The Commentariat -- July 13, 2015
Internal links & defunct videos removed.
Afternoon Update:
Julie Davis of the New York Times: "President Obama announced on Monday that he was commuting the sentences of 46 federal drug offenders, more than doubling the number of nonviolent criminals to whom he has granted clemency since taking office.... In a letter written to each of the inmates in which he personally notifies them that their sentences have been commuted, Mr. Obama says he has chosen them out of the thousands who apply for clemency because 'you have demonstrated the potential to turn your life around.'"
Colin Campbell of Business Insider: "A contact-lens and eyeglass company is having a blast after realizing its logo shares similarities with that of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's (R) presidential campaign. Both Walker's campaign and America's Best Contacts and Eyeglasses feature a cartoonish, four-part American flag logo as the "E" in their names. The same flag icon is also their stand-alone logos when the text is removed." ...
CW: MIKE HUCKAB
and RICK P
RRY must be among Scottie's rivals who are really pissed.
Mark Berman of the Washington Post: "The executive committee of the Boy Scouts of America has unanimously approved a resolution that would drop the group's ban on openly gay leaders, a key step that sends the resolution to the organization's national board later this month. If the national executive board ratifies the change when it meets on July 27, it would become official Scouts policy, a little more than two months after the organization's president [-- former Defense Secretary Robert Gates --] cast the ban as an existential threat to the group."
*****
James Kanter & Andrew Higgins of the New York Times: "European leaders said Monday morning that they had reached a deal meant to resolve Greece's debt crisis and avert a historic fracture in the Continent's common currency project.... The deal announced early Monday allows only the start of detailed negotiations on a new assistance package for Greece. But the prospect of a new bailout program was expected to give the European Central Bank the leeway to continue channeling sorely needed emergency funding to Greek banks hollowed out by a long economic slump and the withdrawal of billions of euros in recent months by account holders as the country's financial crisis worsened." ...
... "Disaster in Europe." Paul Krugman: "There are only terrible alternatives at this point, thanks to the fecklessness of the Greek government and, far more important, the utterly irresponsible campaign of financial intimidation waged by Germany and its allies. And I guess I have to say it: unless Merkel miraculously finds a way to offer a much less destructive plan than anything we're hearing, Grexit, terrifying as it is, would be better." ...
... Here's Krugman's column: "This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can't accept; but even so, it's a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for.... Who will ever trust Germany's good intentions after this?... The European project -- a project I have always praised and supported -- has just been dealt a terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or Greece, it wasn't the Greeks who did it." ...
... Matt O'Brien of the Washington Post: "Germany seems to want to humiliate Greece. This latest melodrama, playing out in Brussels as European finance ministers meet to discuss whether or not to approve a new Greek bailout, appears so nonsensical that it can be hard to believe these people are deciding the future of Europe. Although you wouldn't know it from the headlines, the truth is that Greece and Europe have been close to a deal for awhile now." ...
... Larry Summers in the Washington Post: "Financial problems are in some combination always about two things -- arithmetic that does not add up and a loss of confidence. Incremental steps that provide some but not large sums of assistance, that postpone but do not reduce scheduled debt payments and that defer decisions about the future to the future run the constant risk that they will not bring convincing arithmetic into view and will be insufficient to restore market confidence." CW P.S. Hillary should make me Secretary of the Treasury again because "I'm, like, a really smart person."
George Jahn & Matthew Lee of the AP: "Negotiators at the Iran nuclear talks plan to announce Monday that they've reached a historic deal capping nearly a decade of diplomacy that would curb the country's atomic program in return for sanctions relief, two diplomats told The Associated Press on Sunday." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Richard Cowan of Reuters: "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, interviewed on the 'Fox News Sunday' television program, said the Senate is unlikely to confirm any U.S. ambassador to Havana nominated by [President] Obama. McConnell added, 'There are sanctions that were imposed by Congress. I think the administration will have a hard time getting those removed. This is a policy that there is substantial opposition to in Congress.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, in an NYT op-ed: "Southern Republican officeholders ... still act as if tomorrow will be exactly like today, their tenure assured by unbendable evangelical Christians and testy white suburbanites.... Dramatic changes in voter attitudes will shift the region's party balance, to the detriment of the Republicans.... However..., affluent, suburban whites remain myopic about the obvious signs.... Anecdotal evidence indicates that affluent Southern Republicans continue to believe that minority voters can be attracted with punitive polices based on the Paul Ryan model.... It is a quintessential Southern pattern. The region's most affluent citizens always resist the obvious at first.... The longer they take to get it, the greater the odds that multiethnic Democrats will finally break the Republican lock on the solidly red South." ...
... ** Hugh Howard, in a Washington Post op-ed: "To a surprising extent, the way the North remembers the Civil War is also deeply flawed and misleading.... It's simply wrong-headed to presume that average, mid-19th-century farmers and factory workers in the North harbored abolitionist sympathies. They didn't.... The war for Lincoln was explicitly about union -- until it became expedient to make it about emancipation. The Emancipation Proclamation was primarily intended to hobble the Confederacy's war effort, which relied upon slaves for provisioning and other support. Even among those who recognized that human bondage must end, few thought blacks were equal to whites." ...
... Charles Blow: "While America's history in skin-color politics is long and deep, this aversion to darkness -- particularly dark femininity -- and aspiration to lightness, or even whiteness, isn't only an American phenomenon. It's a global sickness informed by history and culture and influenced by colonialism and the export of popular culture." ...
... Aviva Shen of Think Progress: "A day after South Carolina lowered the Confederate flag flying outside the Statehouse, the NAACP Board of Directors voted Saturday to end its 15-year economic boycott of the state. The civil rights group introduced an emergency resolution at its annual convention this weekend in response to the removal of the flag from the state capitol." ...
... Cathleen Decker of the Los Angeles Times: Latinos' "voting strength [in California] is only half their proportion of California's population, [according to a report said. They hold 1 in 8 state Senate seats and an even smaller percentage of supervisorial chairs. That's symptomatic of a troubling turn for Latino politicians and voters. Together with other data, it suggests the possibility of a ceiling forming over a group that, until recently, thought it had limitless upward mobility.... The higher up the political food chain the job, or the less Latino the political district, the worse their odds of success."
Sarah Kaplan of the Washington Post: "That a wildfire has been able to burn so extensively and for so long in a rain forest [-- Olympic National Park --] is a testament to the severity of the drought that has wracked the American West from California to Alaska. Olympic National Park -- which occupies much of the Olympic Peninsula just west of Seattle -- just endured its driest spring in over 100 years and a winter snow pack that was a mere 14 percent of average, according to the Park Service."
Saeed Dehghan of the Guardian: "The spying trial of Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter held in Iran for nearly a year, has resumed in Tehran behind closed doors at a critical moment in the ongoing nuclear negotiations between Iran and the west."
Simon Romero & William Neuman of the New York Times: Pope "Francis' silence on various sensitive issues was noted repeatedly throughout his tour [of Bolivia, Equador & Paraguay], particularly in Paraguay, where activists in one of Latin America's most socially conservative countries had hoped for more on issues that included gay rights, killings over land disputes and the persistence of widespread economic inequality.... While Francis met with social leaders and criticized an economic model that sacrifices 'human lives at the altar of money and profits,' he spoke in general terms, opting against mentioning specific cases...." ...
... CW: For what it's worth, I think that's what a religious leader is supposed to do. Francis is not going to appear before the U.S. Congress & say to Paul Ryan, "Get thee behind me, Satan." With the help of the Pope's generalizations, Ryan is supposed to realize of his own free will that he is a nasty piece of work, repent & go forth to do good works.
Helen & Margaret are back. Helen (June 27): "Never in my life did I think I would live long enough to see the gays persecuting the Christians instead of the other way around. That was actually a Fox Exclusive! I read somewhere that Glen[n] Beck has 10,000 to 20,000 pastors ready to die before gay marriage would become legal. Funny. I haven't seen any obituaries printed. Religious conviction has its limits I guess, but that really is one herd I would love to see thinned. Of course if a government is able to show more compassion than your church, maybe you should join another church. It's just so odd that all this hatred and discrimination seems to be emanating from a bunch of Republicans who claim to represent Jesus." Via Bill of Daily Kos.
Marie's Sports Report. AP: "The Buffalo Bills offensive line coach, Aaron Kromer, was arrested Sunday in Florida after shoving a boy to the ground and punching him, authorities said. The Walton County Sheriff's Office said the dispute arose after Kromer and his son confronted three boys about their use of beach chairs while fishing near their home. In a statement, the sheriff's office said Kromer grabbed the boys' fishing pole and threw it in the water before assaulting one boy. 'The victim stated Kromer also told him if he reported him to the police he would kill his family,' the sheriff's office said." ...
... CW: A few weekends back, a couple of kids commandeered my lawn chairs to sit in while fishing off the lake across the road. When I noticed this, I asked the teens to put the chairs back when they were through fishing as the chairs are fairly heavy. I failed to toss the boys' fishing rods, punch any of the boys or threaten to kill their families. Also, the boys did put the chairs back on my lawn. Football sucks. ...
** Jim Sleeper in the Atlantic: "The Puritans were America's first Very Serious People.... First, in attempting to emulate the earliest Christian communities, they turned their backs on the golden thrones of popes and kings and countenanced neither aristocracy nor destitution -- a revolutionary innovation in the early seventeenth century. Although they were often shrewd businessmen, they never argued openly that prosperity brings freedom and dignity, preaching instead that it carried communal obligations. Second, they weren't out to 'make history' through scientific planning or by discerning great movements of Hegelian Reason in their strivings, but by fulfilling the pre-established biblical typology of the Israelites' exodus from Egypt on a sacred mission to a Promised Land.... Third, the Puritans' biblically covenanted, congregational communities combined public purpose with personal integrity in ways that survive in present-day understandings of the interplay between individual conscience and rights on the one hand and civic obligation on the other."
Presidential Race
Peter Baker of the New York Times: "Even without the heartbreak of loss, this was bound to be a crossroads moment for a vice president who has spent four decades in Washington only to find an uncertain path ahead. [Vice President Biden] has not ruled out running for president again, and some friends are nudging him to, even if the political math does not seem to favor it. But he has good days and bad days, his mind never far from his late son, Beau Biden, and his staff is not planning further than two weeks ahead.
NEW. David Jackson of USA Today: "Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton unveiled her economic program Monday, including a call for corporations to share more profits with employees in a bid to increase take-home pay.... In slamming [Jeb] Bush for his comment that people need to 'work more hours' to help the economy grow, Clinton said that the former Florida governor obviously hasn't spoken to many actual workers. 'They don't need a lecture,' Clinton said. 'They need a raise.'" ...
... E. J. Dionne: Hillary "Clinton's ideas reflect a wide center-left consensus on behalf of bottom-up or, as many progressives call it, 'middle-out' economics. They also underscore how the nomination challenge she faces from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) differs from the problem created for Republicans by [Donald] Trump. By pulling the political conversation to the left generally and toward specific benefits government could confer on Americans in particular, Sanders is creating new political space for Democrats and highlighting issues that most of them (including Clinton, if she wins the nomination) want at the heart of the campaign next fall. Trump, on the other hand, is pulling Republicans far off message...."
** Paul Krugman (regular Monday column): "Americans work longer hours than their counterparts in just about every other wealthy country.... But Jeb Bush -- who is still attempting to justify his ludicrous claim that he can double our rate of economic growth -- says that Americans 'need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families.'... You see this laziness dogma everywhere on the right. It was the hidden background to Mitt Romney's infamous 47 percent remark. It underlay the furious attacks on unemployment benefits at a time of mass unemployment and on food stamps when they provided a vital lifeline for tens of millions of Americans. It drives claims that many, if not most, workers receiving disability payments are malingerers -- 'Over half of the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts,' says Senator Rand Paul.... If [Jeb Bush] makes it to the White House, the laziness dogma will rule public policy." ...
... Krugman takes a nice shot (albeit in the usual indirect way) at David Brooks & his moralizing.
NEW. Jason Stein, et al., of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "After four and a half years of leading Wisconsin, Scott Walker laid out Monday his goal of winning the White House, launching his campaign to become the world's most powerful leader." ...
Scott Walker is a national disgrace. -- AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka
... Jenna Johnson of the Washington Post: "Dealing with legislation at home was supposed to be the low-drama part of [Gov. Scott] Walker's year. Instead, things ... in Madison have been in turmoil for months -- a complication for a governor building his presidential candidacy around his ability to get things done. Walker has spent much of the year feuding not only with Democrats -- a fight he relishes -- but also with fellow Republicans over proposals such as the Bucks' arena.... [Walker] has pushed hard to use $250 million in taxpayer money to pay for a new professional basketball arena for the Milwaukee Bucks...." ...
... Kimberly Hefling of Politico: "Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's trailblazing effort to weaken tenure protections at public colleges and universities is now a reality with his signing of a $73 billion budget on Sunday.... Specifically, the changes allow the University of Wisconsin system Board of Regents -- 16 of whose 18 members are appointed by the governor -- to set tenure policies instead of having tenure protections spelled out in state law.... The budget sent to Walker also includes other labor-related issues that frustrated unions, including a provision that rolls back a minimum pay protection for laborers working on local public construction projects like schools." ...
... Andy Borowitz has a preview of Walker's presidential announcement: "Serving notice that he intends to go toe-to-toe with the controversial real-estate mogul, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker used the official announcement of his Presidential candidacy to assure Republican voters that he is as horrible as Donald Trump." ...
... Robert Costa of the Washington Postt: "In an expletive-laden interview over soft drinks [Donald] Trump ... said he has no plans to change the way he's running for the Republican nomination, which combines his trademark showmanship, an outsider-populist credo that resists ideological categorization and incendiary comments that have thrilled conservative activists." ...
... Mark Hensch of the Hill: "'Meet the Press' on Sunday aired a video documenting GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump's various changes of heart on campaign issues. The clip -- titled 'Trump vs. Trump' -- shows the New York business mogul shifting his stances on abortion, ObamaCare and even Hillary Clinton, his potential Democratic rival in 2016. 'One of the reasons Trump is breaking through this year thought is because people feel they know where he stands,' says 'Meet the Press' host Chuck Todd in the video." CW: Which means that the Village People got together & sanctioned anti-Donald talk. (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
... Jennifer Shutt of Politico: "Taking to Twitter on Sunday, Donald Trump used the escape of notorious drug lord Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman this weekend to criticize Mexico, the Media and fellow candidates for president. The mogul/reality TV host turned candidate for president, wrote: 'Mexico's biggest drug lord escapes from jail. Unbelievable corruption and USA is paying the price. I told you so!' He continued his posts through the day." ...
... Matt Chaban of the New York Times: An altar to Donald Trump -- a shop selling Trump stuff -- is stealing public space inside Trump Tower. City officials have been trying to get rid of it for years. "It is a New York peculiarity that an atrium lined with golden mirrors, Gucci logos and an 80-foot waterfall would qualify as a public amenity. Yet there are hundreds of these privately owned public spaces, colloquially known as POPS, dotting Manhattan and a sliver of Brooklyn.... In the case of Trump Tower, the developer, working on his first signature project, was able to add about 20 floors to the 66-story tower -- nearly a third of its total height -- in exchange for building public spaces and shops in the atrium." ...
... CW: Huh. I'm pretty sure if you or I set up shop in a public space, "city officials" would take about five minutes to shut us down.
Eric Bradner of CNN: "Sen. Lindsey Graham says Donald Trump is a 'wrecking ball' who has put the Republican Party's future on the line with his controversial remarks about Mexican immigrants. 'I think he's hijacked the debate. I think he's a wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community and we need to push back,' Graham said in an interview with CNN's Dana Bash on 'State of the Union' Sunday. 'This is a defining moment for the Republican Party. We need to reject this,' he said." With video.
It's not about me. Under this construct, nobody really cares about coming to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina any more. It's almost about money. And what you're going to reward, over time, is the people with the most money. And you're destroying the early primary process. And I think that's bad for the Republican Party. -- Sen. Lindsey Graham, complaining about Fox "News"'s "dumb" rule that will allow only the ten top-polling GOP candidates to appear in an August debate
... David Atkins in the Washington Monthly: "... it's funny to see Senator Graham decide only now that policies that reward the people with the most money are problematic and unfair. That never seemed to bother him when it came time to cut earned benefits or assistance to the poor in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Senator Graham never seems to bat an eye when Fox News glorifies billionaires while denigrating the working poor."
Beyond the Beltway
Steve Mistler of the Portland Press Herald: Maine Gov. Paul LePage compares the IRS to the Gestapo, then "walks it back" by making it worse, claiming that the IRS was -- emulating the Gestapo -- "heading in the direction of killing a lot of people" by "rationing" health care. ...
... AP: "Democratic lawmakers said Sunday that another 51 bills have become law [in Maine] after Republican Gov. Paul LePage missed his deadline to act on them by midnight Saturday. But LePage has said he won't enforce the laws and is expected to take the issue to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.... Among the bills that Democrats say became law after Saturday are measures to expand access to a drug overdose antidote and to provide insurance coverage for reproductive services to more women."
News Ledes
Arutz Sheva: "In arguably one of its cruelest acts yet, the Islamic State (ISIS) has reportedly blown up a baby as part of a demonstration showing how to handle explosives. So reports The Clarion Project. The unparalleled incident took place in Diyala Province, eastern Iraq, this past Friday, according to Sadiq el-Husseini, Security Committee Chairman of the province on behalf of the anti-ISIS forces there. He recounted the event to the local Arabic-language A-Sumeriah News."
New York Times: "Iranian and American negotiators made significant progress on Monday toward a historic nuclear agreement and have narrowed the list of final issues, several diplomats involved in the talks said. While the negotiators have moved closer to announcing an accord -- an announcement could come as early as Tuesday -- they said the deal remained fragile and warned that last-minute hitches could emerge as they review pages of text that define limits on Tehran's nuclear capacity and the lifting of Western and United Nations sanctions."
ABC News: "The estranged son of a respected Boston police captain was arrested July 4 by FBI agents as part of a counter-terrorism operation against alleged ISIS-inspired domestic terrorists, federal officials told ABC News today. Alexander Ciccolo, 23, of Adams, Mass., was taken into custody on gun charges after buying two pistols and two rifles from an undercover FBI confidential informant, federal officials said. In a search of his apartment, officials reported they found it loaded with possible bomb-making equipment including a pressure cooker, a variety of chemicals, an alarm clock, along with 'attack planning papers' and 'jihad' paperwork. FBI agents said he used the name Abu Ali al-Amriki and neighbors said he was a recent convert to Islam."
Guardian: "Video footage has emerged that appears to show the moments leading up to the fatal shooting of a teenage stone thrower by a senior Israeli army officer, seemingly contradicting the soldier's account of the killing. Doubts about the account of Col Yisrael Shomer, a brigade commander in the occupied territories, began to emerge last week in witness accounts and medical evidence collected by the Guardian, Washington Post and human rights groups. They suggested that 17-year-old Mohammed Kasbeh was shot in the upper body by Shomer as the youth was fleeing, not in the midst of a life-threatening attack."
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Reader Comments (9)
Maybe Smartie Summers isn't quite so smart.
Financial problems are not simply, and I do mean simply, arithmetic problems or loss of confidence problems. They are far more fundamental problems stemming from sometimes willful misapprehension of concrete physical realities, (was there really gold in then thar hills or oil in that hole?), the perverse capitalist business model (who cares if it's a dry hole? Most business models allow sometimes immense private profit in the midst of overall failure), or equally fundamental human realities like the breaking point beyond which the perpetually victimized (think Greece) won't stand for it any longer and rebel. After all, financial relationships are power relationships, Larry, and when they get out of balance, things get messy.
The predominant financial fact is that there is a whole lot of financial failure, I suspect far more than success. Estimates vary, but the numbers say that between fifty and ninety percent of all business startups fail. If one were to add in all personal bankruptcies, (though those numbers are down since the ACA's inception) the list would circle the globe, just as in geographic terms business failure in fact does.
Does Summers really believe that better arithmetic and more optimism would eliminate all that failure?
I can't believe that. He's too smart. Just ask him.
Ken,
If, as Marie suggests, Larry Summers was trolling for a job with Hillary Clinton, he probably didn't feel the need to get too detailed or economica-ca-cal 'cause by his lights women just don't have the science gene which he, apparently, expands to the cover the dismal variety as well.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Linguistic Stylings of Donald Trump and his Amazing Figures of Speech.
So Trumpy the Trumpet is now indulging in flights of Confederate fancy adumbrated by a judicious sampling of linguistic legerdemain.
This weekend, for example, and....well, every day, I suppose, Trumpy employs a heaping helping of synecdoche which allows him to select a single example of a country or race and have that person stand for the entire population group. Bush 41 pulled off this trick by making all blah males look like rapists and murderers. Trumpy is trying the same thing by having an escaped drug dealer and psychopath stand for the entirety of the Mexican people in his now infamous "I tole ya so" speech, or utterance, or maybe verbal flatulence, not sure from which portal emanated this this deathless sentiment.
But neither Trumpy nor his audience are immune from his indulgence in favorite figurative flights of speech.
Take for instance, his effective use of Diarreahism, which promotes an unending sluice of crap with each opening of the pie hole.
Then there's his particular fondness for Polyignoramalamadingdong, a self-explanatory figuration promising stupidity for all occasions.
And how 'bout Apposition? A-position is staking out what you stand for, right? Like takin' back 'Merica from THOSE PEOPLE. Good thing Trumpy went to collage. Or is it college? Who cares? Only wealthy east coast elites of which (of whom? of what?) Trumpy is not one. Or even half. So there.
Another favorite is Euphony which allows Trumpy to cast everyone who is not him as a liar, as in "you phony".
But there are some figures of speech he assiduously avoids, like all good wingnuts, notably the infamous and insidious Homophone. Why catch gay germs talking on a phone used by....you know...? It's a no-brainer, right? That Obama, for years now, has been issuing free Homo Phones to everyone made by Mooslims from his hometown, Mecca, where his birth certificate is hung in all the mosques right next to the Koran. No wonder healthcare is so bad. Everyone should know this!
Ah....my dears, the English language is blessed every day by the mere presence of Trumpy. Any day now, he'll discover onomatopoeia. Then it'll be whiz-bang-BOOM! Shazammmmmm! Then wee-wee-wee all the way home to the White House.
May Confederate enjambment follow you all the days of your lives.
Or at least until this mook throws in the (figurative, of course) towel.
The NRA Wants You: to shoot someone. Do it Today!
It's not enough for the gun fondlers to advocate for mass murder in this country, they're against any country that tries to stop the NRA's favorite type of humans: nuts with guns.
The recent one-time only, extremely rare, never, well hardly ever, practically never happens gun massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, has prompted renewed calls, even by the president, to do what Australia did after a horrific massacre in 1996, and that is to ban certain types of weapons altogether and make everyone else apply for a license to purchase any other kind of guns. The crazy thing is that this sounds like such a common sense thing to do, but in Right Wing World, neither common sense nor facts have any purchase.
"The American National Rifle Association (NRA) has issued a strong warning to Australia: 'There will be blood.' But the problem is, there has been less blood in recent times."
It appears that in order to make its case that gun controls don't work, the NRA does what it always does. Ignores facts and lies. According to the NRA, Australia's gun laws are misguided and have not reduced the rate of homicides by gun one iota. Facts say different (big surprise):
"In 1996, 516 people were killed by guns compared to 226 people in 2012, while gun homicides in Australia have remained below 50 victims annually during the past decade. Suicides with a firearm have also been reduced in the last decade, with figures at approximately half the amount seen in the '90s."
(50 victims! Annually. In the US we have that on some streets.)
The conclusion reached by all sentient, thoughtful, and rational people the world over is that fewer guns means fewer gun deaths. But like wingnut claims that no taxes will mean more money in government coffers, it's simply out and out lunacy to claim the opposite.
Life in America, courtesy of Right Wing World.
"Stand by, America; your next tragic, one-time only, extremely rare, never, well hardly ever, practically never happens gun massacre will occur in X days. Stand by also for spin from Fox.
Pay no attention to liars from Australia. You are now free to move about the cabin and resume shooting each other.
Nice to see Turtle Man McConnell stick his head out of his shell long enough to blurt out "NO!", his favorite word. This in response to the approval of an ambassador for the soon to be US embassy in Cuba.
He's doing it in the usual mature Republican way....foot stomping and screaming No No No No NONONONONONO.
What was all that noise McConnell was making about teaching the senators how to work together and do bipartisany type stuff?
According to the Yertle (see Marie's link, above) the president has been doing it all wrong. All he does, is "...talk, talk, talk. And Cuba is a good example. He thinks that simply by engaging with them we get a positive result,"
Oh yeah, because not engaging with them has been wicked positive.
Well, I suppose we should be fair, ya know, like all those people at Fox. After all, we've only been doing it Yertle's way for 50 years. Surely we can give it another century or two before trying something different. There's a lot to be said for "staying the course" as The Decider used to say, even a stupid one. I mean, would we be writing books about The Hundred Years War if it were only the Six Years and Change War?
But I guaran-fucking-tee that the first time Sheldon Adelson puts these two words together: Havana and casino, Mitch and the rest of the Wingnut Welfare recipients will be the first ones screaming about how Obama has been dragging his feet about appointing an ambassador to assist "our Cuban friends" as they go about the business of helping American job creators pile up the filthy lucre.
Plus ça change, right? More like plus ça shit.
For an Australian comics take on US gun control, or lack thereof.
Jim Jefferies is currently on the road for his Freedumb Tour. Just might have to try to see him.
Unwashed,
Great stuff. Very funny. First because he's a very funny guy, but mostly because it's all true.
(It's also true that 10% of those who disagree with him can envision themselves shoving a Glock up his ass and pulling the trigger. All NRA members in good standing, no doubt. And I actually have had people tell me that "you can't change the Second Amendment", which they will maintain, becoming increasingly angrier, after being told that the Constitution actually can be changed.)
And Now a Werd From Prime Minister Buttinsky.
News of a deal between Iran, the US, and various other powers has Bibi waxing bilious, bilious, I say.
For the last few days, he's been stomping around declaiming that if the Iran nuclear deal goes through, it will be the end of the world. Holy Guacamole! Not the End of the World! I hate that!
But today, Prime Minister Buttinsky opened a Twitter account in Farsi to say so to Iran's face, and to warn again that the deal, designed to direct Iran's nuclear ambitions away from Boom-Boom, will do just the opposite and allow Iran to "take over the world" (is this guy for real?).
One problem with the Beeb's tweet? It was misspelled.
How does one say "Fuck me!" in Farsi?
One would think that if someone were to open an account in another language to tell those people to eat shit and die, that a native speaker might be consulted to avoid stuff like "syntax errors", right?
Otherwise, you end up looking like this guy.
PM Buttinsky also has to deal now with Israeli groups like Yesh Atid who are calling him on all the jiggery-pokery--(™) A. Scalia--he indulged in to try to kill the Iran deal, like when he came to the US and addressed a joint session of Congress to tell the wingnuts who showed up to blow him that Obama was a baaaaaad man who didn't know what he was doing. These groups now say that since Bibi couldn't deliver on his promise to shove an andiron up the ass of this agreement, he should resign.
Ha! Fat chance.
If that were the case, it would have to follow that every Confederate asshole who showed up to hear a foreign head of state call their president a douchebag would resign too.
Waiting, waiting, waiting.....
Oh, sorry....wayting wayting, wayting.....
Starting to feel like Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode...