupidest idea in the history of the world: “it would be helpful if GOP lawmakers could go home and be able to say they voted to support balancing the federal budget.”

This takes bad faith, disingenuousness, and insincerity to unprecedented levels. To even attempt it demonstrates an unlimited contempt for the intelligence of the American voter. It’s like catching your child with his hand in the cookie jar and having to listen to him promise you that it’s okay because he plans to ban cookies altogether.

The United States of America leading the `Free World’ …

President Bush’s Address on Terrorism Before a Joint Meeting of Congress | NY Times – Sept. 21, 2003 |

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations, secret even in success.

We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.

Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.  

Geez … within a decade the United States used Sunni Terrorists to fight their proxy war with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to force regime change in Syria and overthrow once again another authoritarian regime by any means. Who is with the terrorists now? Not Putin’s Russia who effectively downgraded the terrorists operating within Syria’s sovereign territory. From their intervention from September 2015, the number of deaths and casualties made a sharp decline. The US and its allies had to destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Eastern Syria because their proxy had become a danger to the region and Western Europe.

The refugees crossing from Turkey to Greece and beyond became a rallying cry for populist far-right anti-immigration parties leading to a poor decision in Great Britain to leave the European Union. How the intervention of NATO led nations in Syria ended up destroying the fiber of unity within the EU. Such a poor, poor leadership … or was this the intent from the outset? The fact that the Tory supported Cambridge Analytica played such a major role in the Leave campaign in the UK referendum and a year later in the underdog win of the right-wing conservatives to elect Donald Trump did cause a revolutionary change in the Western world. Oh well, whether its an Orange, Rose or Maidan revolt the CIA and its cohorts to “democratize” outlier nations must be appreciated to further the aim of corporate power and pure capitalism. Jon McCain before you die, well done fellow … you’ve got more backing later in life than you had flying warplanes above Vietnam.You’ll even find bipartisan support for your aggravation of anti-Russia sentiment.

I always thought you were a loser in politics running for the office of President while photoshopping your way to illustrate the safety on the streets of Baghdad, later in Tsiblisi, northern Syria amongst jihadists fighting your war against dictator Assad and the successful coup d’état of the Maidan revolt in Kiev in 2014.

Former political leader of Christian Democrats in Holland, foreign minister in support of US invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, by appointment of George Bush to become NATO’s Secretary General to coordinate European nations to expand NATO to the borders of Russia, Ukraine as the highest possible prize: Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

More below the fold …
○ ‘NATO should not have committed to membership of Ukraine and Georgia’

Europe’s diplomats whispering in Sergei Lavrov’s ears: “We’re being blackmailed …”

No room for diplomatic shades of grey on Russia – NZ’s choice is black and white

OPINION: “Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.”

Uttered by prime minister Michael Joseph Savage at the outset of World War II, the famous statement was the justification for New Zealand following the mother country in to battle.

Good grief.

UK High Commissioner to New Zealand Laura Clarke said the UK felt it was clear the Novichok nerve agent had stemmed from Russia.

Thank goodness times have changed and New Zealand has forged its own fiercely independent foreign policy – one based historically on doing what’s right and standing up to bullies.

We are thankfully independent, and we’re much wiser to the implications of wading into a stoush that may not directly affect us. And let’s be clear, no-one is talking war – this is a diplomatic test.

Still, the United Kingdom has asked for New Zealand’s support in dealing with Russian aggression and on this, only one side is the right side.

It’s not with Vladimir Putin.

New coalition government to reopen trade talks with Russia  

Re: Not The Onion (none / 1)

I took a look at Politico.eu’s front page, too. I noticed one dodgy reporting on Tory gov’s latest “ Brexit ‘backstop’ plan” and was reminded of the summer of ’07, when Politico appeared out of nowhere in first row of a televised WH press corps gaggle. That was Bush announcing his nomination of Bob Gates (CIA dir) to replace Rumsfeld. Both events were startling, memorable.

Politico had only launched in Jan 2007. Turns out, behind the edgy, start-up “branding” were a couple of mainline WaPoo reporters with personal, portable WH press corp credentials.

I dug around tonight for this article to refresh my recollection of its trajectory. Take in Pro edition subscription rates for Belt-way “verticals.” It goes a distance to explain editorial priorities for EU expansion since 2015.

by Cat @EuroTrib on Wed Mar 28th, 2018

(I originally wrote this as a reply to Heart of the Rockies on Booman’s recent post “Why are Trump’s Polls So Stable?” It grew, so here it is as a standalone.)

########################################################################

Heart of the Rockies wrote:

It’s also possible that fewer people identify as Republicans, although I haven’t seen this discussed very much.

I replied:

“Fewer people identify as Republicans?” A pleasant thought, but I fear not. Not in any effective numbers, anyway. As I point out below in the comment beginning “Booman asks,”

Left, right or center, [willing] poll respondents belong more to the Idiocracy Party than they do to any other firmament of belief.

Thus a virtual logjam of poll results.

Gridlocked polls.

It is the “dark matter” citizens who are reachable…the ones who have become disgusted with both parties and their candidates, at least since the end of Obama’s term in office if not well before.

These are the ones who were alienated by Clinton I’s economic policies and sexual obsessions, by Bush II’s stupidity plus his reliance on corporate criminals like Dick Cheney and also by the Democratic Party’s failure to even try to fight the vote fraud that got him elected twice, by Obama’s many-faced Peace President/PermaWar President/Wall Street President/Security State President act and then finally totally turned off by the choice offered in the most recent election…a Klown Chump King or a politically manipulative, gaffe-ridden, cold-hearted political hustler who would have without a doubt continued the mistakes of both the Clinton I and Obama (p)residencies.

In point of fact, I believe that HRC pretty much ran Bill Clinton during his terms in office, beginning with the governorship of Arkansas. The only things she couldn’t control were his sexual proclivities. She was his very own Dick Cheney, and he was her Bush I.

Her good-looking, charming frontman.

Nice.

The only problem was that he turned out to be a little bit too charming.

So it goes.

Had Bill Clinton  been able to keep his dick in his pants, Bush I would have almost undoubtedly lost to Gore.

Tough luck, eh?

AG

P.S. From Wikipedia.

Dark matter is a type of matter which has not yet been directly observed, but is thought to form a fundamental part of the universe. Very strong evidence suggests its existence…

Hmmmm…

Sound familiar?

As the Sufis say, “As above, so below.”

Bet on it.

P.P.S. If the above interests you, go here to read another look at the same general theme on that Booman’s “Why are Trump’s Polls So Stable?” post.

Does anyone really care what Rick Santorum says?