By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
2016
[Readers, I’ll beef up this section a bit shortly! –lambert]
Policy
Sanders on Pope Francis: “I think the fundamental critique he is making of the hyper-capitalist society that we are seeing globally is something that is striking a strong resonance in the hearts of many of the progressive members of the Congress, and we applaud him very much” [Raw Story].
Trump on God: [Christian Broadcasting Network], and no, I’m not making this up:
Well I say God is the ultimate. You know you look at this? Here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this? I bought it fifteen years ago. I made one of the great deals they say ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That’s what I want to do for the country. Make great deals. We have to, we have to bring it back, but God is the ultimate. I mean God created this (points to his golf course and nature surrounding it), and here’s the Pacific Ocean right behind us. So nobody, no thing, no there’s nothing like God.
Frankly, I prefer this answer to what I’d get from Huckabee, Kasich, Cruz, etc. Or Clinton. Or Biden, if I may intrude on his very personal grief-milking process for a moment.
UPDATE “Jeb Bush pledged Tuesday to get rid of the FCC’s net neutrality rules if he were elected president.” [Daily Dot].
Clinton finally opposes Keystone Pipeline [Reuters].
UPDATE Abortion: “Analyses of baseline data from the current study illustrated the importance of differentiating negative emotions from decision regret. Although one-quarter of women experienced primarily negative emotions over one week post-abortion, 95% still felt that the abortion was the right decision” [PLOS One].
The Voters
CNN poll: “Female voters’ support for the first-time candidate dropped 12 percentage points among likely GOP voters after last week’s CNN debate, according to a CNN/ORC poll conducted Sept. 17-19. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3%” [Wall Street Journal, “Many Republican Women Have Second Thoughts About Donald Trump”].
The Trail
“On Stephen Colbert’s new “Late Show,” Sanders willingly participated in a lightning-round Q&A on the issues, like Africa (he’s for it) and kissing on a first date (sometimes). The skit was hilarious thanks to Sanders’s dry delivery and stern face” [WaPo].
Sanders on his persona: “Me, grouchy?” [AP].
Bloomberg poll: “Clinton, once the prohibitive front-runner, is now the top choice of 33 percent of registered Democrats and those who lean Democrat, the poll shows. Biden places second with 25 percent and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is at 24 percent” [Bloomberg]. Still waiting for an answer on why Biden should run, other than the old punchline “Because he can.” Where’s Roger Mudd when we need him?
UPDATE Bloomberg poll: “It’s like a meditative chant: ‘Early polls are not predictive. Early polls are not predictive. Early polls are not predictive.’ [WaPo]. But: “Or so harried Clinton staffers assure their Brooklyn Starbucks baristas. ‘Just an early poll,’ they say, peeking under the lid to ensure that they received the right amount of soy milk. But those assurances are really meant for themselves.” Ouch!
UPDATE Nobody in Clinton’s inner circle knew how to properly erase data from a computer? [New York Times, “Investigators Find Emails Hillary Clinton Said Were Erased”]. “F.B.I. investigators have recovered work-related and personal emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton said had been deleted from the server that housed the personal account she used exclusively when she was secretary of state, according to two government officials.” No worries. I’m sure there’s nothing about money laundering through the Clinton Foundation in there, and if there were, the Benghazi-addled Republicans wouldn’t look for it, and if they found it, they couldn’t explain it. Oh, for the days of Karl Rove, when the Republicans knew how to do more than hyperventilate, and could really gin up a scandal!
Walker debacle: [Former staffer Liz Mair] laid the majority of the blame on poor advice from campaign advisers who didn’t know Walker well and didn’t help him play to his political strengths” [Yahoo News]. Entertaining tweetstorm!
Trump’s cease and desist letter to Club for Growth (!), annotated [WaPo].
UPDATE Fiorina on Clinton: “And so I never make a personal comment about Hillary Clinton — my criticism of her is fact-based, based on her actions and track record. And that is fair game” [The Hill]. Putting “Fact-based” aside, I’m glad to see that Fiorina understands that personal criticisms should be deployed by campaign surrogates, and not by candidates themselves.
UPDATE Fiorina will fade as she faces scrutiny, i.e. oppo [Slate]. “Already, BuzzFeed reports she was paid $48,000 for a speech to a bank that violated U.S. sanctions on Iran, and Bloomberg View reports that Fiorina’s HP sold ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of products to Iran through a foreign subsidiary, despite strict U.S. export sanctions.'”
Stats
MBA Mortgage Applications, week of September 18, 2015: “Rate declines tied to last week’s post-FOMC surge into the Treasury market likely drove prospective home buyers and existing home borrowers into the mortgage market” [Econoday]. “Today’s report is pointing to a pickup for housing sales and is especially notable for how closely borrowers are reacting to FOMC activity.” Hmm. “How closely borrowers are reacting.” I wonder if there’s a more vivid turn of phrase for that.
PMI Manufacturing Index Flash, September 2015: “Growth in Markit’s manufacturing sample remains as slow as it’s been since October 2013” [Econoday]. “Growth in new orders is the slowest since January with businesses citing caution among customers and subdued business conditions.”
“The Federal Reserve Wednesday cleared the way for all banks to offer same-day transaction settlement a year from now but decided against forcing banks to provide less expensive immediacy which will remain the domain of credit card firms. [Market News].
Gaia
“What Should a Journalist Call Someone Who Doesn’t Think Climate Change Is Real?” [National Journal]. Dicussion of changes to the AP Style Guide. Looks like a classic case of working the refs, to me.
Water
Ray’s and Stark Bar, “a small upscale restaurant in the courtyard of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA),” recently introduced “a sleek, 40-page water menu” (pdf) [Nautilus]. In the midst of a massive drought. Maybe I should have filed this under guillotine watch.
Unintended consequences of California water conservation: “Sanitation districts are yanking tree roots out of manholes and stepping up maintenance on their pipes to prevent corrosion and the spread of odors. And when people use less potable water, officials say, there’s less wastewater available to recycle” [Los Angeles Times]. “Water suppliers, meanwhile, say the dramatic decrease in consumption has created multimillion-dollar revenue shortfalls.”
“The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is in talks with Los Angeles County sanitation districts about developing what could be one of the largest recycled water programs in the world” [Los Angeles Times].
“[T]he driest places on earth may be hiding massive water reserves which serve as enormous liquid carbon sinks” [Inhabitat]. “[D]eep beneath [Taklimakan, China’s biggest desert,] lies a hidden ‘ocean’ that is thought to contain up to ten times more water than all the Great Lakes combined, storing more carbon than all the plants on the planet put together.” What could go wrong?
Black Injustice Tipping Point
Post-#Ferguson reform push turns into ka-ching for body cams. [Reveal, back in May]. And taser data in the cloud!
Health Care
“Employers Cutting Health Benefits in Preparation for Obamacare’s ‘Cadillac’ Tax” [National Journal]. NC readers knew this was coming.
“Third ACA sign-up period to focus on 10.5 million uninsured Americans” [WaPo]. What a record of failure, when Medicare was rolled out in a year, back in the days of punchcards, when computers were steam-driven, and programmers used crude stone tools. It would be a farce if people weren’t suffering and dying because of it.
Corruption
Travis Kalanick: Glibertarian rent boy [Fast Company]. A very ugly story that shows how venture capital in the Valley really works. Trav should get together with Dave.
“Volkswagen’s intentional fraud resulted in an extra 1,000,000 metric tons of air pollution being spewed into the skies over America; if they’d extended the con to Europe (where there are far more diesels), it would have been orders of magnitude worse” [Boing Boing]. ” It’s an almost unimaginably depraved act, and it’s hard to believe that VW is the only company that tried this tactic — after all, it produced some pretty sweet profits.” And:
There’s only one remedy: after the C-suite has been led away in handcuffs, after the fines have been paid, kill the company. Don’t let “too big to fail” be a license to destroy the planet. Break up its assets, have a receiver or special master apportion them to firms that are obligated to keep the maintenance and parts stream going, and wipe out the shareholders.
Do that and the next day, every institutional shareholder in every car company in the world will order fine-toothed audits of all manufacturing and firmware practices, with disclosure and remediation, along with termination for any exec complicit in similar cons.
Yes, I support the corporate death penalty. I finally decided to file this under Corruption, but in a neat illustration of how categories overlap, I could well have filed it under Gaia, or (because of how the deaths are, no doubt, distributed) under Class Warfare.
“[T]he White House now faces a first test of its recent directive instructing prosecutors to not merely target whole companies suspected of wrongdoing but to also focus their sights on individual executives at those firms. That shift — enshrined in a Justice Department memo — was issued only days before the EPA said Volkswagen violated federal environmental laws.” [International Business Times]. “Enshrined.” Pass the popcorn.
“The inquiry [into Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib], being run by a unit of the Justice Department that investigates international corruption, is focused on properties in the United States that were purchased in recent years by shell companies that belong to the prime minister’s stepson as well as other real estate connected to a close family friend” [New York Times]. Hardly credible. I mean, that would imply that New York real estate is being used for money laundering by a class of post- and transnational squillionaire crooks. Garcon, more popcorn!
Class Warfare
“Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession” [Pew Research].
News of the Wired
“Baseball, Linguistics Legend Yogi Berra Dies at Age 90” [Slate]. Not really “linguistics,” Slate. Sheesh.
“The Real Roots of Those Famous Yogi Berra Quotes” [New York Times].
“5.6 Million Fingerprints Stolen in OPM Breach” [National Journal]. Well, so much for biometric data as a personal identifier.
Handedness is not random, geographically [WaPo]. And Maine is super left-handed, for some reason.
A look at NeoKylin, the OS the Chinese government wants to replace Windows ([sob. If only we could!] [Quartz]. It looks a lot like Windows, but “offers a Unix terminal, a telltale feature of a Linux system.”
“Despite the hype, DNA testing may not reveal as much about yourself as you would hope” [Long and Short]. I’m not requesting that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck pick up the courtesy phone. At the same time, it seems reasonable that there are more ways for organisms to display and transmit adaptability across generations than DNA.
“Exclusive: Uber shakes up real estate market with massive purchase of Oakland’s former Sears building” [San Francisco Business Journal].
“Meanwhile, the city has had some of the fastest-rising residential rents in the country with paltry construction of market-rate housing. Major residential and hotel projects still sit in the city’s pipeline, and real estate insiders have reported that investors are still lukewarm about committing equity to Oakland projects. The presence of a globally known technology company will change that, Todd Vitzthum, a broker for Cushman & Wakefield, said last week.
So it will be interesting to see what non-gentrified Oakland thinks of all this.
“The rise, and rise, of literary annotation” [The New Republic]. As readers know, I’m a huge fan of annotation. The annotation business model would be: (a) stickiness, as readers stay longer to click the notes, and add notes themselves (perhaps), and (b) serving ads in the annoation popups.
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant (Adrian):
Adrian writes that this bougainvillea was from an exhibition: “All the plants Frida Kahlo had included in her paintings and which she grew herself at the Casa Azul.”
If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. Winter is coming, I need to fix my laptop, and I need to keep my server up, too.
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I can hardly wait for Donald Trump to write something like “Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy and the Art of the Deal”.
Re: VW
Someone else here has likely already made this observation, but I’ll throw it out just in case. I think the whole VW scandal would make a nice talking point for throwing more sand in the gears of the TPP/TTIP/TISA.
Just imagine if this story broke in 2018 we’ve got TISA with the “investor state dispute settlement” framework in place.
1. VW fined by EPA, stock price crashes 30%
2. VW countersues under ISDS for lost profits, damages and fines
3. Suit decided by corporate lawyers outside the US legal system.
4. VW wins – sorry EPA, you’re going to have to pay up.
Great Aussie ad against TTIP.ETC. (did I see it here first or….where??) —
http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2015/09/nine-recoils-as-getup-nails-tpp/
Oh, it was banned by one TV station Down Under. Heh.
You might have seen the ad here, last week.
I’d love to see that same ad template used in the US. Maybe show a hapless VW owner getting smacked twice with bad news in the mail – once with the recall notice and lost resale value, then twice when the tax bill comes to pay off VW through ISDS.
BTW here is a little snippet I found on politico on next weeks TPP meeting down here:
Read more: http://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-trade/2015/09/pro-trade-morning-trade-behsudi-210344#ixzz3maq2fUus
this is the key part. if i were a regulator, i would look for any other company that cheated in the same way starting with the biggest and go after them hard.
FWIW, VW CEO has resigned. Should be on just about every major news service by now’
I met Yogi Berra at the barbership we frequented in Montclair New Jersey when I was a kid. I had no idea who he was but my dad sure did. We watched sports on TV while waiting our turn in the chair. No memorable quotes I’m afraid, but I remember he was a very nice man.
I have to think that once the lawyers get a hold of this anyone who has coughed next to a VW is going to be drafted. Bankruptcy protection will be used to shield the corporations assets. This is going to be similar to the tobacco settlement. 1 million metric tons? That is 40 lbs of soot for every one of us!
The leader of over a billion people is visiting the U.S. today. The Pope is here too. I broke my leg during a papal visit in 1995 (my parents were in the crowd at Camden Yards), so I’m always a bit nervous whenever the Pope is around.
The word about the Chinese leader is that he’s sent at least three ships through the Suez Canal on their way to Syria.
Why go that way??
Re: HRC’s emails. After 30+ years of Clinton scandals (real and imagined-by-RW-conspirators) one would have thought that Hill and Bill with all their money and experience would know that deleting files on a computer has to be done carefully. What the hell was Mr IT Guy doing for them? Does nobody in their circle have any basic IT competence?
Can’t we have a leading candidate who isn’t so demonstrably incompetent in so many ways? (Not to mention dishonest.)
Best way to delete files from a disk drive is with a hammer.
Then the files can be used by no person, for malign purposes…or was using them for malign purposes part of the plan?
One has to explore all possibilities…
Better still is to disassemble the drive, remove the platters and pc board, grind them down to nothing with a fine sanding disc a la GCHQ at the Guardian, and mix said nothing with your household dust or expired milk. As we saw on Breaking Bad, HF works well too, given proper respect.
In CitiGroup we’d put 4 drives at a time in a degaussing machine about the size of a fridge laid on its side. Press the button and a whine like a jet engine would build up before “Boof!” and the machine would jump a few mils off the floor. The platters inside were smashed to pieces. After 2 years of doing that I found the instruction manual that explicitly warned to stand at least 2 meters away after pressing the initiate button. And no, I don’t have any children…
Why should Biden run? How about why he shouldn’t? He shouldn’t because more than any other person, he is responsible for student loan debt not being dischargeable in bankruptcy. In fact, that whole damned bankruptcy bill was his to push through, and he pushed hard for over a decade. Because it was such a bad bill, and everyone knew it.
And let’s not forget, Biden = Delaware, and if you’re feeling a bit touchy about corporations these days, Delaware is where most of them are incorporated. Biden is a slave to corporations and everything about them, because that’s what you have to be if you’re going to be a senator from Delaware. Hillary may be more obvious, but no one is more beholden to the corporate form than Joe Biden.
There’s much more than just that against Biden. Biden IS the DMCA, deeply in the pocket of the MPAA and RIAA. Biden wrote the core of the PATRIOT Act in 1995 even before the Oklahoma City bombing (and bragged after the PATRIOT Act passed about how it was based on HIS original anti-terror bill). Biden actually supports abstinence only sex “education”. He is a VERY big reason for the on-going “War on Drugs”. He authored much of current monstrous anti-crime bills, even bragging about how many “new death penalties” there were as a result.
Biden is a monster. Biden is NOT a better option to Hillary.
OTOH, his demonstrably more horrifying record would make him a far more easily shredded opponent for Sanders, provided Sanders ever gins up the guts to do some oppo. If Biden can muscle Clinton out of the race, Sanders can shred him on his leftist bona fides. If Biden merely splits the establishment vote, then when Clinton unloads on him, he tanks but she looks like a “negative” politician while Sanders floats above it. Biden entering the race doesn’t guarantee Sanders a win or Clinton a loss by a long shot, but it may be the most likely scenario.
But he rides the train to work! Isn’t he folksy?! Yaaargh, he lost a child, (let’s ignore all the children he has killed for his support of U.S. imperialism; whether Yemeni children or soldiers suffering ptsd, they are all someone’s children).
Look, he said a funny racist joke instead of a mean one. He apologized for calling Obama a nice “clean” young man.
If this Biden thing is a ploy to make Hillary seem better, it’s working on me anyway.
Maybe Palin made McCain look better in a theoretical kinda way.. but objectively they were both awful.
Actually I think Clinton makes Biden look better, as I sit here typing. Say they are both an equally fckd up a choice on policy, the Clinton legacy thing is more of an existential threat to our haggard democracy. Like the Team Bush.
Why is it always “Team Bush” or the “Bush Dynasty?” Why not something more accurate, like “Bush League?”
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bush+league&page=2
I know, too hard to move the Narrative even an iota, except in case of Going Viral…
Sounds like “The Many Crimes of ‘Nice Guy’ Joe Biden” might be a good working title. I didn’t know about DMCA, or his abstinence policies. No wonder the Beltway finds him so loveable. This makes Clinton look good.
He’s utterly without conviction. He supports abstinence only education in the US, but co sponsored a bill to drop Bush’s rule that mandated 1/3 of US aid funds to African HIV/AIDS organizations go to abstinence only organizations. Why support contraception in Africa but not the US? A pragmatic response to the HIV epidemic? Perhaps, but it seems just as likely it was politically attractive to make him look more anti-Bush than he was.
He voted against invading Iraq under 1st Bush, but then supported Clinton’s various bombings and attacks on Iraq and said he supported regime change there. Then he voted for the 2003 invasion, then backtracked and said it was mistake, but only because Bush “mishandled” the invasion.
He will say or do whatever seems convenient at the moment, and count on the public’s short memory to cover for his hypocrisy.
Remember that groaf = productivity gains + population gains. It’s the upper classes’ soi-disant “jawb” to manage the production, consumption and reproduction of the working-class. Party doesn’t matter. Preserving the Forms does.
Hillary’s rock bottom bastion of support?
How can the author yammer on for dozens of paragraphs without even addressing long-standing rumors that Hillary herself is a closeted gay person? Guess the libel lawyers told him, ‘Don’t go there, kid.’
It doesn’t really matter whether she is or not. The aristocracy does not f— pigs, as far as your world is concerned, and their world is none of your concern.
I keep saying that American life is just a lifelong, non-consensual BDSM scene run by arrested-development extraverts who had their sense of “enough” surgically removed at birth. When I was a young schoolboy, I loved being correct. Now I hate it.
When I was a young schoolboy, I loved being correct(ed)?. ed.
sorry
could…not… help…myself.
I’m beyond bemused. Nobody I know feels that way about Hillary. And I think the author’s reflections on the meaning of sexual roles are so cliche that they could be on Hallmark cards.
Now, topping Marco Rubio — that’s another story.
I think the author has more issues than the T-shirt wearer, frankly.
I was offended by the article. Nasty stuff that I wish would stop.
yogi linguistically constantly flipped the bird at the doperate media he had to interact with in New York…his yogi-isms seemed to be a reaction to stupid questions and boring corporate events. He was the king of snark…the media did not know if he was laughing “at them” or saying something to laugh about…He was the ultimate eye roller who knew people would write him a check to stand there and say something…
his greatest on field accomplishment to me was his 10 triples in his first full season of baseball…
he was the last of the short guys who was allowed to play baseball…with him went an era of the average american making good…rest in peace old man…
The Average American is above average.
And so was Yogi.
He seems such an institution that his name is a set expression ( ie. Colloquialism):
Yogi Berra.
Yogi Berra was a cunning linguist, but only by accident.
That’s astonishing, how something like that could even happen. It really makes you wonder what he was trying to do.
boowhahahahahahahaahahhah!!!! sorry
Agreed, me thinks just the way his brain happened to be wired.
Apparently he was very good at what he did for a living. I’m guess’in he would have been a hoot “to have a beer with” and talk abt sht having nothing to do w/ baseball.
Oy – you hit that one outta the ballpark ;-)
“I never said most of the things I said.”
-Yogi
““[T]he White House now faces a first test of its recent directive instructing prosecutors to not merely target whole companies suspected of wrongdoing but to also focus their sights on individual executives at those firms.”
I bet Lucy will let Charlie Brown kick the football this time!
On “The Long and Short”;
Can I tell you how much I hate science journalists? They are not scientists, they are writers. Always keep that in mind.
First, like the last article you linked to, he makes no distinction between mutations and polymorphisms, well he kind of does. Up until recently all researchers looked for was mutations because they had no idea the nutrient-gene (nutritional genomics) connection that has more to do with polymorphisms than mutations.
The genetic-nutrition studies they will have to do to PROVE the links between certain genes and symptoms of disease would have to be so huge and complicated they are probably no going to happen. Why? Because there will be no drugs to patent from it and the NIH pretty much cut all their funding for these types of studies. There are people studying this however, one is Dr. Steven Zeisel of the University of North Carolina.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKEYWhpEQVU
The writer also says that knowing your genome is “not a very useful tool for self-enlightenment.” and we need some sort of huge database to help sort it out.
Bullshit.
By knowing my genome, and how Nutrigenomics works, I ended my lifelong disabling OCD and anxiety as well as a host of other auto-immune disorders. And by disabling I mean I was on disability and on several medications. I am better now and I take zero medications. I am not the only one, there are several of us not waiting for the databases and doctors and using the insight of our genome to change out health right now.
“By knowing my genome, and how Nutrigenomics works, I ended my lifelong disabling OCD and anxiety as well as a host of other auto-immune disorders.”
By “knowing my genome”, are you saying you got deep sequenced, or you got SNP genotyped at some markers, or what?
I have my genome from 23andme which I ran though a site called Promethease and look for SNPs in my raw data as well.
Did one of those sites give you nutritional recommendations on the basis of your SNP profile?
Nope. Had to figure most of it out myself, but I have been studying nutrition with a focus on how it effects the nervous system for the last 10 years or so.
The secret is only using cofactors to increase enzyme activity of specific genes.
I have a blog, just started it so not much is there:
https://nutrigenomicinsights.wordpress.com/
Well, the Justice (sic) Department has two things going for it when thinking about prosecuting VW executives. First, they’re not bankers, so that gives them some clearance. Second, they’re likely a lot of foreigners. That’s got to make them feel better. But the key question may be has Lynch’s former law firm had VW as a client? If not, we may actually get a perp walk!
Re: Oakland real estate “investors are still lukewarm about committing equity to Oakland projects”, Let’s not forget that the Oakland PD has a long-standing reputation for extreme violence, and the citizens on that side of the Bay have a reputation for getting very uppity over this. In that kind of a market, business real estate values can fall very quickly and very sharply. Maybe investors there would simply rather go some place where the cops don’t act like a chapter of the Klan, or at least insist that others shoulder the risk of falling market prices? Lousy cops earn a city a lot more than just a local chapter of #BlackLivesMatter.
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/microsoft-using-linux-run-cloud/
Even ms runs Linux
Funny – though MS has actually been running Linux in various services for a long time due to acquisitions. No one is safe from the penguin.
More on Oakland, how sad.
http://www.thenation.com/article/oakland-residents-respond-as-the-largest-police-training-in-the-world-invades/
Uber will fit in nicely.
Ah Uber uber alles?
Mondoweiss on Sanders: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/sanders-leftwing-economic. The comments are more important than the article, notably the first one, by “ablahchick”, and “joemowrey”, a little ways down in response to her.
These are Palestinian supporters, so they’re not thrilled with Sanders. Caveat: Americans rarely vote on foreign affairs, unless there are too many bodies coming home.
And on “the Voters”: ” “Female voters’ support for the first-time candidate dropped 12 percentage points among likely GOP voters “: Women are the majority. You can’t win an election without them. I’d vote for this as Trump’s fatal flaw.
One thing that keeps cropping up in left-wing criticism of Bernie Sanders is his support for Israel’s attack on Gaza in July 2014. I support Bernie but was troubled by reports of his support for Israel. So I did some independent digging – that is, looking for primary source material and not articles repeating someone else’s assertions.
The claims that Bernie joined 100 senators who gave Israel carte blanche to invade Gaza are based on S. Res. 498.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-resolution/498/text
S. Res. 498 was introduced in the Senate on July 16, 2014, by Lindsey Graham. In all, it had 55 signatures. That number eventually increased to 79. Bernie Sanders was not one of them. So for starters, he DID NOT SIGN a resolution that had the support of more than three-fourths of his colleagues. As most people on this site probably know, resolutions aren’t laws. They are symbolic statements that have no force of the law behind them. No vote is taken on resolutions. Any article claiming that Bernie Sanders “voted” to support Israel is flat out incorrect, although from what I can tell, not many made that error. Most writers assume that he supported the resolution because it passed by “unanimous consent.” Chris Hedges says that Sanders “was one of 100 Senators who stood up like AIPAC wind up dolls and approved Israel’s 51-day slaughter last summer of Palestinians in Gaza.”
From what I read about Senate rules, “unanimous consent” is not what it sounds like. Hedges and others paint a picture of 100 senators sitting behind their desks shouting “aye” or raising their hands or whatever. That was not the case. In fact, the resolution came up for approval four minutes before the Senate adjourned the evening of July 17 for a three-day weekend. Because resolutions don’t require a vote, and there was no debate, members weren’t required to be there. It’s highly unlikely that anyone was in the room other than the presiding officers.
Below is the link to the C-SPAN video of the passage of S. Res. 498. The whole proceeding took less than one minute. Also, I’ve included a link to the Senate procedures, along with the Wikipedia entry on unanimous consent. Although Wikipedia shouldn’t be considered a reliable source, this entry does a pretty good job of making sense of an arcane Senate rule. In essence, a resolution is passed by “unanimous consent” when no one present objects.
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4504165/s-res-498
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-RIDDICK-1992/content-detail.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unanimous_consent
I suppose you could argue that Sanders could have hung around after most of his colleagues had left town and made a speech of moral outrage in front of an empty chamber, but what would that have accomplished? He already registered his objection by not signing H. Res. 498, which was going to pass with or without him.
It’s mystifying why those on the left single out Sanders for being one of 100 senators who sided with Israel. What about the other 99? More to the point, however, he actually was one of the few who didn’t. Moreover, on the “War and Peace” page on his Senate website, there’s a statement blaming both sides but noting that Palestinian deaths from Israeli attacks have been disproportionate and that Israel’s “widespread killing of civilians is completely unacceptable.” It’s not strong enough for those outraged by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, but it’s significant that he was critical at all when the vast majority of his peers gave Israel a free pass.
Many reports claiming that Sanders voted to support Israel also mention that he supported emergency funding two weeks later. This is a reference to H.J. Res. 76. Joint resolutions follow a slightly different procedure than simple resolutions. In this case, there was a roll call vote in the House, but the Senate passed it by “unanimous consent.” Again, there was NO VOTE in the Senate, and members didn’t even have to be present. FWIW, Vermont’s lone representative voted against it.
Facts, meet Narrative, where “everyone knows…”
Thanks for digging. I hope it moves the needle a bit.
Re Biden: Has everyone forgotten about Anita Hill??
I remember it well and couldn’t believe Biden allowed it to happen as the committee chair. Totally disgusting and ranks as his worst ever act.
Time for a Black Panther rebirth in Oakland? A militant tenants’ union perhaps?
re:
Exactly what I believe happened to Pawlenty in 2012 when he tried to out-crazy Michelle Bachmann in the run up to the Iowa straw poll. His strength was that he doesn’t come across as being the hard religious right winger that he really is, and for that reason it seemed to me that he could have been the toughest candidate in the GOP field for Obama to beat. If he’d been able to hang in there he would have been the ideal Stop Romney vehicle after all the other higher profile options crashed and burned, as they did. The out-Bachmann Bachmann tactic played so far away from his strengths that I wondered if the strategist who sent him off on that chase was a mole. A Republican candidate wouldn’t play with a ball that hard, would they? (Cough.)
This is the 2015 equivalent of announcing to the universe that you are a complete doofus who thinks it is smart to let telecoms put their heel on America’s universities, school districts, churches, social organizations, and everyone else and grind us into complete serfdom.
iPhone, Android, or any kind of smartphone? Apparently, Jeb! never heard of it.
Streaming video? Netflix? Amazon Prime? Apparently, Jeb! never heard of them, either.
Google?! Apparently, Jeb!’s not heard of that either…
Web browser? Apparently, a foreign concept for Jeb!
I am almost gleeful at how my (lovely, decent) evangelical kinfolk are going to react to news that Jeb! is going to make it tougher for their church and ministry to offer support services and outreach.
Remind me what year this is again…?!!
Hence a more appropriate categorization for ! and his idiot family, “Bush League.” http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bush+league&page=2
<-Jeb!
With "back button".
Carly: absolute, complete, and total destruction of Carly today on ContraCorner, across her foreign policy and her corporate management, don’t miss it. His writing is better than ever…he fully skewered her with actual facts for a change:
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/clueless-carly-crony-capitalist-war-monger-with-flash-cards/
I’m not surprised that Jeb wants to establish tiered internet services. Why shouldn’t the “haves” get more information than the “have nots”… this will facilitate the game plan of keeping the “have nots” in the dark and providing them with lots of b.s. to keep them happy…
I remember the very end of the Clarence Thomas hearings where all the white male senators sat around and laughed about stapling the Playboy centerpiece to their final tests; to get a better grade, dontchano. Hahahahahaha. It was just disgusting in its blatant misogyny. It really said everything about what happened in those hearings.