If you are in the US, remember we are now on daylight savings time!
Larry Kudlow Devalues Human Life With Japan Earthquake Freudian Slip VF Daily
Pay Teachers More Nicholas Kristof, New York Times
Peanut allergy ‘gene flaw’ link BBC
Herb Kohl vows Google probe Politico
Genetic makeup and duration of abuse reduce the brain’s neurons in drug addiction PsyPost
Tablets users lower guard on security MobileBlorge (hat tip reader Sugar Hush). I bet this has to do with the corporate embrace of the iPad. Probably not worked out this consciously, but effectively, “If my company wants me to use this for work, and that entails my transmitting important data, if there are any security issues, they must have thought about it and any resulting problems are their problem.”
Japan Earthquake: before and after ABC (hat tip reader furzy mouse)
Gagging order by Sir Fred cannot stop net chatter Telegraph (hat tip Richard Smith)
Do blogs make reporting restrictions pointless? Malcolm Coles (hat tip Richard Smith)
D.C. insiders can reap fortunes from federal programs for small businesses Washington Post
Enough James Kwak
Mass protest against Republican cuts to services, union rights Raw Story
Why Don’t All Major Unions Own Banks? Jon Walker, FireDogLake
Is the Imperial Presidency Inevitable? Harvey Mansfield, New York Times (hat tip Joe Costello). OMG, when Harvey Mansfield sounds comparatively sensible, you know we are all in trouble.
Justifying Progressive Tax Rates Mike Kimel, Angry Bear
BofA Offers to Help Fix Mortgages…If You’re a State Legislator Abigail Field, DailyFinance (hat tip reader markna)
Administration Foreclosure Relief Programs Plagued By Broken Servicers David Dayen, FireDogLake
The dollar, the RMB and the euro? Michael Pettis. Money quote:
The RMB is unlikely to become a serious reserve currency in the foreseeable future. There are a number of reasons for this. First and most obviously, there are few realistic mechanisms by which the world can acquire RMB. Either China needs to run a large current account deficits, or it needs totally open domestic financial markets in which foreigners can easily acquire domestic RMB-denominated bonds to the tune of several percentage points of China’s GDP annually. I discussed why in a blog entry five months ago.
We are unlikely to see either for many, many decades.
Antidote du jour:
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“If you are in the US, remember we are now on daylight savings time!” Lucky old you: for some reason the EU, which should move to “summer time” in mid to late Feb, moves only in late March.
From the Mansfield article:
In other words, we have replaced our constitutional republic with a (for now somewhat) benign dictatorship. Under Posner and Verleule’s theory, Bradley Manning has no effective legal right not to be tortured or ability to seek redress in the courts; Obama will eventually deign to stop it if there is enough popular uproar or bipartisan opposition. Until then, Manning is out of luck as Congress and the courts cannot or will not meaningfully interfere.
A European-style administrative state that relies on an elite, insular group of “experts” to “manage” the population is not the answer to our problems.
Allowing a professional class of technocrats and bankers to manage the financial system has only increased group-think and corruption while eliminating accountability. In 2008, Congress actually stood up to the bankers and the bankers’ representatives (e.g., Hank Paulson) by initially blocking TARP as their constituents overwhelmingly demanded. Determined to prevent Congressional interference in future bailouts, the Fed, the Treasury, and the bank reform act have all intensified the administrative state, ensuring that future bailouts can be conducted despite Congressional and popular opposition.
The national security bureaucracy is another example of an increasingly corrupt and co-opted group of “experts” bypassing the people and their representatives. When the Pentagon and the neo-cons wanted their war with Serbia in 1999, they got it; it was irrelevant that Congress, the American people, and the UN all opposed the Kosovo War. Four years later, the neocons and their allies fired or punished all the “experts” who insisted Iraq did not have WMDs, replacing them with “experts” who insisted Iraq did have WMDs. The Iraq war happened despite massive protests, and opposition from NATO and the UN. In an administrative state, it is no longer necessary to manufacture consent for war. The constant attacks on Pakistan and Yemen, authorized by executive fiat, are proof of that.
Now, the “experts” in DC insist that the endless wars and bank bailouts have bankrupted the US, and that we need to cut Social Security and Medicare. Cutting defense spending, bringing the troops home, ending the War on Drugs, and other popular ideas are not seriously discussed in DC. Why? Because government bureaucrats, think tank employees, and a few connected journalists have decided that the idea is a “non-starter” and “off the table.”
The question is whether the American people will take the implied advice of Posner and Vermeule and acquiesce to their lives being run from cradle to grave by “experts” whose views and financial interests radically differ from those of the American people. I hope not.
Externality,
In The Evolution of Civilizations, Carroll Quigley describes what happens when a civilization enters its declining stages. The vested interests, in order to “divert the discontent of the masses” away from themselves, he says, allocate “a certain part of their surplus to create instruments of class oppression, instruments of imperialist wars, and of irrationality.” The “institution of irrationality controls much of the intellectual life of the society” at this stage, he asserts.
Mansfield, Posner and Vermeule are certainly denizens of an “institution of irrationality,” and their entire purpose is to engender muddled thinking and confusion. The intent of their “debate” is to create the impression that there is a contest, when in reality there is none. Perhaps this is no more evident than when Mansfield intones:
In fact, the people today both love and hate the administrative state, and together our two parties register that ambivalence. With regard to welfare, Democrats are for it, Republicans against it; with regard to national security, the situation is reversed. We do have two recent examples of presidents who have stood up against majority opinion: George W. Bush with his surge in Iraq and Barack Obama with his health care plan.
This statement is masterwork of disinformation on a number of levels:
1) People do not “hate” the administrative state. What they “hate” is an administrative state that has been co-opted by, to put it in Quigley’s words, the “vested-interest groups.”
2) To declare that “our two parties register…ambivalence” is a lie. Both parties are controlled by the vested-interest groups. There is no ambivalence, only Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum.
3) Obama’s health care plan and Bush’s wars both serve the vested-interest groups. Neither serves the interests of a majority of Americans. That is why a majority of Americans, and a rather substantial majority, opposes both. Both parties operate against the interests of 90% of Americans, and in favor of the vested-interest groups.
4) The mismanagement of the economic machinery of the country by the vested-interest groups and the rise of the national security state, or what Quigley would call “class oppression” and “imperialist wars,” are not unrelated events. And they are certainly not in opposition to each other, as Mansfield would mislead us to believe in his Democrat vs. Republican framing. The rise of the national security state is necessary to control the masses, and is orchestrated by the vested-interest groups who are so horribly mismanaging the country’s economy.
I found an absolutely FABULOUS documentary that was released about a week ago that explains all this far better than I ever could. The movie is called Lifting the Veil and can be viewed here.
I don’t know who this Scott Noble is who produced the documentary, but he certainly marshals the intellectual and moral resources necessary to cut through all the fog created by the plutocrats and their paid liars and bumsuckers like Mansfield, Posner and Vermeule.
I found this short video by the commedian Lewis Black that was included in the documentary Lifting the Veil.
It captures what is perhaps the major theme of the documentary in a very humorous way.
DownSouth, thanks. I watched one of their other films a few months ago. (Maybe you posted the prior link?) Good stuff.
So ,to distill Lifting the Veil message to a tabloid headline,
We’re still trapped in Mrs Astor’s drawing room (max capacity 400).
Under Posner and Verleule’s theory, Bradley Manning has no effective legal right not to be tortured or ability to seek redress in the courts; Obama will eventually deign to stop it if there is enough popular uproar or bipartisan opposition. Until then, Manning is out of luck as Congress and the courts cannot or will not meaningfully interfere.
As those hacks no doubt know, that’s reminiscent of one of the rejected 1760s-era notions of Parliamentary sovereignty: That it was possible for Parliament to err and act in an unconstitutional way, but in that event no one had the right to disobey. Rather, one had to complain through legal channels and hope to move the erring sovereign that way, but in the meantime one must scrupulously obey. Eventually, Parliament would recognize its error and change its ways.
This nonsense was explicitly rejected by the Declaration of Independence, a document all statist hacks like those scribblers regard with fear and hatred.
from: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/
Activism with Ralph Nader (against big government and big corporations)
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/taleb010311.htm
Corporate Crime Reporter is now in its 25th year of publication.
Subscribers include: federal and state prosecutors,
major white-collar and corporate crime defense law firms, trial lawyers, major corporations, law school libraries, and large media outlets.
CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Nassim Taleb Says No to Big Corporations and No to Big Government
25 Corporate Crime Reporter 1, January 3, 2011
The right likes big corporations but not big government.
The left likes big government but not big corporations.
Nassim Taleb hates both.
Taleb is the author of the best selling mega hit – The Black Swan (Random House, 2007).
And most recently of The Bed of Procrustus – Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Random House, 2010.)
Aphorisms as in:
“It is much easier to scam people for billions than for just millions.”
“The difference between banks and the Mafia – banks have better legal-regulatory expertise, but the Mafia understands public opinion.”
“In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes. In DC, they get the sophisticated implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations.”
“In politics, we face the choice between warmongering, nation-state loving, big business agents on the one hand, and risk-blind, top-down, epistemic, arrogant big servants of large employers on the other. But we have a choice.”
“English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).”
If he had to choose the lesser of the two evils – big government or big corporations – which would it be?
“Both are the enemies of progress,” Taleb says.
“Big corporations – their job is to suck up resources for themselves. I came to that conclusion after reading Marx. I’m not a Marxist, but I realized that large corporations are just in cahoots with big government.”
“When I was debating the chairperson of Pepsico, her sole argument was – I employ 600,000 people. 600,000 people will be unemployed if I don’t sell people diabetes causing drinks.”
“The second problem is – you are going to be fragile when you employ 600,000. And the society will pay the price of your fragility.”
“The chairperson of Pepsico will have a free option. They know they can’t go bust. They know that society will prevent them from going bust.”
If Taleb doesn’t like big corporations or big government, then what does he like?
Artisans.
Small business.
Like the old market in Lebanon – where he was born.
“I shock people when I say the most stable system is an artisan style system,” Taleb says. “That’s the only one that doesn’t blow up. The world now has become too complex.”
“It’s the Levantine system of trade and commerce. No debt. And small size. That is the most robust. These people survive much longer.”
He says big corporations should never be bailed out.
Ever.
Taleb says that Ronald Reagan started it.
“This is why I get along with Ralph Nader,” Taleb says. “Nader was the first to say that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is cosmetic.”
“It is Ronald Reagan who bailed out the banks in 1983 and started this whole process.”
Reagan of the Milton Friedman free market philosophy?
“Exactly,” Taleb said. “There is something about governments that will be susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists to bailout the big corporations.”
“Had Reagan not bailed out Citibank in 1983, we would not be here.”
Where would we be?
“If the government didn’t bail out Detroit and the banks, we would have a better Detroit and better banks. Smaller and more competitive companies.”
“People forget that much of the growth of companies came from debt building.”
“Small companies are the energetic ones. The energy and innovation comes from small companies in California. And these companies neither go into debt nor do they get bailed out.”
Okay, so government shouldn’t be bailing out the big banks.
But what about cracking down on corporate crime?
“If two adults want to speculate, they should be free to do so, conditional on society not bailing them out,” Taleb says.
“The government should be there to enforce the rule of no socialization of losses. You want to make sure the banks are never big enough to take these risks at the expense of society.”
“The rule is as follows – if you want a bailout, you are under our regulation. And we want you small. And we don’t want you to take speculative risks. In other words, you are a utility. And you obey our rules.”
“If you are not to be bailed out, then you can do what you want, providing that you don’t harm the public.”
But Nader’s argument is that you need a strong central government to counteract big corporate power. And that of course is what corporate crime enforcement is about. You need to try and control the abuses of large corporations – to keep them in line.
“I don’t mind the idea,” Taleb says. “But I prefer to let the system destroy the corporation before it becomes so big.”
“It’s good to think about it this way – once a corporation becomes so big, it’s going to bully the public. So, you need a big public to stand against it. But a robust world is one composed of very robust cities – not city states necessarily – but strong cities and municipalities – and very strong small companies.”
Taleb says – do not give children dynamite sticks, even if they come with a warning label.
And he makes a policy recommendation in this regard – ban complex financial instruments because nobody understands them.
“I don’t understand them,” Taleb says. “And I wrote a text book in 1987 about them. The motivation behind these instruments is regulation. Shocking but true. Regulation had the effect of having people skirt the regulation, hire an expensive lawyer, and design a complex product to get around the regulation.”
But Taleb would impose a regulation to ban them?
“I said that a product that has been traded for a long time should be traded. But a product that requires mathematical methods should not be. So, vanilla options have been traded on exchanges for hundreds of years – since Amsterdam in the 17th century – they can be traded.”
“Stocks can be traded.”
“But these complex products have no reason to exist other than to skirt regulations. They don’t need to be there. People don’t understand them. And they are designed to take advantage of people’s mental biases and misunderstandings of some classes of risk.”
But doesn’t it require big government to ban complex financial instruments?
“The government has been doing everything but what they are supposed to do. Financial regulation did nothing but help Goldman Sachs.”
But that’s because that’s how they set it up. It didn’t have to be that way.
“It was a 5,000 page law,” Taleb says. “We could write a one page law – captain goes down with the ship. Bridge engineer sleeps under the bridge. Personal liability.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Nassim Taleb, see 25 Corporate Crime Reporter 1(12), January 3, 2011, print edition only.]
Corporate Crime Reporter 1209 National Press Bldg. Washington, D.C. 20045
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/aboutccr.html
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2011/03/wisconsin-needs-a-general-strike-not-recalls-via-rigged-e-voting-systems/
Wisconsin needs a GENERAL STRIKE, not “recalls” via rigged e-voting systems
From Victor Provenzano:
Only an immediate and ongoing general strike in Wisconsin and, to be even more effective, a “rolling” general strike (a one day strike moving from state to state) in the other states that are contemplating similar measures can possibly put an end to this.
……
Because look at next step of right wing authoritarians:
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/03/michigan-budget-would-let-republicans-dis-incorporate-whole-cities-dismiss-elected-officials/
Michigan Republicans seek power to dis-incorporate whole cities, dismiss elected official
By Stephen C. Webster
Republicans in Michigan have come up with a revolutionary solution to the state’s growing budget crisis: claim the right to auction off entire municipal entities, like cities, counties, school districts and water systems.
In a new bill being pushed by Governor Rick Snyder (R), the governor, or a company hired by the governor, would have the power to declare municipal entities insolvent. Amid the fiscal emergency, the governor or the governor’s agent would then be empowered to appoint an emergency manager to oversee all financial matters.
Under language in the bill, that individual would be able to cancel any and all contracts — including collective bargaining rights for unions — and outright dis-incorporate whole cities, dismissing lawfully elected officials in the process.
In short, “they want a corporate monopoly state,” author Naomi Klein explained during an appearance on Wednesday’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC.
Re the administration being “plagued by broken servicers”:
Yeah, that’ll happen when you intentionally put them in charge in the first place.
But why should anybody call it a “plague” from the adminstration’s point of view?
Re the imperial presidency:
Here’s a brief explanation. The executive branch was always bound to be predominant where it came to an imperial foreign policy.
By the mid-20th century, foreign policy was purely the servant of global capitalism. On behalf of this it became completely imperialistic and predatory.
Meanwhile, under neoliberalism the goal of domestic policy was to gut all public interest policy and turn the government into nothing but corporate bagman and goon. Policymakers came to regard the very idea of “domestic policy” with contempt, and look at it in the same imperialistic foreign policy way that they looked at their predations in the Global South.
So when it came time to bring to the home country the worst depredations of globalization, it was natural to envision this as just another foreign conquest. The US corporate/government nexus truly does see itself as waging war on the American people, in the exact same way the Stalin regime saw itself as at war with the peasantry.
So it was natural (given the premise) that if “domestic” government policy was going to be carried out with the same mindset and in the same way as predatory foreign policy, then we’d see the same ascendancy of the executive branch in domestic affairs as we saw in foreign affairs. And so it has been.
So it follows that a new Constitutional Convention must greatly curb executive power, or better yet assert state and local power in explicit supercession of the previous Articles.
Re gadget security:
“If my company wants me to use this for work, and that entails my transmitting important data, if there are any security issues, they must have thought about it and any resulting problems are their problem.”
That’s a good example of the Work-to-Rule attitude we should all have in every interaction with big business and government.
Imagine if we all purged all filthy anarchist behaviors from those interactions and engaged only in capitalist behaviors. The system would collapse in a day.
“Posner and Vermeule belong to the school of legal realism, now dominant in law schools.”
Its when I read lines like this that I know our ship is sinking and will not stop.
The faux “realism” these coddled law school cultures purvey and imbibe is full of decadent detachment from the things that made this country great — when we still believed in notions of personal responsibility and the consent of the governed, the social contract etc. etc. What’s pathetic is that I thought we all went through that phase where we start to look hard at the world and see all its awfulness (maybe read too much Nietzsche or something); and we decide for a year or so that nothing is real, nothing matters truly. Then we land back on earth and realize that of course things matter — they matter because we do care about our families and friends, and don’t want to live in a cesspool of corruption and decadence. In short, we hopefully grow the fuck up and take a stand. But these types, they look at us as if we are suckers believing in fairy tales and they are stronger than us sentimentalists for seeing “the truth”. In short they never grew up and decided that things like love and principle actually mean something. They’re still playing with Nietzsche, who despite his much greater sophistication, isn’t much less juvenile than Ayn Rand herself. These technocratic careerist torture apologists — our democratic elite — have much more in common with the dumb-ass John Galters than they’d ever care to admit. Both stances are juvenile and completely amoral. They don’t take the world on its terms, although they claim that is all they are doing. The problem is they wouldn’t know the real world if it was right under their feet.
Its the inevitable moral and cultural malaise of a culture in self-imposed decline. And when has one of those ever turned itself around?
I think Posner is a Keynesian now.
what is difficult to understand is why apple cannot safeguard its users security to the same extend it safeguards its own platform from reverse engineering. apple should have state of the art security infrastructure, but instead has dumb user security, as in, “i’m too dumb to know or care about security.”
i’m sure the spooks are pleased.
Re: “Enough” James Kwak
James Kwak said: “But ultimately I agree with Heller. It is a great thing to have ‘enough,’ and to know you have enough. And that is a feeling that for some people, apparently, no amount of money can buy.”
What do psychopaths want? What are their motivations?
Hare: They want many of the same basic things that the rest of us want, but, in addition, have an inordinate need for power, prestige, wealth, and so forth. They differ from most of us in terms of how much they “need,” their sense of entitlement to whatever they want, and the means with which they are willing to achieve their ends. They also differ dramatically from others in the communal nature of their needs and goals. That is, the sense of altruism, concern for the welfare of family, friends, and society, and the social rules, expectations, and reciprocity that guide most people are irrelevant to psychopaths. They operate according to their own self-serving principle: look out for number 1, no matter what the cost to others, and without guilt or remorse.
▬Identifying Psychopathic Fraudsters: These Men Know ‘Snakes in Suits’—-Interview with Dr. Robert D. Hare and Dr. Paul Babiak
yves, those pop-up windows that appear when one hovers over your links are a real pain in the ass…
Don’t bother with what Larry says but listen closely to what the women on the right say after. WTF.
Are we not paying much attention to the Middle East?
It’s time for dictators to play rough when people are busy with other things.
Two wildly incorrect assumptions about Larry Kudlow are that his comment was a mistake and that he has a mind, albeit even an unconscious one.
re: A Freudian slip is a verbal or memory mistake that is believed to be linked to the unconscious mind
Where did the fox get those designer leggings? Not another animal, I hope.
Sometimes I wonder if progressives have any recognition of external reality or are just constantly responding to internal mental stimuli. Justifying Progressive Tax Rates (Mike Kimel, Angry Bear)seeks to vindicate what has hardly been questioned since the great Satan, Ronald Reagan, brought to fruition the 60s counter culture movement of the Young Americans for Freedom. Even the so called flat tax envisions people with larger incomes paying a larger amount. A real flat tax would be a equal fixed tax amount levied on each adult person, say 5K per individual.
It would be nice if some progressives would ask at what point does the progressive income tax just become a mechanism for selling (or leasing) the government to the plutocracy. Just as a heuristic device at least? As an explanation of the economic policies of the Clinton administration perhaps?
Amazing that someone who lumps a hugely disparate group of people together and simply labels them, in the fashion of the day, as “progressives” can, without shame, accuse *others* of having trouble with external reality.
What a confusing sequence of words you have constructed. I mean, seriously, could you please re-read your comment? If you still stand by it, I can conclusively label your intellect as extremely limited.
In any event, all these stunted rhetorical tricks that Fox has given you (“Progressives”, “Great Satan”) do not conceal your complete incoherence on this topic. Seriously, plutocracy caused by *progressive tax advocates*!!! It’s like saying you’re against terrorism but a staunch IRA supporter. It’s literally insane. I mean, there is no softer word for it.
In any event, I’ll be brief about my view on the actual subject at hand. I believe we live in Extremistan. I believe that relative consumption is important. I believe that most attempts at governing require the consent of the governed. It is completely rational for a member of the governed to support and vote for (or use most means to make) policies that tend to reduce relative consumption in Extremistan by having a progressive income tax. I think most people agree with me. We’ll see. [Full D: I’m in the top income bracket]
Larry Kudlow Devalues Human Life With Japan Earthquake Freudian Slip
In response to news “… the Dow is trading in positive territory …,” Larry says: the human toll here
looks to be much worse than the economical toll and we can be grateful for that …”
That isn’t a Freudian slip. Would that it were. Larry Kudlow speaks for an entire class of American people; that class being courted politically for whom the stock market is manipulated. Call it the investor class -call it the middle class. Kudlow speaks for a class of people who do not care how, only that the stock market appears sound.
hum.. hum… Peggy Noonan, has a Crisis of Loyalty with her readers; specially with Rupert Murdoch… Peggy Noonan without conscience, lacks her brains to know that Ronald H. Runsfeld has a erratic and irrational Criminal Mind. Documents from WikiLeaks show that Rumsfeld’s order and approved the abuses at ABU GHRAIB… I call him the “The American Hitler” but you are not different then him: a) You bought his book… b) Accusing Osama Bin Laden, as the Mastermind of September Eleven… My question to you… How do you know?… You can question my “Ex-good friend” Barack if… Al-Qaeda is Our United States Government.
Regarding the ‘great scandal’… of the Bush era Warrrrs… Peggy were you had been… thi’s Our Evil Democracy at Work
… Our Criminal Government does not bring it’s Criminals to Justice!!!… We… We.. The Poor,Humble,Gullible,Stupid Crazy Hard Working Americans failed to bring all this Criminal Clowns like: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Colin Powell, “Head Hunter” Condi Rice, Bush and all the rest before the ICC (International Criminal Court) for Crimes of War and you too. Rewrite Bad History is Shameful.
“mass protest…”
Election 2010 was a mass protest against runaway government spending and higher taxation. While that doesn’t make dramatic pictures for the mainstream moron media to tout on the 6pm news, it’s the only protest that counts.
It’s the quiet revolution of the thoroughly fed up.
A more perfect example of confirmation bias one would have to struggle to find.
Amazing how the only thing that “counts” is the one recent event with which you most agreed.
I’m sure you felt the same way in 2008.
And in any event, the idea that any one election, in which a small portion of the population participated, has the kind of authority you presume it to is preposterous.
How people can continue to embarrass themselves with such rich and unintentional parody never ceases to amaze me.
Absolutely the 2008 was a mass protest against Bush. And in their desperation to repudiate Bush, people did not closely examine the quality of the candidates they ultimately selected (in either party).
But you have only to look at various polls to see the massive shift in public opinion re government. Especially the independent voters. The election wasn’t an illusion.
And if you want to talk about “small portion of the population,” I think unruly protesting union members would qualify. Michael Moore says this is war. So be it. Guess who wins? Those who are tired of paying large bills for a shoddy government product. Only 39% of Wisconsin 8th-graders proficient in math. And in my own state, 50% of high school grads going on to college need remedial classes.
Bank of America document dump tomorrow @anonleaks
Midnight EST actually.
Heads up to Yves…it’s gonna be a race in blogland to see who can blog on this first.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/operationleaks-ex-bank-america-employee-can-prove-mortgage-fraud
Yves, would you paste a link to your old RMB post?
I’m in dire need of ammo to shut someone up.
Carrick
You’re making too much of a kurfuffle over Kudlow’s obvious slip of the tongue.