Readers, you get an extra ration of links because there are two cross-posts. –lambert
Horseback Hero: Eagle Point rancher lassos alleged bicycle thief Mail Tribune. Let’s give that local reporter some clicks!
The cat guardians of Singapore BBC
Stocks under pressure as bond yields rise FT
The Alchemist Who Turned Toxic Assets Into Gold at Citigroup Bloomberg
Stupidity, retaliation or something else? Baltimore Brew
Exclusive: Studies find ‘super bacteria’ in Rio’s Olympic venues, top beaches Reuters
Motherboard. There’s good news tonight!
Brexit?
Poll gives Brexit campaign lead of three percentage points Guardian (TF).
After hit to sterling, polls shows Britons divided over EU membership Reuters
EU referendum: British public wrong about nearly everything, survey shows Independent
Too many facts and not enough theories: the rhetoric of the referendum campaign Open Democracy (CG).
‘Brexit’ Vote Splits British Political Duo Walll Street Journal
Schäuble warns on Brexit ‘business as usual’ FT
Brexit: It’s smarter to stay Der Spiegel
Maastricht and All That Wynne Godley, LRB (1992). A salutary reminder that not all economists are stupid and/or evil; just neoliberals.
Crete: Local Medical Association calls for punishment of Vet who treats Humans due to dramatic staff shortage in hospitals Keep Talking Greece
The U.S. (Again) Escalates The War In Afghanistan Moon of Alabama
2016
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Call Each Other Unfit for Presidency NYT (JW). They’re right!
Green Bay to test Obama’s ability to help Clinton Journal-Sentinel (MR). Shorter Obama: “In 2011-2012 I threw you under the bus, so now I’m here to ask for your help!”
The Unity Illusion David Brooks, NYT. “[Trump] is incapable of horizontal relationships.” Same “horizontal” trope Krugman deployed.
Oil money flows for black and Latino Democrats CALmatters. This is what Operative K means by “horizontal” politics, in practice.
Watch: President Obama sings Rihanna with Jimmy Fallon to explain the importance of the TPP Vox. And speaking of les grand horizontales…
It’s Time To Bury “Economic Anxiety” Once And For All as a Campaign Issue Mother Jones. But contrast this from Bloomberg (!).
DNC Chair Day Late And Dollar Short On Regulating Payday Lenders, Now Owes $300? Wonkette
Tulsi Gabbard launches petition to end Democratic Party superdelegate process Politico (MR).
Daddy, why didn’t you blog about Trump? Shtetl-Optimized (DL).
Okay, that settles it. Stop Me Before I Vote Again
Donald Trump, Mainstream Conservative The American Conservative
Furious GOP donors stew over Trump Politico. Expert grifter Newt Gingrich took squillionaire Sheldon Adelson for millions, and the donor class isn’t stewing about him. So WTF?
In what English-speaking communities does “trump” refer to the breaking of wind? English Language & Usage. With musical accompaniment…
California saw surge in registration, but not in voting Fresno Bee. Odd!
Did you have trouble voting Tuesday? Some poll workers say they’re not surprised Los Angeles Times
American cynicism is reaching a boiling point, and the corrupt electoral system is to blame Salon. I’d blame the Crapification of Everything, which most Salon writers are not unlucky enough to experience, and of which the Crapification of Voting is a part.
In Sanders’ hometown, people proud of his mark on campaign McClatchy
Clinton Email Tarbaby
12 Red Flags in Clinton’s Email Setup Kristi Culpepper, Medium (MS). Excellent, from a bond geek. It’s telling that gifted amateurs with research skills keep writing long-form pieces like Culpepper’s, and all end up at public corruption, and criminality. (See, if you have not already, here and here).
FBI criminal investigation emails: Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations with her cellphone, report says Salon. Some daft attempt to appeal to millenials?
The Clinton Foundation Timeline – Part 1 Thompson Timeline. Another excellent compilation from open sources.
Health Care
California to ask feds to allow undocumented immigrants to use Obamacare UPI
Controversy erupts over Medicare observation care requirements USA Today. Just another layer of “transparency” over an insane system.
Class Warfare
The French Stand Up New Politics (SS). Nuit Debout.
Why the poor spend more on restaurants than all but the very rich Bloomberg. JP Morgan discovers it’s expensive to be poor.
Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder NYT
Tomorrow’s Test Slate (Re Silc).
What makes me tired when organising with middle class comrades Guardian
The Path to Dissent Jacobin
Oppositions NLR. Comparative assessments: Sanders, Tsipras, Corbyn, Mélenchon, Grillo; Podemos.
Revealed: Cambodia’s vast medieval cities hidden beneath the jungle Guardian. One more reason for Kissinger to burn in hell.
Undo Influence Wall Street Journal
Startup lets landlords scan tenants’ Facebook to check if they can pay rent The Verge
As Silicon Valley lays plans to colonize Mars, researchers offer a blueprint for governing it Quartz (Re Silc). Help me.
Rebel Cities — Towards A Global Network Of Neighbourhoods And Cities Rejecting Surveillance Decentralize Today
What Milton Friedman Got Wrong: Biologists Destroy Homo-Economicus Evonomics
The Uber driver and Muhammad Ali Africa is a Country (LG).
Antidote du jour (RS):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
418 comments
Comments are closed.
Motherboard link broken, use motherboard.vice.com/en_uk/read/arming-your-drone-is-legal
Arming your SUV is legal, and SUVs get much, much better mileage off a tank of gas.
Re: O-town:
This hasn’t even sunk in yet.
Let’s hold off
NO SPECULATION.
NO BLAME.
NO SPIN.
Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. 50 at a time. But it’s nobody’s fault. No, wait…it’s terrorists! Well then! Move along! Nothing to see here!
NO!….it’s a registered democrat…
…but you’ll never glean that from the press…..
Yeah , you totally didn’t get that from the press. I’m sure you had to do some deep research on the matter.
Is that even relevant? Could have been a registered Hare Krishna for all it matters.
it’s relevant in that the MSM most likely will gloss over that, if it is in fact true, if it mean tarnishing Candidate Hillary and the DNC Brand ! The press think nothing of screaming ‘rightwing nutjob’ whenever someone affiliated with the republican side, however tenuous that link may be, to use that to calling for evermore gun control, while never stating plainly, that a majority of deaths by firearms occur in the big democratically controlled metropolises : Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, etc..
Now please understand, I am not giving cover to the extreme perps on the right side of the aisle, ………but damn if i won’t call out the supposed ‘liberal press’ when they obfuscate, by omission, in not being truthful and/or forthcoming, all to push forward the agenda of making the plebs weak and subservient to money & power!
I’m willing to bet this guy was probably pretty apolitical. He was a democrat like he was a Muslim.
By the way, I have zero love for the democrats.
Colonel Pat Lang at Sic Semper Tyrannis has written a post noting the basic non-sequitoriality of that view in this case. I will first copy-paste the whole thing because it is short. Then I will offer the link.
Poor Obama! It is so clear that this is Islamic terrorism.
( Omar-Mateen-Pulse-Shooter) <—–( This is an embedded photo in the original post).
Just listened to BHO speaking on the Orlando gay massacre. He would so love to make this a gun law issue, but it is just so difficult given the facts known so far:
Sunni Muslim who called 911 to renew his pledge of allegiance to IS and his Caliph Ibrahim DURING the attack.
This second generation US citizen had no criminal record
As a licensed security guard for a major security company this man was allowed to buy firearms with less than the background checks required of ordinary Americans (like me)
He evidently bought guns legally.
Media surrogates are a bit confused by all this. Almost all of them know nothing of firearms and are unqualified to discuss them. They sound ridiculous.
It is Ramadan and Islam universally condemns homosexuality. IS kills them when they find them.
In the EU possession of an AK-47 is illegal. They still get them on the Black Market. There are several million AR-15 variants legally in civilian hands in the US.
It is once again falsely stated that magazine size would make a difference. Wrong! I am old and can make a magazine change in an AR-15 in less than five seconds.
The ignorant, like Malcolm Vance insist that Islam does not permit killings like this. He is wrong. As I have often stated Islam has NO CENTRAL AUTHORITY. Because of that Islam is whatever some group of Muslims agree that it is. Think IS. pl
Poor Obama! Surely this can be twisted into a gun control sermon! Surely!
Posted at 03:26 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Here is the link.
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2016/06/poor-obama-it-is-so-clear-that-this-is-islamic-terrorism.html#comments
and the first comment that came in is so Ahh Pro Poe to our choice in Election 2016 that I decided to copy-paste the first comment here too.
"Tyler said…
Dear The Gays:
Trump does not care what happens in your bedroom. Meanwhile Hillary wants to import a gorillion violent foreigners who are hunky dory with tossing you off a building or stoning you to death.
Choose wisely.
Reply 12 June 2016 at 03:33 PM"
The Colonel can suck my dick. You can’t kill 50 people with a knife. And when white guys slaughter loads of people, he doesn’t universalize it to be “all those crazy fucking white guys, we ought to kick them out of the country!”
Fuck him.
I’ve read SST for several years now, and have also read your comments for some time so I won’t judge you by this one.
Col Lang is the former Director of Intelligence, IIRC for the Dept of Defense. He has spent years in the Middle East and is fluent in Arabic. He knew that the Iraq War was going to be the unleashing of hell, and he has consistently been eerily prescient about a whole spectrum of topics.
Col Lang is not at all someone to underestimate or insult.
He performs a phenomenal public service keeping his blog going.
I understand that many of us (I include myself and my spouse, who is a lifetime member of the NRA) are completely fed up with the mayhem that automatic weapons are creating in this society. From what little I’ve read today (and I’ve mostly stayed away from the news), this is yet another story of mental illness trying to masquerade as political act.
Unfortunately, the US has not had the leadership we need to have a good conversation about guns.
I know that in my own part of the world, the Connecticut first graders changed a lot of minds about the ‘freedom’ to own guns without any obligation to prove you can handle them. Every state that I know of requires a driving test for a driver’s license; guns seem only to require money.
But to disparage an exceptional man for that situation is not at all up to your usual insightful comments, IMVHO.
It looks like you missed the points Colonel Lang was making about how the (legally speaking alleged) shooter was a major-company security guard with a more-permissive gun-buying set of rules than we ordinary citizens have. You also missed Lang’s point that the gun-control measures recommended by Obama and others would not have affected this person’s ability to buy the guns he bought.
Can you show me any actual quotes in the Lang piece I copy-pasted where Colonel Lang actually universalises from this alleged shooter upward to 1 billion muslims? If you can show me the quote, and show me how it demonstrates this universalization you claim to detect, I will certainly read and think about the actual quote you you show me, if you can actually show me any quote at all.
Can you?
Can you show me any inaccuracies or mis-statements of fact in the Lang piece I copy pasted here? Can you offer a better interpretation of the Florida events than the one that Colonel Lang is preliminarily offering? Can you demonstrate how your interpretation is better than his?
Thanks, DC.
Again:
This guy was a licensed security guard who bought guns more easily than a retired military colonel.
Tell me how anything the Dems or Obama said actually grapple with the Gordion’s knot of problems inherent in that statement. (I don’t even bother with the GOP any longer; they’re an utter waste of my time.)
Given the right knife or two w wrist straps in a crowded night club someone could, but thats beside the point
Yours is a fallacy -An irrational religious organizing principle vs “white guys” -of false comparision.
Root cause analysis flows directly to disempowering the Neocons and making a complete withdraw from the ME to the point of mutually consenting trade and thats about it
Having a good cry first.
Real Men, Tori Amos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4Ffer2dJyE
Re: Clinton Email Tarbaby
I have never heard of a political appointee being embedded in IT staff at a government agency. To call it unusual would be more than an understatement. That article is correct – political appointees are there to make policy, not to do the grunt work of running an agency. Also, the article is correct on Powell. Others such as Josh Marshall have tried to claim that his violations were just as serious as Clinton’s, but that clearly was not the case. Powell had spent a career in DoD, so he certainly had a much better understanding of the proper handling of classified information than Clinton’s apologists.
I originally didn’t think much of this whole scandal, because Republicans have a strange propensity to focus on stupid things, and ignore the really shady things that the Clintons have been doing. The more details that have come out about this, though, the worse it makes them look. It certainly looks like they’re hiding something, and the extent of the steps that they’ve taken goes well beyond the excuse that she’s a private person. If she really was just doing this due to an overriding desire to protect her privacy, then why all the lies and evasions? If that really was her reason, then that just means that she’s a pathological liar.
And yet, her apologists continue to wave her actions away – mistakes were made. I wonder if there is some line, past which they’ll finally abandon her. Or, maybe this is like the frog in the boiling water. The incremental drip-drip nature of these scandals inures them to the overall corruption. This certainly makes me look forward to the excuses they’ll make for her, should she be elected President.
If she’s elected president, they won’t NEED to make any more excuses. The coup will be complete. The propaganda worked.
If the president does it……..
If she’s elected prez, she will have no coat-tails to bring in more dem congresscritters. Impeacment proceedings will begin immediately.
Hope you’re right.
I’m almost positive that impeachment will be on the table with a GOP House.
There’s nothing Congress likes better than fiddling while Rome burns, so it’s a twofer. They can avoid work AND they can stick it to a political opponent.
I’m not so sure. If “impeachment is off the table” for George Bush, then I suspect it will be mostly optics and little substance for a Democrat of HIllary’s ilk as well. A lot of the enmity between the two gangs of thieves is theatre – granted not all, but at the end of the day Clinton is a player; utterly corrupt, utterly ruthless, utterly greedy and too valuable as such to expose the inner workings of the great piggy bank called Democracy.
Pelosi likely knew anything Shrub did as a member of the gang of eight. The Republican back benchers and their supporters are a different breed. Their voters took out Eric Cantor, and he should be safe as he only has farmers outside of Republican suburban types. Cantor and the other Virginia Republicans have always taken care of the small farms in the Commonwealth. They won’t mind losing a “conservative” scion in any kind of scandal because they will simply say Congressman X betrayed conservatism or was a RINO. The GOP voters will continue on their scowful way as they did before the scandal. Democrats will be hung up on how Pelosi or Clinton could betray them.
No question about it. If the House doesn’t have articles of impeachment ready to go before January 2018 I’ll eat my hat. They may not drop them, but they won’t even hide that they have them and the votes to do it.
Here’s the thing she will never be convicted, not without overwhelming evidence AND even more overwhelming public demand. They won’t get it past that 2/3 requirement of the Senate. But if it becomes as bad as I think it can, we will have another President resign in disgrace rather than actually be thrown out by both Houses of Congress.
All Donald has to do: in they’re first debate, come on stage in “the blue dress”. Long gloves and high heels. Strut his stuff and hear the audience go WILD. Game over for Hitlerly. She will just leave the stage.
Don’t put it past him. He has no shame and doesn’t listen to his advisors. Donald knows, as we all do its going to get down and dirty. It could happen.
Maybe not: “She’s one of us,” and “We can work with her” are powerful tribal shibboleths…
The Borg say that all the time.
Meh, she’s one of them until she actually wins the election. Then she becomes the lead villain in this little play the oligarchs have created to perpetuate the myth that we have a democracy.
I agree with you. Also, there is the added restriction that an impeachment would dredge up way too much information about how everything works. Clinton would not go down quietly.
I agree with this. Impeachment has to be ” safe. “. Most of the GOP are caught in the same trap. A real impeachment threatens to shine a light on the nest of corruption that is kept dark, which would implicate both parties.
This is why Bill Clinton was impeached for nonsense, while W was allowed to skate for war crimes.
I’ve been trying to hypothesize how that would go, but I really can’t make up my mind which way it would go. I’m pretty sure the R elite and our shadowy puppet master overlords are fine with Hillary. But then there are the R segment whose livelihood is directly dependent on R victories in order to get a good seat at the Smorgasbord in our political-economy. Then there are the rank and file R voter, which may or may not be controllable by the R elite, the puppet masters, and of course our famously free [and libertarian] press. So I’m still hopelessly confused.
Empeacement, I like that idea! Get rid of Killery, Nuland and the lot of them.
Empeacement. But, sooner is better than later and does not involve impeachment.
via: https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com/2016/05/28/democratic-primaries-is-clinton-leading-by-3-million-votes/
Democratic Primaries: Is Clinton leading by 3 million votes?
by Richard Charnin
UPDATE: Bob Fitrakis updates information about the RICO suit and California which they are adding to discovery for their case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdwKuqtTXc8&feature=youtu.be&t=18m23s
6-10-16 Nicole Sandler Show – Election Integrity – Fact or Fraud?
Bob Fitrakis on The Nicole Sandler Show
TrustVote.org
FreePress.org
Nicole Sandler
54:10 on video to see better than the rough transcript below:
Update: The RICO lawsuit has not yet been filed.
Originally, attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis were going to file their RICO lawsuit earlier on June 6th in order to get the networks to release the raw data on exit polls for the California primary. The networks cancelled exit polls instead.
The RICO suit will be filed. The problem is they ran into a huge problems in California.
With the donations they are getting, Arnebeck and Fitrakis are beefing up legal staff.
California, if it were a nation would be the eight largest nation on earth, had some of the most massive irregularities. Fitrakis said he was getting emails constantly from poll workers and election observers saying 25% of people in my precinct were forced to vote provisionally.
Systematic problems with registration being wrong, peoples showed up saying they had registered to vote in the Democrat primary, but instead were registered as being in other parties which meant that they could not vote for a presidential candidate.
Fitrakis said, we did some limited exit polling ourselves and those numbers are being crunched.
The suits and it looks like there may be two of them: the initial one over getting the exit polls and also a second one getting discovery for criminal activity which is the one that should go first, be filed first.
But California had massive levels of irregularities and what looks like outright fraud. Most of California should be roped off as a crime scene. it happened deliberately from party loyalists and private corporations.
California has delayed us somewhat and caused us to beef up legal staff. He says they will be filing next week.
For donations go to trustvote.org or freepress.org
………
Initial report, the shorter video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IAJ5fAm3Cs
http://trustvote.org/
PROTECTING OUR ELECTIONS
Bob Fitrakis, Cliff Arnebeck and Lori Grace
My summary: This is a Very Strong RICO lawsuit involving State and Federal Courts, involving current and past election crimes, that importantly involves ALL THE STATES for the collection of additional evidence, discovery, to determine the correct vote counts, and delegate counts precinct by precinct from this primary.
Cliff Arnebeck says that by the time of the Republican Convention which is before the Democratic Convention, that this RICO racketeering lawsuit will have changed history, and the minds of politicians and the public so that the true winner, Bernie Sanders, will be nominated.
Cliff Arnebeck is the same attorney who prevented fraud from occurring in Ohio in 2012 which would have given Romney the Presidency. Obama owes his Presidency to Arnebeck. Since the FBI were involved with Arnebeck’s successful effort to prevent fraud, Carl Rove did not get a heads up about the election not being fixed as the voting machine owners could not call him for fear of FBI wiretaps. So Carl had a meltdown on TV.
These lawyers have a history of success. I believe they will win. I believe we are on the verge of rescuing our democracy. If you want to donate to their efforts go to TrustVote.org or FreePress.org
…….
Get Rid of Those Voting Machines Now, because look what Bev Harris found–EVIDENCE:
http://blackboxvoting.org/fraction-magic-1/
Fraction Magic – Part 1: Votes are being counted as fractions instead of as whole numbers
By Bev Harris May 12, 2016
Saw a posting with a link by a friend on FB yesterday that the on-going count of provisional ballots has already flipped three CA counties to Bernie. Glenn county in Nor Cal plus San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties along the coast. (From updated Sec of State totals.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/4nj6qp/bernie_has_flipped_3_counties_today/
Because these are very serious crimes, even though they have continued for so long, the collecting of evidence for a RICO racketeering lawsuit, may be changing a few partisans’ minds into not wanting to be dragged into this RICO suit.
Yes, I saw where those counties flipped from Clinton to Bernie. It made me wonder.
Can an Attorney answer this?
Since some counties in California are changing their counts and reporting to SoS corrected amounts of votes, enough so that they are flipping from Clinton to Bernie, won’t that prevent those who conducted these precinct elections from being RICOed because the RICO lawsuit has not yet been filed.
Then what about all the other states (ALL STATES ARE SUBJECT TO THIS RICO LAWSUIT, this is both a State and Federal RICO lawsuit) rechecking their previous paper ballots counts, especially those mail-ins and e-scanned paper ballots along with those many provisional ballots and affidavits, and if they are NOW counted accurately and found to have changed totals, and delegates, and if they then make a new report to each of their Secretarys’ of State to correct first accounting, then will they be RICOed or will this action itself be enough that by correcting now, prevent their being RICOed.
Also, those who conducted their precinct elections should note that Arnebeck and Fitrakis were involved with the 2004 Presidential election which oddly flipped to Bush. They filed a lawsuit in Ohio to recount all paper ballots, and found all forms of tampering, even putting tape over a voters vote and marking for Bush instead. The ballots were photographed, a book was published with all the different examples of fraudulent tampering. But, they did not have a RICO lawsuit concurrent with the ballot counting…like they do now.
So, don’t tamper. You will be in even bigger trouble. Recount those votes accurately and re-sent to SoS (who should also want accurate counts, because, you know, the RICO) so that you don’t get RICOed. Now, before this upcoming week during which the RICO racketeering lawsuit will be filed, affecting ALL STATES, and the lawsuit allows discovery in each state. So, get to it. Thank you.
To clarify in the first paragraph, often provisional ballots are not counted which should then be reviewed for evidence under this RICO suit.
However, I am sure that all should be legally correct, whether those conducting these three counties’ precincts in California either got right to the counting of provisional ballots which is the correct thing to do, or whether they decided later after initially ignoring them, that because of the gathering of evidence for this RICO suit, they changed their minds and then started counting. So long as the count is correct. No problem.
But, those precincts in California and all other states with uncounted, or miscounted mail-in, e-scanned, and provisional ballots, need to reconsider and get those counts complete and correct as soon as possible.
I am not a lawyer. It may be the case that all these ballots, provisional, mail-ins, e-scanned, from these primary elections are now sealed, not to be touched, except by this RICO discovery. So, pardon me, we need a lawyer to determine how to proceed or sit tight.
Easy programming change. I always imagined more complex coding. Why not? Who’s checking?
I’m sure the person in charge has security over the coding, but then again, when someone wanted to steal my code once in the 80s, they sent an upper level IT guy asking me to sign off my acct for a while so he could get in and make some updates. Luckily I had a way to move the code to another acct while he looked for what he wanted.
Thanks for those links. I have known about Fitrakis and Wasserman since 2004. I wasn’t sure what to make of their work at the time. And amazing there was a huge push-back against them from the liberal establishment (and still is). Kerry, apparently, was not even interested in looking at their claims.
The MSM will always dismiss claims like theirs as ‘conspiracy theory’. And indeed it is a conspiracy theory. But no conspiracy theory is wrong BECAUSE it is a conspiracy theory. Human beings have conspired through history. Any theory is more or less probable relative to the facts it seeks to explain.
In this case, it is reasonable to conclude that Fitrakis et. al. have made the case that what happened in New York and California doesn’t make sense unless we posit massive fraud.
I hope they impeach her – but the Dems are poised to take the Senate…so yeah, crime pays!
The D’s will lose more senate seats in 2018 than they pick up in 2016; so time is not on her side.
No they won’t. Not immediately. Not ever. She will be the Obama 2.0 President. As such, she will be worth trillions of dollars to her backer-sponsors. They will instruct their Republicans in the strongest possible terms that they are not to lay a glove, or even a finger on her, ever.
EVer!
if the president does it…
That didn’t work out all that well for Tricky Dick though granted the elite back then did not realize just how far they could take raw corruption right out in public view and get away with it. The public also, wasn’t so saturated with corruption and scandal as it is today, to such an extent that it simply can’t keep up with it.
One has to wonder if Obama has endorsed Clinton because he knows that no matter what happens he can make it go away or whether he really is being cautious and has assurances from the FBI that they won’t trip any mines.
I wrote this before seeing Jim Haygood’s as always inimitable comment regarding his social life and the FBI. Jim answers the question: Obama can make anything go away – a power Hillary will make ample use of once coronated. Life sucks but it’s still life.
Nixon’s impeachment also played out against the backdrop of anti-war protests and a very iffy social (un)rest situation.
I wonder if Obama endorsed her to provide cover for the investigation. “No political interference” cover. He is the only one in a position to throw her under the bus.
I’m not convinced myself, but this is an outcome that is possible.
There is the distinct possibility that the ‘evidence’ is held by multiple players including the FBI. Guccifer made it clear that he was using a laptop ‘given to him by a French friend he met via the dark web. His French friend told him it was an ex pentagon PC.” Maybe! but the Russians and Romanians were after him at that time as well. He was notorious in the dark web circle as he had already hacked the Bush’s and Powell. It is possible that the laptop was supplied by the Russian security service with a keylogger on board. Why not? that’s precisely what the CIA would do given half the chance if they discovered a good penetrator of a foreign state.
There are stories in press now about disputes between the various Russian Federation security administrations as to whether their files of Hillary Clinton’s server records should be leaked. That could be BS as well just to torment but it could be very real.
But it needs to be acknowledged that there is a fair chance her server records were hacked in part or their entirety at some point or even continuously. Hacks on her old server may be hard to detect, as Guccifer or another hacker may have used her account to log in. That is what Guccifer did to Bush, Powell and the Romanian Secretary of Defense. He used intuition and repetitive attempts to masquerade as themselves. It is all reported in press as quotes from Guccifer when arrested in Romania.
If third parties other than the FBI have some of her records then prepare for the old drip drip water torture. What a way to destabilize the USA national sense of security and eradicate Clinton.
I still am waiting for three hundred FBI feet to march out the door and quit because of the utter disgust in the Clinton’s shenanigans and corruption! That would be the day!
And watch at least one of those pairs of feet. Watch that pair guide its owner to a whistle. Which will be blown.
And remember this date: June 17, 1972. Washington, DC was the place.
Anna chennault had a great party in the penthouse that night, didnt she ?
Oh well, china lobby was not too upset about nixon double cross considering she was the neice of one of the kmt leaders in the 1920’s…details details…maybe tricky dicky still had some peking duck in his teeth from february…
RIP Mr Liao…
If the FBI gets angry, they will selectively leak information.
I think Clinton will be indicted and is finished. This email scandal is 100 Teapot Domes. You have here 30,000 emails of corruption and sleeze from a dirty politician who thought she was operating in secrecy. How many major scandals are in those emails? The FBI might be able to ignore/bury one major crime but at which point does it become too much for them? Hillary is doomed because there are too many crimes here to cover up.
Incidentally, Clinton apparently also used a private server when she was senator. This raises the question: how many members of congress have private email servers?
“The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does not apply to Congress.”
http://archives.democrats.rules.house.gov/Archives/jcoc2ai.htm
…but the Freedom of Stealing Insider Trading Information Acts Does
Thanks, Jim– that mostly answered my question. What a surprise.
Perhaps FBI agents know how whistleblowers are traced, found and discovered. Perhaps those who have “had enough” will figure out how to cover up the “whistle blow” and then how to coverup the “whistle-blow coverup”. If they decide they have figured all that out to their satisfaction, then perhaps they will arrange a Thirty Thousand Emails Email-Dump to pour into
Wikileaks’s front hall through Wikileaks’s mail slot.
If the FBI gets angry, they will selectively leak information.
I think Clinton will be indicted and is finished. This email scandal is 100 Teapot Domes. You have here 30,000 emails of corruption and sleeze from a dirty politician who thought she was operating in secrecy. How many major scandals are in those emails? The FBI might be able to ignore/bury one major crime but at which point does it become too much for them? Hillary is doomed because there are too many crimes here to cover up.
Incidentally, Clinton apparently also used a private server when she was senator. This raises the question: how many members of congress have private email servers?
I think Clinton will NOT be indicted . . . EVER. She is worth too much to her trillion dollar backers. They will not permit an indictment to go ahead. They have probably already told Obama that they will give him NOT ONE PENNY after he leaves office if he permits anyone to indict Hillary. They may well have told him that he has to give her a Nixon Pardon after she is elected but before she takes office, if he wants to collect any of the money he expects.
The only way the FBI will have any effect on anything is if they give Wikileaks the whole bundle of Thirty Thousand Emails. And they will have to do it before Hillary is elected, or it won’t affect the election. And therefor won’t have any revenge-value or warning-value.
Incremental dripping? Sounds like the early days of the Watergate scandal.
Yesterday evening at a party, I put a hypothetical to a neighbor who’s a retired FBI agent. “You’re on the Hillary emails investigation. Then you see Obama endorse Hillary, and meet with the attorney general the same afternoon. How do you interpret this?”
“I asked the same question to my colleagues who are still working in the bureau,” he answered. “The younger one told me, we’ve got the goods on her. She’s gonna get indicted for sure.”
“But the older one demurred. ‘You don’t understand the inside game,’ he informed his younger colleague. ‘Hillary has fixed this with Obama. He will suppress any indictments. And if a rogue prosecutor acts anyway, he will pardon Hillary on the spot.'”
“And FBI director James Comey?” I pressed. My neighbor smiled. “He will keep a stiff upper lip, and retire with a commendatory letter from the president and a good pension.”
Sad but true, comrades. That’s the take from my FBI contact: Hillary has Lagos-on-the-Potomac wired tighter than a drum. There is no justice, and never will be.
But a rogue indictment, even followed by a pardon would be a very weird shadow over her campaign. I’m guessing no indictments at all are planned.
But what if the young guys start leaking?
Or an older guy. Remember Mark Felt? Pretty senior FBI official. We remember him as Deep Throat.
Yes. I remember Deep Throat. But it took reporters at a powerful paper to make it stick.
I feel sick about this. With Watergate the facts (pretty much any facts) weren’t known until after the 1972 election. (A letter from one of the burglers after New Years 1973?? Is that right?)
This thing … We actually have time but powerful Dems ignore it. Can it really be ignored long enough to elect her?
That’s the paradox – an FBI agent leaking information to expose Clinton’s leaking information.
This is more quixotic – With Obama, Warren, and many, many Democrats endorsing Hillary – basically the D party – why did Sanders join the party in the first place to try to save it (or was it to profit – in the realpolitik style – from its low information, sorry, loyal Southern voters)?
Wasn’t that the only way in. If you have no nationwide name recognition then you must debate. The dem/repubs lock out other parties. We need to start low & local like Kochs and change how they scam us. Our tax dollars funding “private clubs,” paper vs e-vote, ensuring all votes are actually counted.
Knock over that two legged stool. Get other parties & people in.
It can certainly be ignored long enough to get Clinton nominated and get Sanders firmly swept off the field. That is the Inner Party’s first priority here. Is to get Sanders firmly disposed of and out of the way and Clinton safely nominated.
If it explodes too loudly after that to ignore, then the Inner DemParty will swap in some other Brand Name Democrat. Sanders can just grind his teeth about it in the Senate. And all the Sandervoters can vote their vengeance in November. How many of us will do that?
Hope it’s true. Just didn’t hear any clues from this ex-FBI guy, who also speculated that Trump may be a ringer whose role is to throw the election to the Clintons. But that’s his personal theory, not something he heard from inside the bureau.
A ringer. There is no monopoly on that theory. :-) The question becomes is Trump really that good an actor and is he really that self disciplined?
I have argued multiple times that Trump is doing this as a favor to Hillary but to hold on to the notion, I’ve had to grant Trump actor of the century status on too many occasions to remain comfortable with the argument.
Too many times, as Yves puts it, he has looked exactly like a dog chasing a car. Perhaps he “gets a hold of himself,” but that too is a hard argument to stick with.
There is always the possibility that Trump does this unwittingly, but somehow I think he would see through that.
Trump and his emmy…shut off the sound and watch trump walk himself thru his motions…
Say it looking left, repeat it looking right, turn head looking left…stare silently…three four five…turn right and continue…he has the dj on the dance floor cadance down tight…the bernaze sauce is powerful in young trumpwalker…
I think there is less and less evidence as the days pass recently that Trump is just in it to throw the race to Hillary. Lately he has been trying to suck up to the GOP and try and say things to attract “moderate Rs”. Take his VP list for example. Also hitting up Wall Street for donations.
‘Course he has to do these things to win. So I still have no idea what he would really do once in office.
Nor does he. :-)
What he would really do in office – that is, if he catches the car.
I suspect he would become fairly easy to handle. He would have very clever yes men who become experts at “brushing” his ego. They in turn would be directed by more clever thinking people who write the legislation and they in their own turn would be directed by the corporate overlords sans frontières.
As @Jess puts it below, the rest would be taking lots of public bows and staffing out any real work.
It seems doubtful that he would actually do anything from his own initiative though I could easily be wrong.
He would just have fun. He would run with a Cheney-figure as his VP and let that VP do all the Presidenting . . . which is Hard Work. Shrubya Bush assured us that Presidenting is hard work.
I subscribe to a variation of the “Springtime for Hitler” meme: Trump didn’t really expect to win, but now that he’s the nominee the lure of being the “most powerful person on earth”, “leader of the free world”, etc., is just too tempting to pass up. After all, it is very historical — only been 43 different presidents ever. That’s a pretty exclusive club. He’s also smart enough to see himself as another Reagan, taking the bows, making the big statements, but staffing out all the real work to others.
I agree with you, Jess. I think the whole Trump candidacy is a publicity stunt that got out of hand. I think pretty much everyone (Trump included) grossly underestimated just how angry the precariat is.
+1
Precisely.
At most, we’ll get leaks and I think the Pols actually enjoy those. Gives them the truly “invincible” aura and is a nifty below the belt jab to the ever irritating activists.
The Republicans will protect a Hillary leaker.
Snowden types embarrassed both parties and brought attention to the personalities of the gang of eight, Democrats stopped whining about torture when it was confirmed. This is the important difference.
If Comey takes down Hillary, he’s the GOP nominee in 2020. If he lives in Virginia, the Governor’s race is next year (Governor is an easy job), and Kaine is up for re-election. Then there are movie and book deals, the lecture circuit, the real celebrity.
I know low level people at DOJ & SEC, they were trying to get me to vote for Romney. Obama wants people to spy on each other, turn people in. They felt work was better under Bush. They wouldn’t get into specifics.
But what if the young guys start leaking?
Lots of grasping at straws here.
No one in the FBI is going to leak on the Clinton file unless they want to destroy their careers, get run out of the agency, and probably end up in jail. This isn’t 1972 when methods of mass surveillance were primitive and largely ineffective, it’s 2016 where the national security state has all the most intimate details of your life available on demand at its fingertips. The last time you accessed certain sensitive information, where you were last night, whom you met with, what you talked about. Hell, they probably have a recording of the conversation taken through your phone’s speaker on file in Utah, it’s just a matter of pulling it up. If you leak they will find you. No one knows that better than the people who actually operate the system -that is, the same people who supposedly stand ready to fall on their swords in the name of embarrassing Clinton.
The Obama administration has publicly crucified leakers for the explicit purpose of making sure everyone exactly understands the price of being a hero.
I have been taken to task for suggesting that most people aren’t heroes so I will conclude with the following modest observation: there were thousands and thousands of people in a position to do what Edward Snowden did, yet there was only one Edward Snowden, and he’s living as an effectively stateless person in potentially permanent exile.
Maybe there are a lot more Dudley Do-Rights in the FBI than the NSA, but I’m not holding my breath.
Huh? The FBI HAS been leaking! The WSJ has been a major recipient.
Facts not on the side of your argument. The FBI appears to have more institutional independence than the rest of the Administration, probably due to it retaining some of the old J. Edgar Hoover information-gathering practices.
You mean like the report about how Clinton’s server included e-mails about impending drone strikes? Those kind of stories aren’t causing her any sleepless nights.
In case this needs to be said “leaks” occur all the time in Washington, a high proportion with official or semi official sanction in pursuit of one agenda or another. To actually force her out of the race absent an indictment is going to take something really big however, and the person with the temerity to leak THAT is going to have their hide nailed to the wall. It isn’t just about Clinton, if unauthorized leaks large enough to derail a presidential bid are tolerated then no one in Washington is safe. A message needs to be sent.
I’d be happy to be proved wrong. In the meantime I’m still waiting for Fitzmas.
I beg to differ. Have you noticed the hysteria in the Democratic chattering classes, as evidenced by the appalling Krugman column of last Friday that Lambert wrote about in Water Cooler, basically saying that people vote only based on their tribal interests and nothing else matters? This is a justification of campaigning using race/identity wars solely. And as a Democratic insider pointed out, this is almost certain to fail, since minorities lose those fights when they are framed that way, and the winners tend to tighten their control afterwards.
In case you missed it, despite Hillary getting massive positive press coverage last week, between AP’s coronation, her victory in California, her self-coronoation and Obama’s endorsement versus Trump doubling down on his Mexican judge remark and the media correctly excoriating him for it, he’s only taken a small dent in his ratings and Hillary has not benefited. By contrast, when The Donald became the presumptive nominee, he showed a monster gain in his poll ratings.
The drip-drip-drip of bad news on the server front most decidedly is damaging her. That is why the Dem establishment is freaking out. Just go have a look at the Sunday New York Times magazine section. The intensity of the messaging is overbearing.
If Hillary is not losing sleep, she’s put herself in an even bigger echo chamber than I thought possible.
I know this is picky, but you forgot the quotation marks around “victory” in California. They still have more than a third of the ballots to count, and three counties flipped to Bernie on Friday, backing up the theory that most of these ballots will be for him.
That doesn’t in any way vitiate your core point. But with all the deceitful messaging being pushed, I feel compelled to correct stuff like this whereever and whenever.
We are talking past each other.
I never said the e-mail issue wasn’t hurting Clinton. I only said that absent an indictment the idea that rogue elements in the FBI will leak information that would clearly form the basis of an indictment and force her out of the race seems like a long shot.
Again, I’m more than prepared to be proved wrong.
All enough FBI agents have to do (two or three) is say staff recommended an indictment and the political level of the agency overruled them. They don’t have to provide the detail, but a reporter would also like to get a sense of the basis of an indictment recommendation. You seem to think the FBI needs to leak actual documents for there to be a story. Not correct.
Good point on Fitzmas. I do think, though, that systems are more fragile now then they were then. I can see some outraged worker bee — and they’re right to be outraged — mailing a CD to Wikileaks, even if Obama, Lynch, and Comey do manage to put the toothpaste back in the tube. And nothing like Wikileaks existed during the Plame Affair.
And when you’ve lost Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd…
Sure, lots of people have had enough. I don’t dispute that.
At the same time becoming an FBI agent requires a very significant commitment of time and effort. Are you going to throw that away because you’re unhappy that Clinton wasn’t indicted?
Again, I doubt it, but I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.
You underlying assumption is questionable. Why is someone throwing away their career by leaking? I’m not going to go into details but there are ways to get documents and information to reporters that are not traceable. And of all people, FBI agents would know which information transmission methods are not readily tracked. Number one rule is avoid the Internet.
katiebird
June 12, 2016 at 9:38 am
With regard to leaking….and those who think it is a plausible approach – Consider: it seems to me that the whole zeitgeist at the time – 70’s – was considerably different than it is now. The technological ability to trace leaks, the legal consequences to leaking, and the government apparatchiks will and encouragement to prosecute leakers is much, much different now (IMHO) than it was in the ’70’s. Think in terms of Snowden versus Daniel Ellsberg.
The oligarchs have constructed, and designed, a very effective matrix to protect themselves and keep everybody else in. I see the NYT and Washington Post as defenders of government policies, particularly the policy that ONLY government can decide what government information is disbursed. The MSM is not disruptors of the status quo – they are enablers of the status quo….
I’ve thought about this off and on all day and agree. It would take a very brave person to do such leaks.
Sickening. Power for the powerful.
I’m not so sure. WikiLeaks, Snowden, and Panama Papers were all ginormous leaks.
I suppose its a waste of time to keep on double guessing these things, but I can’t help thinking that if this was true, then we wouldn’t be seeing what (to me) looks like jockeying for position by people like Warren to come to the rescue if Clinton falls before November. I think if it was sown up they’d be showing more confidence, but to me the incredible rush to push out Sanders and sew things down looks more to me like internal panic than anything else. I really think we’d be seeing a calmer and more conciliatory run up if the Dems were truly convinced the FBI were in their place.
0bama campaigning with Hillary on Wednesday in Wisconsin sends a strong symbolic message: “I’m with her.”
Not that events couldn’t cascade beyond 0bama’s control, just as they did with Nixon.
What do you want to bet that 0bama’s first post-presidential gig is with a Clinton Foundation donor?
I’m not sure he had any choice really but to be seen to support her. It would have been a pretty big story if he was in any way lukewarm.
I agree; and if he did not endorse her or gave a tepid congrats the rumors and speculation mills would be like geysers. We must remember that the Clintons have as many enemies as lackeys and blind followers. Who in government and politics gains from Hillary’s takedown?
Those parts of the Armed Forces who would be involved in new overseas combat, including tactical battlefield nuclear combat on the Ukraine Front, if Hillary gets elected . . . . would have a strong incentive to get her taken down.
They just cancelled Wisconsin, “due to Orlando” it sounds like there are security concerns for Obama.
searched google for “news fbi leaks” just now: Julian Assange on camera, posted 2 hrs. ago: http://www.itv.com/news/2016-06-12/julian-assange-wikileaks-plans-to-release-more-private-emails-sent-by-hillary-clinton/
There’s still the rumor that the Russians have all the emails from Clinton’s server. Maybe they are biding their time…..
In cases of blackmail the release of the information used is a frank admission of total failure. I can’t think of a single reason that the Russians would tattle on Clinton given that the information is only valuable to them as long as it remains secret. It’s the same reason the FBI, the NSA and the rest of the US Gov TLAs won’t release or leak any of it, it’s only valuable as long as it remains out of the public domain. If everyone has it, it becomes worthless. Leaking it would be institutionally stupid and counterproductive and signal a total failure. I assume a dossier containing career ending dirt exists for nearly every DC power player, but it is unlikely any of it will ever come to light.
Depends, if Clinton is gung ho on Victoria Nuland being in her cabinet than Russia can save themselves a big headache.
Agreed – sometimes it’s best to take the kill shot, if you have it. J.Edgar Hoover and other DC dirt collectors play defense and the long game. Dirt gets stale with age too.
Assange admitted in that interview that Loretta Lynch, “..is not going to indict Hillary Clinton […] It’s not possible that could happen […]” even though Wikileaks plans to publish some pretty damning evidence of wrong doing.
The fireworks, for those who are even aware of them, will be mostly confined to a few groups such as ourselves. What escapes to the population at large will be more along the lines of nagging feelings that undefinable things are indefinably amiss.
You could explain that by who has information and does not, the insider games. Warren as a relative newcomer and rather an outsider may not be up on all the latest and who has a string attached to whom (someone correct my grammar?). Those on the periphery may be jockeying for non-existent or lower-probability positions.
That the FBI buries it is looking more and more probable. I suspect Obama would very much prefer NOT to have to pardon Hillary – that is the weak link – but the act of endorsing her probably means he has been satisfied by higher ups in the FBI that such is a very manageable risk.
It depends on if the mitt romney branch of the fbi or the louis freeh branch are on board…since neither has spoken bout $hillary, seems the thing might be past its sale by date…
A friend recently suggested this whole email thing was a way to keep the inquiring types feeding on a chicken bone when there
were t-bones out there to be had…
Hypermachiavellian perhaps…
I think Obama has helped govt employees understand what will happen if they decide to be a whistle blower. O will throw so many accusations at them and file charges so onerous that they will be broke from attorney fees even before they go to prison.
Then the MSM will treat them like Bernie. Need I use the F word? Fascism.
Impeachment? That’s so 1970s. Just talk to distract the masses.
Alex morfesis
June 12, 2016 at 11:01 am
“…a way to keep the inquiring types feeding on a chicken bone when there
were t-bones out there to be had…”
Love it!!! Is that copyrighted, or can anyone use it???
It’s all yours…just at least send me a postcard every once in a while…
Well the FBI under Hoover was of course famous for having blackmail material on politicians (and others). Sadly the FBI and NSA might prefer to have HRC elected and under their thumbs … very easy to control.
But that wouldn’t prevent a rogue agent leaking the docs, at least.
Is it conceivable that Obama wouldn’t also be damaged by an indictment? Clinton must have corresponded for years with the Executive branch by email. Even if Obama didn’t notice Clinton’s email address, wouldn’t others have noticed? There must be some panic at the White House over how far the scandal could spread. Right?
The Thompson article said there were very few emails between Obama and Clinton when she was Secretary of State. Less than a handful. I guess her people talked with his people kind of thing.
The important relationships are handled by Defense since 1948 or are handled through international organizations we control or through the UN where we have a high profile and independent of state ambassador.
I’m fairly certain the expectation was that members of Congress would take the cabinet jobs or take enough of them where the executive departments could pursue independent courses, but realistically, the President is simply the employers of the appointees. Certain jobs have treaty importance, but State doesn’t handle military allies. It’s not surprising Hillary and Obama would have little contact.
With TPP being Obama’s ‘legacy’ project, I would have expected more contact at least on that particular subject. But then, Congress had to go in to a secure room just to read the thing…
Obama is a hands off guy. It took him two weeks after Mark Warner called for Shinseki to be fired for Obama to accept Shinseki’s resignation. If Warner sounds sane, the issue should have been dealt with a year before.
Wouldn’t most “work” be communicated by their respective teams? I doubt Obama sends many (direct) emails.
The staggering level of corruption evident in the Clinton Foundation and its obvious connection to the private email server is, as far as I’m concerned, beyond dispute.
It is astonishing that anyone who genuinely cares about the integrity of our government and the people who lead it would continue to make excuses for the Clintons.
What is significant is the ability to bury it and the relative ease of the whole thing. As observers, we are constantly way behind – and therefore drop-jawed at – just how corrupt things have become. It’s like watching climate change. You can’t believe it, you can’t believe it, and then wham – New Orleans goes under. You still can’t believe it, and so on, and then wham all over again only harder each time.
Americans are troubled by the same issues that exercised the sea of protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989: the flagrant, exuberant corruption of the party nomenklatura, coupled with a flimsy facade of sham democracy for the masses (as in California voting results being announced with barely half the votes counted).
The president’s out campaigning with a candidate who raked off two billion dollars by peddling influence and government favors, while law enforcement is silent.
Any resemblance between this squalid spectacle and a constitutional republic is not only entirely coincidental, but probably falsified as well.
I’m not sure how much Americans care about corruption. We seem to have become a lot more cynical in our imperial postlude. The shock and outrage people felt about Nixon’s lying now appears almost quaint.
My guess is that if HRC goes down it will be because the notion of having her in our living rooms every day for the next four years seems appalling.
Plus Americans like the new thing. Dynasts such as Dubya win in squeakers even against lame opponents. We are cynical, but hope stays alive that perhaps some politician will surprise us.
‘hope stays alive that perhaps some politician will surprise us’
… a toxic illusion promoted by the depublicrat duopoly.
Their mission in life is to derail real reformers by any means necessary.
Those responsible for bread and circuses know that you have to keep giving them new shows.
They have seen Nixon and Star Wars.
You have to give them something different.
A candidate who also ignored advice from technical advisers on communications security so she could use her Blackberry for her own comfort and convenience.
L’etat c’est moi.
As I recall, in Greek tragedies, hubris always invokes nemesis.
We shall see.
Comrade Jim;
Throw in the fact that the post New Deal safety nets are being dismantled and one has the ingreedients for a “Pitchforks and Torches Stew.” SNAP is being downsized without a concomitant increase in wages and benefits. The result will be more starving people, or, at the least, hungry people. Starving people are a fertile recruiting ground for ‘angry mobs.’
The ‘elites’ aren’t as smart as they seem to think they are. F Roosevelt pushed through the New Deal in part to save his social class from its’ own stupidity. By dismantling those reforms, all the 1% are left with is, stupidity.
As has been pointed out many times, and usually denounced as ‘fringe’ thinking, the Constitution of the United States is really a template, a guide for the oppressed. The famous quote by A Lincoln about “fooling all of the people some of the time” is not often taken to its’ logical conclusion. What happens when “all of the people” suddenly wake up to the deception being played upon them? I suspect that that front rank of chateaux burners will be mainly populated by hungry people.
See you at the barricade.
Our so-called elites operate on the monkey brain level of “too much is never enough.” They figure they can always get some economist stooge like Milton Friedman to make their choices sound rational.
And of course we all do things out of selfish motives. The problem is when individuals acquire enough power to distort society (or fry the planet) as a result.
FDR’s polio struggles gave him what so many of our privileged lack–character. He was able to see outside of himself.
My hopes are pined on those barricades. We’ll see. But there may be a few more twists and turns in this than you anticipate. The one thing Lincoln never fully addressed is that you can apparently fool just enough of the people just enough of the time – due largely to modern propaganda, partly to human nature, and to the fact that you have a new generation every 25 years, or – put another way – a fresh new malleable group of minds to start bending every 12.5 years.
Brooklin Bridge
June 12, 2016 at 12:10 pm
“…is that you can apparently fool just enough of the people just enough of the time…”
Undoubtedly, propaganda techniques and research into how to make it more effective has probably increased exponentially increased over the years. Considering that everything every politician says is Kabuki raised to the 5th dimension, I’m pretty sure we are living in the Matrix. Only the programmers aren’t as benevolent as the ones Neo faced, and are giving us Hillary…
Food stamps are being downsized?!
Lambert;
This is the best I can come up with quickly, and I self filtered for ‘tinfoil hat’ sites. I know it’s HuffPoo, but, there it is.
This is not so much a ‘downsizing’ as the re-imposition of a previously ‘worked around’ Dickensian Policy.
All of the details mesh with much favoured themes of the manipulation of numbers and ‘Spin Doctoring’ in general.
See:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/05/food-stamp-enrollment_n_6419196.html
Ambrit, (Atl.Ga) my brothers stamps have been shaved twice in the last 17mos. (yes the one with cancer now weighing in at 108) you asked yesterday if i had access to this program but i don’t…my mothers money blows the cap and sharing same address would flag me. oh and they consider back child support as income (even tho i seldom receive 100.00 mo of over 40k owed…schmucks started Double taxing my 100.00. can you imagine taking a kids child support…NU LO)
That bit about the back owed child support is the cherry on the icing on the cake. Be strong, you’re not alone.
Appalling.
another example of the frogs being slow boiled. So many frogs in so many different pots….but Davos man can’t figure out why people are upset at 4.9% unemployment…
Well put (to say the least). You raise an interesting point with the Tiananmen Square comparison. We clearly have far better propaganda embedded in virtually every part of our lives; everything from brick and mortar sales to cinema, tV, the weather, to advertising, to education, to the MSM than the Chineese ever had. Every last thing from product to ideology – right or left doesn’t matter as much as one would like to think (granted this is changing for both right and left) – is saturated with preposterous exceptionalism. Being fooled inside out has become an All American pastime. The government doesn’t have to impose it on it’s citizens; they seem to beg for it; No such thing as beer that tastes too much like donkey piss for me, let’s take it down another notch!
This, if anything, is why foreign corporations (and countries as if they still mattered) have a sort of bewildered grudging respect for USA. The apparent appetite for being lied to and manipulated is simply staggering.
So when you say Americans are troubled, you cover a lot of ground. Indeed, a small cadre of them are outraged, a larger group are in a transition, and the bulk of them are starting to notice or not. Troubled is a good way of capturing that ambiguity, but perhaps doesn’t quite describe the distance we have yet to go.
Many Americans saw photos of the Bartholdi statue at Tiananmen Square and superficially assumed, “They admire us, and want to be democratic like us.”
But people don’t hit the streets over abstract principles. Many protesters at Tiananmen were enraged by the exorbitant privilege of Party “princelings,” with their economic entitlement and their de facto legal impunity.
Faced with the unapologetic operation of the U.S. two-track justice system, in which banksters and federal officials are exempt from accountability, the American myth of “equal treatment before the law” is crumbling before our eyes.
Then what may well happen is that the Chinese and Americans swap tactics; the Americans coming ever closer to raw Tiananmen Square methods of getting our two track justice system right in our minds while the Chinese copy American know how in the art of inducing the population to think it’s Democratically behind the wheel producing the bilge water it gets and just needs to tweak a few lessor of evil knobs to get the champagne it deserves.
For some reason, It always struck me the Chineese would be better at this sort of thing than than we are anyway – but hey, go figure. Probably just my prejudices showing.
Watch for restrictions on the internet, free speech, assembly and so on becoming more and more pronounced with ever less plausible excuses.
The internet of things is going to be a godsend to our overlords for keeping tabs on progress. The trick is to do it all slowly.
Watch how dissent of any kind is treated at the two Party Conventions this summer. That will tell the tale. I’m already reading about the fencing going up around Philadelphia.
See:http://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/Wells-Fargo-Center-Xfinity-Live-to-Be-Inside-Perimeter-Secret-Service-Says-382433501.html
Cleveland had a release of their ‘shopping list’ for the Republican Convention. Some interesting stuff in there.
See:http://www.cleveland.com/rnc-2016/index.ssf/2016/03/cleveland_seeking_to_buy_riot.html
There was also a squib about surveillance cameras, and uses thereof.
See:http://www.cleveland19.com/story/31841545/is-cleveland-camera-ready-for-gop-convention
We live in interesting times.
Brooklin Bridge
June 12, 2016 at 1:30 pm
“Watch for restrictions on the internet, free speech, assembly and so on becoming more and more pronounced with ever less plausible excuses.”
the first time I heard of “free speech zones” around political conventions I though it was satire…
I think we went down that road of more pronounced restrictions on freedom long ago…and we have been careening down that path for decades now – if we haven’t busted through the earth’s crust and descended into Hell and past Beelzebub, than it is coming up right soon…
All too true! But I think a lot more can and will be done in that area. It’s like neoliberalism; it starts with a plausible theory that isn’t without some merit and over time morphs into something deadly; in this case round four of the ninth circle of Dante’s hell seems fitting, treachery to one’s benefactors.
The internet of things – all things from cars to toasters to pencils to your underwear is fertile territory. First to gather data; later to control or guide your decisions. Requirements that one belong to social media, that one use particular means of payments and so on. There is no end to the depth of mischief and depravity they can go.
Exactly. Deng Xiaoping had said “Let some people get rich first” and the Party “princelings” were getting richer first. The Party’s response to 1989 was, really, the same as FDR’s: improve the economic conditions for most people as a trade-off for preserving the system. Our élites not only won’t do that, they can’t acknowledge that anything needs changing at all.
Brooklin Bridge
“For some reason, It always struck me the Chineese would be better at this sort of thing than than we are”
I think the Chinese are better at this sort of thing than we are: in Chinese philosophy, the Mandate of Heaven granted emperors the right to rule based on their ability to govern well; that a ruler was overthrown was taken by itself as an indication that the ruler had lost the Mandate of Heaven. It’s not like in the West where the right to rule has very little to do with governing well—it only has to do with who chooses the ruler (God, as in the divine right of kings or the governed, as in democracy)—and where revolution occurs against the context of the right to rule. Chinese leaders, from Deng on, have been “pragmatic” enough to ensure “stability”; élites in the US are more ideological than their Chinese counterparts and assume stability.
There is a phrase – Jingshi Jimin, (from The Trouble Empire, by Timothy Brook, pg 126) – “ordering the age and aiding the people.
“Those who embraced this moral commitment, which we translate as “statecraft,” understood that their role in serving the state was to mobilize whatever resources the state placed at their disposal to ensure that the people did not perish in hard times and flourished in good.”
“The power of this commitment was so strong that when a neologism was needed in the nineteenth century to translate the European concept of ‘economy,’ the phrase jingshi jimin yielded up the new word, jingji.”
That is to say, for the Chinese, economics imiples a commitment to public action, a commitment that places the people first and foremost, not numbers like CPI or GDP.
That is
Ordering the age = 經世
Aiding the people = 濟 民
And
Economics (ordering and aiding) = 經濟
It’s a different world view than merely extending the manorial management of serfs to nationwide management of citizens.
Here, their worldview is from the bottom up….according to Ming dynasty Neo-Confucians. (I disclose this because to some or many, Confucians can be quite reactionary).
Thank you! I appreciate that additional information.
There seems to be an underlying set of values in Confucian governance having to do with acting virtuously or serving the people—that’s what rulers should do, that’s what an economy should do. In Western governance—or maybe US governance, the prevailing assumptions are about how rulers won’t act virtuously, how an economy can’t have any normative principles. So the frames are diametrically opposed—people governing in Confucian societies are judged by how far from the ideal they fall; people governing in Western societies are judged against how lacking in virtue they could be—it’s a pretty low bar. When people ask “What does Bernie want?” they can’t imagine that he might want something that helps people or society, he has to want something for himself—say, some cabinet post. He can’t be acting virtuously; he must be acting in self-interest.
Just to add another perspective, and perhaps a bit of cynicism, I have noticed in my study of Chinese folk religion that quite a number of Chinese gods were elevated to the pantheon (or got their own dedicated holiday, Tuen Ng) because they were incorruptible officials or leaders. The fact that you could rise to deity status simply by being honest says something about the general corruption of Chinese imperial governance over the last few millenia.
Another interesting fact-let–Chinese has two different words for politician. One is used less often, and means something closer to “statesman” 政治家 (jing ji ga). The other 政客 (jing haak) is used more often, and describes your garden variety politician. The characters literally mean “government’s guest”. If only.
Lots of activity on here! This comment was in response to Jim Haygoods:
“Any resemblance between this squalid spectacle and a constitutional republic is not only entirely coincidental, but probably falsified as well.”
I like the way you summed it up. Well put.
good point bb.
so many 10 percenters are completely clueless about the extent of the rot. they recognize there are “serious problems”, they recognize climate change as the most urgent problem and may even be spending time and effort on trying to forestall that disaster; and they have no concept of how bad the corruption and looting and pillaging of the neoliberal takeover really is. they still believe what they hear on NPR. they have never been asked, in any of their many educational institutions, to consider the wrong inherent in the system qua system; they have been taught merely to do good within a system taken for granted as good.
this is human. when there is no perceived imminent direct threat to oneself/one’s family, it is so much easier to go on with one’s life as usual than convert to a different way of life that the choice (made half-consciously perhaps) is a no-brainer. one’s existing life depends on not seeing reality whole, and it is everything that comes with one’s “job” that “depends on not seeing it.” and strongest of all is the drive to ensure that one’s children become 10 percenters too.
this blindness in the 10 percenters is a crucial force. like most humans it appears that only experiencing a sufficient level of suffering will awaken their “interest.” they serve as a very heavy anchor of the status quo and as a group seem very unlikely to budge.
This is spot on and a more accurate description of what happens (at least within a certain segment ) than my cynical description of our propaganda society above though I’m afraid that plays into it as well and exploits the decency and good nature you describe.
thanks bb, & the last thing i intended was to point out decency and good nature. just that it’s good to try and understand the exact nature of the obstacle/battle: that between those who are really suffering (maybe the 40 percent?) and those who are actively hurting them (the 1 percent) stands this 10 percent who are disastrously, cluelessly well-meaning and are pretty happy with their personal situations and the limited worldview that gives them carte blanche to just enjoy them.
I think lots of people realize the NYT is not what it used to be, ever since Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and Clark Kent stopped working there.
I wouldn’t underestimate how difficult it is to actually get anything to happen, even if the bottom 9% of the top 10% are enraged. Fact is, there needs to be a persistently screaming press (like a sane version of Fox News) to keep things in the limelight, and then also an opposing political party to be motivated lawmakers to facilitate punishment.
We don’t seem to have that anymore. The Dem’s went after T.D. and back then T.D. was easy to hate as well – he was trying to draft us and send us to Viet Nam.
Nowadays I wonder how many of Hillary’s emails were addressed to republicans.
“lots of people realize the NYT is not what it used to be, ever since Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and Clark Kent stopped working there.”
craazyboy i differ on that, maybe lots of people do realize it, but far more really do not realize it and are not interested in hearing otherwise. tell them calmly, and they get nervous like maybe you’re starting to go around the bend. or they say sure, but… whatever rationalization they cling to to maintain their personal status quo.
what we had in the 60s and 70s with vietnam, middle-class boys getting drafted, media far less dependent financially on corporate life support, democratic party ditto–yes let’s not underestimate all of that. and so i would guess that if the bottom 9% of the top 10% WERE enraged, we WOULD have a lot better prospects right now. outside of their panic about climate change, they really are not.
i’m just wanting intelligent minds here (far more intelligent than mine!) to inquire, how could the 10 percent become outraged by all the rest of it? …do we just ignore them? do we engage as mentors with those of their children who are outraged? just asking for insight and constructive understanding.
The Vietnam reporting wasn’t particularly wonderful. Cronkite’s reversal was more about the war effort than the causes and moral reasons for being there. If we kept it at a JFK level meat grinder, I’m sure he would have kept putting out propaganda.
The 10% are certainly still comfortable, so they won’t grab a frying pan and join revolt in the streets, I don’t imagine. I sure wouldn’t.
But, being a single guy, I have to constantly remind myself that these people have kids and grandkids and may be motivated that way over what America is becoming. Like if a bunch of 20 somethings are living in the basement and then grandma(s) and grandpa(s) show up at the front door because SS got cut, Medicare deduction got increased, real cost of living went up a lot, etc….
Then GWB did train everyone that War is a tax break, not a tax increase. We are up against a lot here.
Then again, someone once said revolutionaries can always agree on what they don’t like but ,once obtaining power, never agree on what they do like. So there’s that.
Still too comfortable? Even in that group, except the high end, it may be they are too tenuously comfortable to risk brandishing about anything heavier than their pay check, and even then not in public. I could be wrong – the fear part could be happening further down the ladder.
aletheia33 my take on how the 10 percent become outraged is that they see both they and their children’s future’s blatantly stolen if not crippled by the activities of the establishment 0.01%.
They can see that in the present military debacles, they sense that in the ‘way too little’ ‘too damn late’ climate responses plus the vigorous push back against any reform in fossil fuel guzzling.
Maybe they hear of it in the way the primaries have unfolded but are yet to FEEL the enormity of that corrupted process.
We all FELT the ‘risk’ of future loss or the virtual actualization of it with watergate and Nixon impeachment and resignation cycle. Future-loss fear in the ’60’s came from despair and weariness of endless futile war and dishonesty at the highest levels of state. The music of the times resounded with that message: the eve of destruction.
Its here again more forcefully now as climate change is not a war we can ‘end’ as it has decadic and inter-generational repercussions. The messaging to the ten percent has to talk into where they are listening and that is maybe easier now with contemporary technology. Certainly Bernie Sanders messaging is resounding. They are staking their children at the roulette wheel and that is a fool’s errand.
If the 10% are the fulcrum on which change is leveraged then they are primed to lift their share of the load. Is it too late for Bernie Sanders to run as independent like a host of a rainbow alliance if he fails to swing the Democratic Convention? I sense that he could tip the balance if he applied the weights.
u.t. thank you, this seems like good insight.
i doubt sanders will run as an independent, though, as he promised he would support clinton. we shall see.
Her management style is imperfect!
i initially got the email scandal wrong too, for pretty much the same reasons. i started out the campaign opposing clinton, but as i’ve learned more about her i’ve become much more supportive of the idea that we have to break the duopoly; we can’t get the changes we need through reforming the parties.
might i recommend informing, encouraging and empowering kids…they’re plenty aware things aren’t ‘matching up’ to their parents and media tilts. they’ll need support to throw wrenches in the machines, while surviving on their parents dime. i got 21 to 24yros all over me out there…if they get off key (leaning towards violence) i throw them short spiffs of historical outcomes. Awareness is the Game…only then will the Solution doors open.
They deserve at least this much…while we bob in shark infested bloody waters!
i try to inform people, without getting into verbal confrontations. i’m not 100% sure this can get done without violence. most of the violence in the us has been more or less contained, (we’ve got the biggest prison system in the world per capita! usa!), historically, by the system eventually becoming more accomodating–unless the elites are fighting each other.
Agree with regards to Adults…young kids retain (i did) information from a caring and informed adult.
Look, all im doing is suggesting you watch. the age group im talking about are all around you and they aren’t impressed with ‘millennials’ either…show them their own compass. Never Ever approach & lecture them. one day i made a Aby remark in a checkout line…next thing i know i got 3 of them following me to my car, yaking their frustrations.
Awareness is the Game Changer…find a place to sit back, educate yourself and when a door opens casually put your foot in it. you’ll breath and sleep a bit better too.
i think the most effective tactic is just being very calm and fact based, if some relevant subject comes up. nc is a great resource for facts!
obviously, i tend toward humor & irony…i couldn’t have got this far without it. your correct in being real..they’ll spot anything less. i am so so proud for NC…yesterdays comment section ran a well oiled fact spit’n machine. i hope there are young lurkers and i hope they start posting…NC can handle it and deserves it. the rags out there only wish they could grow like this place has. i remember when17 post averaged FOR THE ENTIRE DAY.
Best Site Eva
Tru dat.
I’ve been considering the longitudinal turnover of the commentatorians and would like to reit an important poem, from Mexico:
Here’s the simple reality
America’s aristocracy
Already has MMT.
For them, you see
American society,
Is pure felicity.
It’s MMT for me,
And austerity for thee.
I’m young-ish, I think, for this place (35). Would be curious to know what the average age is of people posting here. I’ve always gotten the impression that I’m probably on the younger side of regular NC readers. I have a lot of interaction with people in their early 20’s because of work and where I live (Bushwick area of Brooklyn). I have definitely been sending my younger friends in this direction and I can say for sure that they are into it and becoming daily visitors!
i’m 54…love music and don’t shy from new stuff, an honest bridge.
I’m now 60.
Phyllis is 72.
Our children are all in their thirties.
Here in Central Mississippi, ‘steering’ folks to NC can be an uphill slog.
The secret lies in how old you feel inside. (I find internal self images can be all over the map.)
I’m 68, so was alive for the first attempt at bringing down the status quo, although I didn’t participate. However, I’ve also come to believe it’s less a question of age than of mindset. I only recently woke up to what I’ve been ignoring for far too long thanks to a combination of a family member launching a battle in the #waroneducation and having found NC. If one recognizes the need for change then undertakes to figure out how to implement same, that’s what matters more than age group.
I believe this in part because one of the things I’ve noticed since waking up is how desperate the establishment is to drive a wedge between the generations. That worked in the ’60s and ’70s because there really wasn’t a lot of the elders who weren’t happy with the way things were—overdosed on comfort and prosperity. That’s not the case now. Those of us who aren’t overdosed and addicted remember, and that means there are cracks in the walls of complacency that can be used to advantage.
23 reading for three years, only started commenting recently, I can’t quite remember which site brought me here, it was foriegn policy though so either moon-of-alabama, tom-dispatch, washingtons-blog, or zero-hedge (I know I know, but I was young and it does give some good info sometimes).
Whichever one it was i’m thankful, haven’t stopped reading since.
37. I also do my best to steer anyone of any age to NC. It’s all about the facts and great discussion.
About 325 or 326, give or take. I don;t remember. Perhaps another digit – I seem to recall very large animals chasing me when I was young. If Ambrit’s right, and it depends on how old you feel inside, then add another 2 or 3 digits. They were actually damned big animals!
My wife says I’m 68 though where she gets these crazy ideas is beyond me. She used to say I was four or five so go figure!
I ask questions and use this phrase: “Well, that’s one way of looking at it. But what if you turn it around and look at it from another direction? What is it’s not true?”
Last night a person at dinner said, “Well, I’m putting faith in the next generation to fix things. Things are bound to get better. Look at all the progress we’ve made.”
I said, “Like what?”
He said, “Like we are not sitting around in caves.”
I said, “Well, because of “progress” like nuclear power, we may be sitting in caves again. Maybe that’s a good thing. After all, we could sit around telling stories instead of watching them on I Pads. Oh, and I don’t buy the Greatest Generation thing or millennials are more wonderful than Boomers. Dividing people up by generation doesn’t make sense to me.”
Well, I ‘m not going to go thru the whole conversation, but to my friend’s credit, he said he had never looked at “progress” as a negative.
Baby steps. Baby steps.
Progress is so very subjective and based on our inherently subjective outlooks there exists two types of progress, both negative and positive.
To neoliberals (like Clinton etc.) gdp worship, wars, and trade agreement globalization mark positive progress towards personal and national economic, military, and power consolidation and the maintenance of hegemony both over people (domestic and abroad) as well as nations.
To much of the worlds people’s and nation’s these same forces mark negative progress.
Positive progress for the top 10% means negative progress for the 90%. It is still progress though so I think it’s important to differentiate negative and positive.
Positive progress for the top 10% means negative progress for the 90%. It is still progress so it’s important to differentiate negative and positive.
i’ll be draw’n that dark line for kids THANKS & HT
The other thing is that now people toss around the phrase ‘top 10%’ like it’s … the pinnacle of a big triangle. As if once you hit, say $120,000, you are right in that group with the upper 1%. But the upper income fortunes have expanded so rapidly that it’s a far more asymmetrical distribution than it was back 30 years ago. Here is one graphic:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
So a lot of us are racing after that ‘top 10%’ category, or even ‘top 20%’, but it is still incredibly far from someone with $50,000,000,000. IOW, the disparities even in the top 10% are enough to worry someone like myself who has read a lot of history — and has never yet seen evidence that societies with such bizarrely skewed incomes ever manage to function over time. They implode.
I would argue that someone making $25,000 is still closer to that $110,000 than either of them are to the billionaires. People need to think more clearly about how vast the disparities have become, and where they actually lie. They lie within the top 10%; it has simply ‘stretched’ to chasm-like breadth.
Any student of history sees this as a warning sign.
Yes, income follows a power curve. And it’s fractal: The more you zoom in at the high end, the steeper the slope gets.
This suggests the economy is a closed, zero sum system. It’s not. It is infinitely expansible **provided** you have resources. Reusing and creating resources has unlimited potential to generate new wealth IMVHO.
This comment is very much to the point.
We are living in a time of rapid change, following the successful slow-motion coup of the transnational kleptocracy over the last four decades. Many vestiges of popular sovereignty, concern for social welfare, and the rule of law still persist, of course, and this creates cognitive dissonance.
Many young people, like my own daughter, have learned to pretty much ignore the “news outlets” of the MSM. To her, Paul Krugman is as obscure as any minor medieval scholastic. Yet neoliberal propagandizing isn’t limited to CNN and the NYT. Movies, video-games, music, etc., often reinforce neoliberal dogma.
We oldsters need to live the values of resistance, so the youngsters see something beyond acquiescence to our horrible status-quo. Even small things resonate. The other day I overheard my daughter explaining to her friend why she won’t use the self-checkout– “that’s somebody’s job.” This little gesture made me as proud as any of her academic or artistic accomplishments!!
HT! door open, insert foot…simple. i love & absorb your post…smile n spread it baby!
Yes, I tried that with IKEA on a contractor who suggested I drive an hour and a half to pick up something there. I said, “You have to buy their crap and then put it together yourself. Better to buy something that an actual person made. Or to buy an old piece and chalk paint it.”
Ulysses,
My daughter loves to tell her friends how to sabotage (something to do with laser pointers) or to use the self-checkout machine to steal from big corporations.
It is no longer a moral issue with them, but rather is a badge of pride. You can’t fool some teenagers with MSMBS, or for that matter, PCBS. There is hope after all.
:-)
She’s a supporter of small businesses and walks her talk.
Pay every bill by land-mail. Cut all your e-payment connections. Show that you are spending time and money buying time for the Postal Service to achieve survival and defeat its enemies.
Oh for the good old days of moral clarity in 2014:
US officials say Snowden disclosures will lead to deaths
Needless to say, Brennan, Clapper and Flynn are maintaining radio silence on Petraeus and Clinton.
BEST Owl Porn Eva!
Veterinarians vs Med. Docs (backed into this): “IF you want to be a VET, you’ll find that it may require a college GPA equal to or maybe even higher than Med School. I know this sounds strange, but it’s true. I used to be an undergraduate adviser for the biological sciences, and I had a number of pre-med and pre-vet students. If you fall much under 3.5 you’ll find it harder to get into a reputable school. For Med students, the MCAT is equally important, and the lower your MCAT, the higher your GPA needs to be.”
hmmm what does it say that human doctors require less education than animal doctors ? i’ve always preferred a Vet over an MD…
i remember some prison got in trouble because it’s prison doctor was a vet. given the standard of medical care in many prisons, it might be an improvement.
considering the standard of care i’ve witnessed between my 82yro mother and KAISER…it might well be lifesaving ! she just this minute opened a bill from the big K and is being charged for surgery from a nurse practitioner for a broken arm…the PA never even saw her. a castman came in an wrapped her wrist. Vet sounds real good about now.
jesus christ. i just visited a guy with parkinsons in the hospital, he’s terrified of hospitals now–he has a lot of trouble talking and can’t write, but he received bad care in his last hospital stay and says they damaged his shoulder. i try to stay away from doctors as much as possible, and my gp is a pretty good guy, doesn’t seem to be motivated primarily by money. but, reaching an age where i’m not going to be able to avoid them much longer. i wish we had decent medical care in this country.
might i suggest (if you don’t already) get a health partner to escort you to the doctor…sometimes a life partner can’t do it objectively. it takes two to filter & address health…can be skeery sheet. maybe even consult with a friend online. if i ever run across a Vet black marketing human care…i’ll gladly pay him or work for him!
Animal care primarily is “concierge care” — cash payment; no insurer. Which makes veterinary a more attractive and independent career option than human care under the soul-crushing horror of insurer control and direction.
Surprising that the insurance companies have not made corrections for such low hanging fruit.
If ever I were to op for euthanasia, my preferred provider would diffinitely be a vet.
i had to have my dog euthanized, it was very quick and as far as i could tell painless. i still felt like a traitor, but it was the best thing for him i tell myself–lots of health problems.
Very compassionate thing to do when the animal reaches the end of a good quality of life. The important thing is that you got and gave many years of love, attention and affection.
There are something like 4 times as many accredited med schools as there are accredited vet schools, so it stands to reason that standards for admission to vet school would be higher – they are going to run out of seats before they run out of the most highly qualified applicants.
While it makes no sense from the standpoint of producing the best and brightest physicians and surgeons, it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of making sure all the seats in the med schools are filled: if you can’t fill all the seats with 4.0+ GPA applicants, well, I guess you have to go lower, right?
Things that make you go, “hmmmm.”
slapping head…i know better than to follow anything but the money. Thanks Anne
i just did a broad search for Med.School Closings…seems to be individually reported by states: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Medical+school+closings&t=ffnt&ia=news
Health care for humans in terms of difficulty is kindergarten level compared to what vets have to know. MDs only need to know how to treat one species, a vet might have dozens of different species come in the door needing treatment in the course of a year. Vets also have to deal with financial constraints that human doctors are trained to pretend don’t apply to them.
yes. i depend on my dog’s vet to help me decide how much $$ to spend on a problem. she is remarkable in her compassion for both the animal she treats and the human owner who is not one of those who can readily spend thousands to keep an aging, sick pet alive for a few more months.
her office charges a small percentage when the bill goes past 90 days, but they have never, ever bothered me to settle a bill. MDs used to operate the same way–does anyone remember?
she advised me not to adopt an aging cocker spaniel i was uncertain about because she was overweight and i thought she might have diabetes; in one phone call expressing my worry about it she resolved my uncertainty. the dog found a home with someone with deeper pockets.
also it sure helps keep expenses down when the practitioner has no interest in over-medicating. thank god for the good veterinarians. (vets are now mostly women by the way.)
Aby, there will come a time when more people will agree with you. A medical school in TX has already cut a year from medical education. Now we have the WSJ lobbying for it.
Needed: A Three-Year Medical Degree
With an aging population, doctors are in demand—but aspirants face a decade of training and a mountain of debt.
What happened to the link I put in? Why did it disappear? Maybe most people cut and paste the link into google?
Was this the link?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/needed-a-three-year-medical-degree-1455752081
Beth, you probably forgot to paste the link a second time. After you paste it in the link window, you need to paste it following the HTML link code. Some people paste different, more human friendly text in that position. Finally, you have to click the /link button.
abynormal
June 12, 2016 at 8:12 am
My zoology teacher wanted to be a vet, and in college I met a number of pre-meds who wanted to be vets as well – they all agreed that vet school was tougher to get into than med school.
But the real question:
WHY is the number of vets and doctors graduated DETERMINED by Big Vet and Big Doctor??? The people who would caterwaul about the market, and freedom, and how education is the solution to unemployment are nowhere to be seen or heard when it comes to this anomaly between supply and demand….
Funny how great numbers of vet and doctors from other countries would love to practice in the US, but than somehow our borders, when it comes to competition for lower paid jobs, is so porous it can’t stop a butterfly, but a doctor trying to immigrate faces a 2 mile high wall of steel and stone. Funny how we get ever more people for jobs where there are a surplus of applicants, but somehow workers that we are short of can’t be allowed into the country…funny….
@fresno dan…this is difficult to type but i’ll try. i’m living something the vet world would never allow.
my brother (Derrick) is very sick but not so you could tell so much. the weight loss is evident but he’s always been small framed. doctors decided he would do well with a trial that’s shown pretty good results. they were that sure…suspect for me but Derrick is willing to hang onto some kind of authority. it’s been a ruff go…blood work every Monday, treatment Thrusdays and Sat. & Sun. head in a trash can. this past week my older brother invited us up to his house on the lake. great time for all of us and mainly because Derrick demanded they skip treatment. The rep for the trial was present and warned the doctor (like Derrick wasn’t in the room) that the patient would lose points and worse could jeopardize his free 600.00 pain patch.
Have you or anyone reading this ever met a Veterinarian that didn’t show loving compassion towards the animal they’re treating ?
Derrick is leaving me his instruments and patiently teaching me to pick along with him. for my brother…the bravest soul i’ve encountered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6djaYISUFg
This sickening, abynormal!
I hate it so much. That a doctor would play games with pain or any other medication….. It is inhumane. I wish there was an organization committed to overseeing the compassionate treatment of patients. But, we have no one on our side when we really need support.
i’m sorry katiebird, my intent was not to upset but how could anyone not get upset. we are talking end of life here. hospice is falling apart around here and my brother is in need of it yet. maybe in a couple more rounds of this treatment. i smell hospice going private…they were a blessing while my father was dying at home. the head nurses were constantly complaining about admins running them ragged and dropping the ball on meds etc. yeah i smell profits yet to be obtained in that area. enough to make us real sick.
we don’t have anyone for checks an balances but we got each other and that looks like all we got. i’m taking it one day at a time between caring for my mother and brother/s. i could sure use a day at the beach…i’m only human and not educated in this area. oh well…
abynormal
i can’t begin to express my admiration for you, for the way you contribute here, and the way you are dealing with the responsibilities you’re carrying. you are an inspiration to me and i have learned much from you. i am sad for your sorrows. thank you for informing us about your thoughts and life.
Only once. An older vet near retirement put to sleep one of my cats. It clearly meant nothing to her. Last time I used her as a Vet. She was burnt out and I believe retired now. I assume she was more compassion in her early years.
The vet has it much harder. A med doctor only needs to learn human systems. We are all the same. A vet needs to learn multiple species of variable likeness to humans. Would you prefer to learn ONE physiology or half a dozen or so?
Re: “OK that Settles It”
I cannot understand why people bother with Friedman and Kruger any more. Their writings should be in the humor section. I would say the children’s section but it’s too toxic for young minds.
In a civilized society they would have no podium at all.
Trump the Uniter?
I’m trying to think of another issue which has united Friedman, Krugman, and Brooks…
They agreed before the election in 2012.
Every time I see that clip I cringe for Friedman. I think I’d go into hiding in Brazil or Chile…
For those wondering about the “clip”, here’s the link:
https://youtu.be/ZwFaSpca_3Q
Pedantic obsequious creep.
With a last name like Friedman, I’d consider Bolivia or Paraguay. Gulp! I almost forgot Costa Rica! But hey, CR is mainly pre Reich immigrants, so I guess I wasn’t too far off.
– Why the poor spend more on restaurants than all but the very rich
Author can’t do arithmetic. Just sayin’.
hmm 3 jobs, no grocery store in area, 500 fast food outlets…
okay here’s the thing… I agree with the central point. But with all the squawking about a math error in the Friedman paper, we have to consider veracity as a Bayesian modifier.
So why does Marketwatch, which should be reliable on addition, allow itself to be so sloppy on an assertion that the poor have it hard?
Indicative of ngas about subject material.
No economics wonk here, but that Star Wars intro was really funny. While watching it, I realized that thanks is due almost entirely to NC and its’ commentariat for everything in it that I did understand.
Your childrens is learning!
I thought Mark Weisbrot in ‘Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy’ has a good definition of neoliberalism and why it is a more appropriate term than similar labels like The Washington Consensus or market fundamentalism.
“”For these reasons, I would choose the more appropriate, if lesser-known, label of “neoliberalism”, which describes a set of policy changes that were implemented during this period. (80s and 90s). These changes include more “independence” for central banks, along with tighter monetary policy (including higher real interest rates); and (often indiscriminate) opening up to international trade and capital flows, while at the same time increasing protection for “intellectual property”; some measure of deregulation, including financial deregulation; privatization of state-owned enterprise; a weakening of the bargaining power of labor, often through legal or institutional changes; tighter fiscal policy, even to the point of governments pursuing pro-cyclical policies that cut spending as economies slowed; and not least, the abandonment of industrial and development strategies that government had pursued in prior decades of development.””
As an example of the effects of these policies he mentions that “”Pharmaceuticals that cost a few dollars to produce can sell for thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars due to state-enforced monopolies.””
Depends which IP you’re talking about. Musicians and photographers get their work stolen online and that’s too bad. Sorry about your inability to make a living, chumps. You’re roadkill on the information superhighway.
OTOH, there is the IP that belongs to big companies. It will be protected!
Good analysis of neoliberal infestation:
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/this-is-our-neoliberal-nightmare-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-and-why-the-market-and-the-wealthy-win-every-time/
Re: Brexit and not enough facts.
There are too many assertions and no facts. This is a fact.
Here is another fact. The United States does not want a Brexit. President Obama made this perfectly clear in the special trip he recently made to the U.K. just to enforce Rome’s will upon the English people and how this government’s “special relationship” would be damaged by a Brexit.
Here is another fact. The U.K. exiting from the European Union would be the first domino to fall in what has been the United States’ stated goal of one world, one empire, under one emperor in Washington, DC. This alone should be reason enough for a Brexit
Here is another fact. Globalization is just a cover for the United States’ stated goal of total world domination under the fiction of a democracy that never even existed in the United States. Who wants to fall under the yoke of a single ruler? Especially one like the United States, whose own house is governed by a fully-rigged, manipulated, and controlled political and financial system that is on the verge of collapse? Who wants to be dominated by a Rule of Law where that is nothing more than the rule of chaos, enforced by endless wars and war-mongering — especially upon its own people?
As an American, if I were a citizen of the United Kingdom, I would start looking for another ally, because the one the English people have now is the enemy that they fought in World War II.
General question: if words matter, why do “we” call the Privileged Few the “donor class?” Why not the “Suborner Class,” or something catchier for the benefit of ordinary people who don’t use big words? “Donor Class” might be pleasantly ironic for those with heightened political-economic awareness, but it is hardly a dog-sitter of a moniker…
Because we might make kebabs from them when it gets serious?
The “briber class” is easier to say than the “suborner class”. So in case that matters, I offer “briber class”.
“Approximately 20 killed and 42 injured after a gunman opened fire and took hostages at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, police said early Sunday. Officials said a hostage situation developed after the gunman stormed the Pulse Nightclub about 2 a.m. The gunman was shot dead about three hours later when a SWAT team entered the club NBC reports. “We are looking at probably in the range of 20 [dead], but we don’t want to give you an exact figure,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina said. The preliminary assessment: the incident “could definitely be classified as domestic terrorism,” Orange County Sheriff Jerry Demings said.”
ya know…not sure of the details yet (may never) but classifying mental health as domestic terrorism could brush a super wide stroke. we won’t recognize mental health when its in our face but damn if we won’t tool it. i watched Revolutionary Road last night (2nd x since it came out)…everyone involved in that film knocked it outa tha park! …well worth time to stream or borrow from a library
Latest report is that the shooter is an American of Afghan descent – that sounds very bad, whatever the underlying motive.
When you look at so many terrorist attacks both recently and in history it is very difficult to disentangle politics from mental health. Most lone wolf style attacks seem to involve a complex mix of personal mental/personality disorder issues, bad group dynamics and poisonous politics.
50 dead, according to news. Sickening.
it is. hanging around & taking hostages in a bar, smacks mental. Afghan decent by american standards could be 7 generations removed. consider also, the mental health attention for the survivors…oh wait that’s not even offered to the young, 3 days past a carnage!
This hasn’t even sunk in yet.
Let’s hold off
NO SPECULATION.
NO BLAME.
NO SPIN.
“Palm Beach Post first reported that according to state records, Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was employed by the US subsidiary of G4S plc, the world’s largest security company by revenue. The problem is that according to Judicial Watch this is the same G4S who has been contracted by DHS to drive Other Than Mexican illegal immigrants across the Mexican border to Phoenix where they are then released without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents.”
not too sure the puppets will be able to contain this one
Across the Mexican border to Phoenix? Um, that doesn’t right.
Another 200 miles to go!
But I’ve been wondering how our gun licensing system gives out permits to crazy people. Mavbe we don’t have the technology?
But, man, is this a grand slam-type media event: (1) terrorism (ISIS, domestic), (2) the gays, (3) political response and (4) chance to ratchet up fear on all fronts.
One thing I’m pretty sure of: great effort will once again be taken to minimize the shocking ease at which weapons are obtainable, and the criminally lax gun laws/regulations. And cue the “if only people in the club had been armed ” talking point.
Can’t wait to hear how Trump spins this one, but it will be ugly.
Maybe no TV today, for sanity’s sake.
why just today?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BofvfVPFbiM
Trump was gifted the same kind of rifle as was used in the shooting, an AR-15, by a gun shop in New Hampshire while on the campaign trail. link
What is even easier is to spread hate via the social media, or with deeds done all over the planet.
And when the collective mind is not well, is sick, the symptoms will manifest themselves.
The choice of weapon is a just a matter of will.
Violence begets violence. The 50 dead in Orlando is horrific — needless to say — but I can just imagine some ISIS foreign minister in the future saying “50 dead… but we think it was worth it.”
I see on Antiwar.com today that Obama wants to ramp up the Afghan war.
Will they never learn? Bill Clinton’s Iraq sanctions killed 500K children. That puts things in perspective somewhat. NOTE: this is in no way to excuse what happened in Florida. I am against all violence.
Pavel, the roof is leaking…”Palm Beach Post first reported that according to state records, Orlando shooter Omar Mateen was employed by the US subsidiary of G4S plc, the world’s largest security company by revenue. The problem is that according to Judicial Watch this is the same G4S who has been contracted by DHS to drive Other Than Mexican illegal immigrants across the Mexican border to Phoenix where they are then released without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents.”
Supposedly, ISIS did threaten an attack in Florida three days ago, and now are claiming it —
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2016/06/12/orlando-nightclub-shooting/
Setting us up for popular support of the never-ending middle east war?
Here we go, right on cue — http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/clinton-focuses-on-need-to-fight-international-terror/article/2593687
oh yeah, and never a question about what we are doing over there that motivates people to kill us.
“We” aren’t doing anything over there. It’s the U.S. government and military that are doing something over there. I suspect the killer was motivated by religious faith to hate gay people. As Voltaire said:
Miracle based religion, whether it be Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or something else, is a catastrophe waiting to happen.
i suspect the people affected won’t be so quick to draw that distinction. doesn’t sound like the shooter did. i’m quite well aware that many americans opposed the wars; since i’m one i don’t want these neoliberals and neocons representing us in washington or abroad.
Some Muslims, such as the shooter, are like the Westboro Baptist Church haters.
The media is calling this “the worst mass-killing in U.S. history.” And they are calling the terrorist, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, a radicalized, Muslim extremist. Who could have seen this coming? That a Muslim would go into a GAY nightclub to wipe all the infidels from the face of the earth.
Can anybody say “San Bernardino”? And what will happen? The government will blame the American people, because that is what our dysfunctional government does, when it is not taking these “refugees” into the country in the tens of thousands.
He was born in New York, I believe.
The revealing thing is that, on radio, some official who was interviewed said that Mateen was an American, born in New York.
Had his name been John Doe, would anyone on radio or TV feel oblige to add that bit of information, that he was an American, born in New York.
The ‘assumed’ need to add that information says a lot.
Check out this excellent interview of Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/dilbert-creator-trump-bitch-slapped-fox-news/article/2593496?custom_click=rss
That is brilliant analysis.
Wow. You’d expect it would be brilliant from the likes of Mr. Adams, but that surpassed even my high expectation.
It’s so much more thoughtful than the usual hysterical invective about Mr. Trump pumped out like oozing feces from “da Meedeea” and “Punditz” which to my mind is in fact so superficial, stupid and sibilant (I wanted a better word than sibilant that started with an “s” but couldn’t think of one in 60 seconds, and that’s my time limit per adjective) unreadable — and so I don’t.
Trump is so much more complex than his critics believe, and than they are. But interested readers can read the link and learn from a Master . . . (I mean Mr. Adams . . . and Trump too, to some extent that’s not at all trivial) . . .
So you’re saying you’re all being hypnotized? Well that explains a lot.
the other dot I’d connect with today’s links is the story on laid off workers getting bolder.
they didn’t seem very bold to me when I read the story. they seemed like mice. squeaking anonymously in the shadows of fear. If that’s “bolder” then I’m not sure what “rebellion” would be — maybe they’d hiss instead of squeak.
If you look at the world the way Mr. Adam’s does, which certainly takes a considerable intellect and perceptive ability, it’s easy to see that Trump’s defiance of any and all critics is a “Walter Mitty fantasy” (if anybody remembers that reference) that would appeal to the nation’s mice. It doesn’t take a lot of mind string to connect those dots.
I personally suspect Mr. Adams is very very insightful about what a Trump presidency would be potentially like. Much more so than all the foaming mouthed rabies riters who rail at Trump.
Things are often not what they seem, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to figure out what they are. Sometimes they’re only a vague probability distribution and other times they’re “just what we thought they were” if anybody remembers that beer commercial with the Vikings head coach.
craazyman
June 12, 2016 at 3:36 pm
From the article:
“He is doing a most interesting thing because he has to run for president of a country that is mostly dumb people who aren’t paying attention and maybe a few smart people who are. He has got to get all of those groups on his side because the smart people might have the money and the dumb people have the votes. So you kind of need both of them.
So what he is doing really is he is running two campaigns simultaneously and he is not hiding any of it. He is saying outrageous things because some people like to hear those and they’ll vote for him because of it. At the same time he is winking right at the camera and saying, “I say things for effect. I’ll probably be more presidential.”
Now, there is no other way to interpret that than the fact that he is being a little bit outrageous right now to suck all of the attention away from the competition, which is working. He is running as a common-sense conservative. He is basically saying, “I am going to do what makes sense, what works and I am going to do it right in front of you.”
So there is almost nothing about what he does that is terribly surprising. Even the fact that his facts don’t add up in the fact checking, in the normal world, what I call the “2-D world,” where people imagine that reason and data and logic all make sense, in that world it would obviously be bad to say things that aren’t true and to say them so often.
But anybody who is trained in persuasion already knows that nobody ever changed their mind because of facts. Facts don’t have a place in persuasion. It’s just what you learn. As soon as you think that they do, you lose your ability to persuade. You turn into Rand Paul. He is a guy who knows lots of facts. I am sure that he does his very best to make sure that his facts are accurate. It gives him exactly zero persuasive ability.
Whereas a good persuader — Trump, anybody who has the same training as I do — knows where the emotion is and knows how to pick the right topics. By the way, it is no coincidence that he picked immigration and jobs, the things that people are going to be the most excited about and get the most emotion into. That is the job of persuaders is to know what topics to pick.
=========================================================
I think this section is the most interesting because it deals with something that has taken me so long to come to grips with – what the facts are, and WHO says these facts are important. (i.e., “how to pick the right topics”)
Succinctly:
Who lies more – Hillary or Trump?
Whose lies are more consequential – Hillary or Trump?
Whose lies in the future will be more consequential – Hillary or Trump?
Is the status quo in need of incremental adjustment, or is it so no good, bad, terrible that it must be destroyed?
“Is the status quo in need of incremental adjustment, or is it so no good, bad, terrible that it must be destroyed?”
makes me wonder how MLKing might have considered this question.
no incremental adjustment can possibly be enough.
and
the status quo cannot possibly be fully destroyed.
MLK aimed high. way higher than anyone had imagined before him.
he did not reach what he aimed at.
he did not set out to destroy the status quo but to show the oppressed and outcast that they could liberate themselves. which they proceeded to do.
maybe that is the kind of compass we need.
It’s a good article, and it did open my eyes to some aspects of Trump’s m.o. that I hadn’t considered much before. However, it does not change my basic stance that voting for him would be too big a compromise of my ideals and beliefs. Maybe facts really don’t matter to ‘Joe public’, but the truth definitely does matter to me. And to keep repeating ‘free will is an illusion’ is disingenuous. I mean: define your terms. What do you mean when you say ‘free will’ in the first place? Everything’s a trade off of some kind. Free will or not, I know that I have a choice today, and that whatever choice is before me right now is mine to make. I mean barring coercion or loss of sanity or consciousness, no one’s going to make my choices for me unless I allow them to.
That Trump is or is not a master of the art of persuasion is not good enough reason to elect him to be our spokesperson. I can think of another political figure who was also quite persuasive, and had a whole nation hypnotized, and who also coincidentally had a similar focus on race and racial differences. That person got things done too in his ‘administration’. I know the comparison is not really 1:1, and I don’t think that the same thing is happening again, I’m just saying.. there are similarities and being persuasive doesn’t carry much weight to me if you don’t stand for anything but your self. Whether or not he intends to, Trump is serving one of the highest agendas of the real global elite, which is Divide and Conquer. Keep us all fighting along racial, religious, national, and cultural lines, so that we don’t unite and overthrow the oppression that is on us all.
The Saddam’s WMDs paper tempts fate by comparing Hillary to Geraldine Ferraro, of the 1984 Mondale-Ferraro ticket:
John Zaccaro’s business deals were penny ante, compared to the Clintons’ multi-billion-dollar charity foundation boodling.
We’re playin’ with the big dogs now!
“Pharmaceuticals that cost a few dollars to produce can sell for thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars due to state-enforced monopolies.”
What can be done about this? I don’t see either of the official state parties addressing this in any meaningful way. Most of us as individuals and as small or large businesses are being screwed to the wall by unfair state-enforced monopoly pricing.
Where is the push back? It’s one thing to have super high margins for discretionary choices. Like tickets to Hamilton. But this is life and death. We don’t let gas stations gouge during crisis. Why do we let big pharma?
I think that Schauble weighing in on the #Brexit debate is about as welcome as Tony Blair. Put him on TV fear-mongering about #Brexit and people will vote for #Brexit just to stick it to the old school German.
I thought the Der Spiegel article was going to be a seduction effort in a British-German love-fest. But no, it’s just an exhortation to keep quiet and stay in line. Not rhetoric that the average … er, English, voter appreciates.
$3,000 bail for a misdemeanor bicycle theft? That’s insane.
For what its worth, I have a bike that cost more than $3000….
So do I. And if someone ripped it off I certainly hope that his bail was at least as much as what my bike cost.
Don’t worry, he will get into the bail bond system, reneg on the loan, get another warrant, get caught stealing again as the crimes slowly escalate in tandem with the debt.
Eventually, prison… For life (or just enough of it to take up any meangingful time and drop an elderly homeless person outside the front gates).
It’s at times like this, I wish there were movie theatres showing great classics like the Italian movie The Bicycle Thief. If anyone is interested, Roger Ebert writes about it here:
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-bicycle-thief–bicycle-thieves-1949
There is so much to choose from in foreign film.
“The Bicycle Thief” and “Open City” and “The Conformist” and on and on in Italian alone.
It reminds us that the world is much more than our own little clique of imperialists.
Interesting read!
RE: Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations with her cellphone
Isn’t the SecState supposed to be the US’ chief diplomat?!? You can look at their website and it says ‘Diplomacy in Action’ right there at the top.
So what in the hell is the US chief diplomat doing authorizing drone strikes, whether by cell phone, semaphore or smoke signals?
Is this even legal? And I don’t mean John Yoo legal, I mean actually legal.
It’s undiplomatic to blow people up when, say, conducting sensitive negotiations with their host governments. You want to wait until the right time before committing outrages. The article says it was this matter of timing that led to the State Department interest.
Or perhaps HRC just thinks she has to have a finger in every pie. Calling for the killshot over her phone must have been quite the thrill.
Damn Carolinian, You Go
didn’t we used to prosecute gangsters for ordering hits over the phone? i’m just trying to keep track of the norms. i think they’re under the center cup, but the cups keep moving right.
Facts like those cited in the Salon article got ten WWII German leaders hanged at Nuremberg.
Yep, and got hundreds of others killed by ambushes and assassinations during the war. Heydrich comes to mind. Considering the underlying racial/cultural ethos that informs these decisions, “after all Mr. President, they’re only nasty little tribesmen,” the comparison with Heydrich is appropriate.
Reminds me of Churchill saying he had no problem bombing whole villages of ‘savages’ in Iraq in the 1920s. I can’t seem to find the exact quote right now unfortunately.
Remember, he was voted histories greatest Briton!
“Remember, he was voted histories greatest Briton!”
Hmmm… Voted on by whom? The Board of Regents of the Victoria and Albert Museum?
Plus, working on the idea that the victors write the history, if the Reich had ‘won’ WW2, Heydrich would now be a Culture Hero. Applying my example from above, “..after all Mr. President…”, Heydrich is a culture hero, of sorts.
By the British public.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2509465.stm
Unless there is a viable, effective (meaning we are possibly, in not probably, to achieve the desired result) third choice, Trump is the only one left to stop her from assuming the command.
Today on Twitter Stein mentioned a poll showing Sanders at 18% in a three way race and commented about his ability, then, to participate in debates.
It’s an 11 dimensional chess gambling move.
1. Join the D party and make a promise you will support the primary winner. You get exposure to gain national recognition and a chance of winning the nomination. If you lose, you are out of the general election when the D candidate usually moves to the right and you can’t do much about it.
2. Stay independent or join another party’s ticket. Run in the general election, have a chance at preventing the D candidate from moving to the right. Maybe you qualify to debate or maybe not. You ensure you are there in the 2nd, and the more critical, phase of the campaign.
3. Join the D party. Anyone can join and vote. Presumably anyone can join and run for the White House…without having to make any promises. Then, as a fallback, you can go to 2, above, in the flow chart.
Edited for clarity:
RE: Clinton approved CIA drone assassinations with her UNSECURED cellphone
So, Obama is campaigning for TPP on late night talk shows and campaigning with Clinton in Wisconsin, has anybody asked Clinton if she’s still against TPP?
I’m sure the two links were close enough for regular readers to notice and come up with the obvious question, but maybe somebody can suggest it to a reporter.
Where in the world do you get the idea that a substantive issue will be inquired about by the press? (whether anyone suggests so or not)
And if you got an answer, that it in any way is related to reality?
WOW, the USA Today article “Controversy erupts over Medicare observation care requirements” is unbelievably obtuse and unhelpful. Put simply, it means Medicare (MC) is dramatically limiting/ reducing/restricting coverage for a key MC benefit to seniors and their families. The rule changes would shift the costs for temporary nursing home care and for some in-patient doctor visit/test costs from MC to patients/families.
Up ‘till now I believe, if a beneficiary was ‘admitted’ to a hospital for at least 3 days, MC would cover/pay for a 30 day nursing home stay post-hospitalization. Also physician and diagnostic test costs would be covered by MC under in-patient admission status whether the patient/beneficiary had paid for Part B coverage or not.
After the rule change, patients assigned ‘observation’ status, although they may receive the same/identical services as an ‘admitted’ in-patient, will not have their in-patient days count toward the 3 day requirement for post-hospitalization nursing home cost coverage. In addition, MC patients that do not have Part B coverage and who are assigned ‘observation’ status, will be financially liable for physician/test costs incurred during their stay.
My understanding is that the rule changes how ‘admitted’ is defined. MC and hospitals have created a new classification – ‘observation’ status for hospital stays that will not meet the MC definition as hospital in-patient admission days so the MC beneficiary/family are liable for many more costs. Do note that “hospital officials” rather than doctors may make the ‘in-patient’ or ‘observation’ determination.
The rule change will mean lots of financial hardship/ruin especially for seniors without Part B. This is a policy / political choice. Hope I’ve interpreted this wrong but the neoliberal rule…. go die… seems writ large.
Most diminishment of benefits is done surreptitiously through such things as “definitions” and the like to not call attention to the fact that these programs are being “cut.” Insurance no longer means what most people think it means…it is more like the ticket to ENTER disneyland – you get in, but you still gotta pay for each ride…
This policy has been in use for at least 3 yrs. I know because a local elderly person told me about it. She had a friend who was admitted this way, then sent to a nursing home and the person ended up having to pay for all of that. Not pretty. But the word spread quickly as there is only one hospital in town and people learned to ask.
This system is soooooooo corrupt. My local hospital (the only one in a town of 40,000) put in luxury single rooms. Everyone was talking about how we didn’t need that. They said patients demand was why they were doing it. BS. As I drive around Wisconsin, I notice the elegance and size of the health care institutions. Compare and contrast with the schools. Sad, sad thing.
These are mostly non-profits, but if you look at their 990s, there are lots of folks taking away good money. Lots of $$$ spent on marketing, those mailed out magazines with the miracle cures, the billboards, the ads in the newspaper and on the radio. JEEZE, there is ONE CHOICE in town. And there is the constant remodeling and expansion. Makes me just ill. I completely avoid the medical system. I had to protect my elderly parents from it. Do you ever wonder when we will find out about all the long term effects of the pharms that people are being fed like candy? Another lady I know now has constant skin cancers on her legs. Her new doctor told her it was from a liver drug that she took for 20 yrs. He took her off it. Oh, and her liver panel stayed the same…so it wasn’t doing anything. Effing ridiculous. I want to SCREAM.
Re; Startup lets landlords scan tenants’ Facebook to check if they can pay rent
Yeesh!
I wonder how long it will be before all of us who don’t have Facebook accounts will be required to have one to conduct business, get jobs, etc, Either that or we will pay more and face discrimination in hiring because landlords, lenders, employers won’t be able to examine every detail of our private lives.
Failure to self-register for surveillance is a prima facie indicator of antisocial tendencies, if not worse.
Are you on the grid, comrade?
Good catch Comrade Jim. Now, what was that about states, Florida comes to mind, requiring people to be connected to the “grid” in order to exist?
See: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/03/09/florida-makes-off-grid-living-illegal-mandates-all-homes-must-be-connected-to-an-electricity-grid/
“In six months’ time, he can count every member of those families.”
i sincerely hope our gov’t is too dysfunctional to accomplish that.
fortunately, our public education system is pretty bad.
Are you comrade?
The UK is about to enact the so-called “snoopers charter”. There are surveillance cameras on every street corner, motorway and in every shopping centre. Everyone must have a bank account now or you cannot conduct any business between you and “their” government. In Holland they want to get rid of money so that every transaction can be monitored. In the place I live there was a gigantic sting operation between several government departments to catch potential “black market” businesses, costing thousands of £s. They caught 5 window cleaners in the early am hours. That’s it. Meanwhile, the Primo Ministro’s family avoids paying taxes via offshore accounts. Hell, I believe the UK police even found the need to “infiltrate” meek environmental groups – just in case like they wanted to do something radical like grow vegetables.
China is no more communist these days then you are. The UK, authoritarian wise, is much closer to a stasi state than the stasi state could have dreampt.
Go team capitalism.
There’s a special place in hell for Score Assured.
Any property manager who would use fartbook to decide on rent payment capacity will soon be visting the unemployment line or a bankruptcy attorney…
Despite 100 years of adding bernaze sauce to the meal called life, non of the brilliant geniuses on madison avenue and now sillycone valley have any magic insights except more free aol disks with the magazines…
still have a few of those drink coaster floating around somewhere…
And as for big bluffer, it is easy…love your enemy in such a ridiculous way, it becomes obvious you mean the opposite but computer algoze can not be recalibrated to figure it out…it has worked for two million sunsets…the clowns from illium are too blinded by their hubris to notice before it is too late to make adjustments in the programming.
If your going all wobbly due to Facef*k tracking, what in the world are you gonna due when its anal probe insertion requirement time???
Is it just me, or is the present environment beginning to feel like “The Man in the High Castle?”
Hmm. Maybe I’ll build a app that sets you up with a fake friend network of white-collar upper class people, y’know, the right people. That should be good for a while, at least until lying to Facebook is considered equivalent to insurance fraud.
As far as I can tell, you can’t comment on ESPN baseball conversations without a facebook account. So I am out. First time I have noticed a facebook account mandatory to participate on a major website such as espn.
Re: Obama-TPP (Vox)
“It’s that simple,” Obama said.
And just like that, “it’s a no brainer“ returns.
Breaking 50 people feared dead in Orlando shooting at Gay night club
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/12/us/orlando-nightclub-shooting/
Expect the NRA circus to roll into town Monday.
Watch the NSA Ringmaster take control, “for the public good.”
Tragic.
I fear the choice of weapon is not the main issue, but it is the mind behind it. The mind, as in the stress in the mind and body of the society, of the world.
If there is a will, there is a way. Just look at the land of milk and honey or around it. A suicidal martyr can take just as many or more, in his/her demented way.
i’m moving along the same lines Beef. i think it was early last yr., a businessman intentionally took an off ramp onto GA 400 (known around here as the southern audubon). plowed right into head on morning traffic…froze my blood. i stopped to think about what it would take to be so secluded in ragging pain, that you take that many lives with your own…i still come up empty.
we got deeper problems when we do FEMA & Paramilitaries jobs for them
Re: O-town:
This hasn’t even sunk in yet.
Let’s hold off
NO SPECULATION.
NO BLAME.
NO SPIN.
If you lived here in central Florida, you’d realize that that ship has sailed. This has been on the “news” since 6 a.m., non-stop. Every channel. Not even any weather, which is usually the headline.
Further on Henry K’s attempts to inflate the value of Khmer(ចក្រភពខ្មែរ not the ខ្មែរក្រហម) art holdings by Rockefeller’s Asia Institute. Since when has being a signatory to the Roerich Pact stopped the Uncle Sam from flattening any cultural site? Possibly as bad the bombings, Henry and Mao (and their puppets in Thailand) were partners in supporting the Khmer Rouge (ខ្មែរក្រហម) as a counterweight to the Viet, even through the ethnic cleaning of Chinese & other minorities, and then the extermination of the “new people” and cultural markers of the past.
“Laid-Off Americans, Required to Zip Lips on Way Out, Grow Bolder NYT”
From the article:
“He had prepared a 90-page manual for his foreign replacements showing how to perform every detail of his work.” And …”most of the 220 people facing dismissal had been required as part of their severance to train Indian immigrants with H-1B and other visas.”
This exactly fits my experience doing contract work in the Boston area for State Street & BNYMellon. Both places ask you to do elaborate “procedure manuals” for the simplest routine and robotic tasks which could be replaced by sitting with a trainee for 15 minutes or so. But instead, managers want cut/pasted pics showing computer screens with inserted arrows showing exactly where to do the keystrokes. I’ve been on interviews at State Street with the hiring manager going off topic and telling stories about “entitled” Americans reacting to having to train Indians how to do their job to replace them. Quincy, Ma has a huge Chinese population but I’m seen the number of Indians rise rapidly in the last few years, encountering them in stores, gyms, downtown, and public transportation.
When I submitted my first “procedure manual” w/o pics for dummies to a manager at BNYMellon, he didn’t like it but would not say so directly. He kept asking “do you feel you did your best job here” and I refused to take the bait and replied what matters is his opinion, please state your opinion, so I can adjust, and finally had to tell him to stop being passive/aggressive and tell me what he wants done as he kept asking if I was proud of the procedure manual and I would not offer an opinion. I doubt Indians on work visas “talk back” like that.
The pay the contract work offers varies greatly but most of it is below what I make being part of the “waiter-bartender” economy I’ve become a part. It’s unpredictable work but on an hourly basis very gratifying. That plus renting my basement in a split level home has worked for me so far.
Why don’t workers forced to train their replacements just insert a few little mistakes in the procedure or code that add up to a disaster later?
I’m not that tech saavy, so maybe it can’t be done. Couldn’t they insert something like Y2K that would be triggered by some other procedure?
They might be afraid of being sued by the company if something goes terribly wrong.
Then again, maybe some employees in the process of being terminated have done exactly what you asked about. It would probably be a mistake for them to brag about it publicly.
Side note from my hispanic professor: Only 50% of undocumented workers are Hispanic, the rest are Asian… yet 90% of the deportations are Hispanic.
Austerity appears as a policy designed to cut demand. Why would the US want this? To emasculate a new muscular China.
This is provably not true. He’s been married three times, and has children. I’d assert he’s proven capable of horizontal relationships.
I love the way the neolib cheerleaders come up with new word usages whenever the old words lose their magical charm. This election years few people still buy the old neolib arguments so the neolibs come up with new words. They pretend to be au courant with new argument when it’s just the same old argument in new buzzword wrapping. So, rethink their basic ideas or just find a couple of new words? Engage with the critique or try to throw people off the scent with new buzzwords? What to do, what to do….
Sorry, much as I like your snark, I’ll counter with the sociological outlook. Relationship implies two near equal entities ‘negotiating’ a mutual existence. Make one ‘partner’ a full blown narcissist, and the equivalence part of the equation goes to null. (I may be underestimating D Trump here.)
I may be underestimating D Trump here.
I respectfully suggest you are – an easy thing to do given the man’s personality, but a grave error, as a slew of erstwhile GOP rivals can attest. From May 16 NC water cooler:
o What’s up with Donald Trump and ‘the women’? Not what you might think | Yahoo News
To which one reader commented:
Granted, such “positions of real power” are not quite “horizontal, but still. Anyway, since when did the US executive-branch org chart ever have a horizontal line attached to the Presidency? That fact shows the faux-liberal pundit class’s criticism here utterly inane, if the “consider the source” angle didn’t suffice to do so for one’s taste.
To be attracted to beautiful women – that’s programmed by evolution…both the attracting and our (mostly accepted) concept of beauty, it being tied to fertility. \
Some men are lucky and can naturally look beyond that, and some work hard to over come, and can see beauty beneath the surface.
Re: It’s Time To Bury “Economic Anxiety” Once And For All as a Campaign Issue – Mother Jones. How is Drum’s drivel not a sly return to the “happy darkie” racist stereotype of yore? I remember when MJ was a decent publication.
Re: California saw surge in registration, but not in voting – Fresno Bee.
And NO EXIT POLLS! What a coincidence! /s
Lots of good links today.
Yea there may be reasons Hispanics are less anxious (like maybe more social support networks and really any number of cultural differences – and there might be something to learn there) but going from that to “economic anxiety” is just code for whitie wants to be boss is a flying leap, I mean sure it may motivate *some* Trump supporters, but Trump supporters has to be a pretty narrow slice indeed of everyone suffering from economic anxiety (the Sander’s campaign – hello).
How many whites were ever boss? And for that matter, I suspect less white women than white men were probably EVER boss. Gender isn’t even discussed in that hit and run stupidity, all whites regardless of gender were bosses once. When even most white men were never boss.
Huh? Try restating that.Editors are bosses too you know.
I thought I was pretty clear
1) Anxiety and optimism and so on is of course subjective. So level of anxiety doesn’t necessarily mean level of economic problems but would indicate perhaps various cultural differences in the perception of these circumstances and perhaps in handling them.
2) Most whites regardless of gender were never boss. In addition I suspect less white females were boss “once upon a time, in the good old days” than white males were bosses “once upon a time in the good old days”. But I don’t actually have data on that. I merely suspect so because I don’t believe we have complete gender equality and I suspect we had even less in the past. And non-married (single, divorced etc.) women as a category often fare pretty poorly economically. I suspect women have often gotten less promotions than their male counterparts regardless of race.
3) to go from whites seem to be more pessimistic about their economic future than Hispanics to concluding all talk of economic anxiety is about racial anxiety or worse is racism is just jumping to conclusions. Ok so maybe data tends to suggest economic pessimism is NOT A DIRECT FUNCTION OF of economic circumstances. But then what is it a function of? There is no rational attempt to access this. There is merely a jumping to conclusions that it is a direct function of anxiety over having lost racial privileges or worse of racism. That conclusion is pulled out of thin air. But in fact that argument has to be made. For instance you’d have to correlate say racial attitudes to say negative outlooks on one’s economic circumstances, but even then you wouldn’t have which way causation is flowing. But you can’t just conclude it because it fits your world view without any evidence to back it up. This is the very definition of irrationality.
Latest threat to online lenders: “stacking” of multiple loans
Hanson now pays nearly 40 percent interest on his latest loan, from yet another lender.
“I pretty much feel trapped,” he said.
(Reuters/IFR) – Many online lenders have failed to detect the “stacking” of multiple loans by borrowers who slip through their automated underwriting systems, lending company executives and investors told Reuters.
The practice is proliferating in the sector – led by LendingClub, OnDeck and Prosper Marketplace – because of many lenders’ hurried, algorithmic underwriting, use of “soft” credit inquiries, and patchy reporting of the resulting loans to credit bureaus, according to online lending and consumer credit experts.
Such loopholes, they said, can result in multiple lenders making loans to the same borrowers, often within a short period, without the full picture of their rising obligations and deteriorating ability to pay.
New revelations of loose lending could make it harder for the beleaguered sector to win back trust from investors who are already concerned about slipshod underwriting and rising default risk. The marketplace lending industry – which last year hit $18 billion in annual loan originations – has seen plummeting share prices and the retreat of some major backers, including BlackRock and Citigroup.
http://www.reuters.com/article/usa-onlinelending-stacking-idUSL1N19209A
it looks like many are buried in debt…but hey, why worry?.. O says all is well….
wow. thanks for this link.
jrs
June 12, 2016 at 2:36 pm
I think your point was crystal clear: only racial oppression is worthy of discussion. ANY discussion that RICH people are screwing the vast majority, regardless of race (dare I say it – the 99%) is just communist, homophobic, pedophilia ….(yes, including homophobia and pedophilia is just to show that any means necessary are used to disparage anyone who dares attack the rich….who in the illustrious words of Lloyd Blankfein, are doing God’s work – by the way, I forgot atheist….)
I guess I have a bad case of “middle class privlege”.
My youngest kid is always too busy to come over, or answer the phone, or reply to a text. I can go weeks without hearing anything. She lives 10 miles away.
That is, until she needs a financial bailout of some kind or other. Usually because of poor judgement on her part, and usually doing the exact opposite of what I recommended she do.
Thus describing why many liberal programs wont fly with the middle class. They end up shouldering the burden of paying for the program, but can not ask that the recipients quit making the stupid decisions that put them in poverty/bad jobs to begin with.
I love the way the real elites, the .1% and their hired hands declare that it is all of us, not them, who are the privileged people. That’s right out of Karl Rove’s playbook.
Look, your issues with your daughter are your personal business. Extrapolating them to the entire citizenry and economy, substituting your daughter and her inexperience, drug habit, whatever, for desperate people with no access to living-wage work is not only unhelpful, but quite unhinged.
It probably is how many people think though, and most people probably do not have the economic means to keep bailing out family members.
Actually at a certain point it’s a darn good reason the state should step in. So bailing an able bodied 20 something who maybe could put their life together and doesn’t may not be that compelling. I got it.
But shouldn’t EVEN our irresponsible family members have decent healthcare if they get sick? If his daughter was to have a deadly cancer, as uncommon as it may be at that age, should she die? We can’t necessarily pay our family members healthcare for them, but do even we think they should just die? (even if they have character flaws out the wazoo which we do not deny!)
What if one’s parents don’t save for their old age and let’s assume they could have but just didn’t, let’s even say they gambled it all away or something really stupid. We may raise our kids but we sure as heck never chose our parents. Do we want them to go without necessities? Noone wants this. But it doesn’t mean we are necessarily rich enough to personally provide their safety net.
I admit my samples of one or two may not be representative of the whole.
But in my experiences with family and people I know, the split between genuine adversity and unrepentant bone-headedness is approaching 50/50.
But that’s a judgement call on my part, which is getting out of fashion. The trend seems to be to bail out the screwups, no matter how dumb, or however non-repentant, or how often repeated. Starting with Wall Street .
Wouldn’t it be better if coercive deficiency worked for the greater good instead of the more particular good?
Government is not a household.
I wish the Pentagon was run on a household budget.
But it seems it is not a household.
If it was, Dad would be down in the basement making pipe bombs, while Mom humped the milkman and Junior knocked off a liquor store.
Ah, the levity
“t’s Time To Bury “Economic Anxiety” Once And For All as a Campaign Issue”
Gawd Kevin Drum. Apparently, because in a survey 70% of Latinos are feeling optimistic that their children will do better than them even though only 40% of them think their own finances are stable, that means economic anxiety is a white thing and its about demographics and white anxiety (read: racist worry that the dark ones are coming for their jobs).
Talk about coming to a conclusion and forcing stats to back it up. But whatever gets you to back Hillary is all good Senor Drum.
He and Krugman and Brooks make it clear that Hillary and the Dem establishment will not talk about jobs or the economy or any Main Street issues this campaign. Heads in sand.
Ah, and I guess they think by doing so that the bottom 90% of the country will somehow also forget to think about the impoverishment and misery staring them in the face. Heads in sand indeed. Heads in sand and Trump in White House.
It’s not that they won’t talk about it. It’s that they have an alternative theory of doing politics that erases class altogether, rather like “national conversation” except at Krugman’s chalkboard (I saw this in extreme form on the twitter, with the claim that socialism was inherently racist.)
Just when I think Drum couldn’t be any more of a condescending asshole, he surpasses himself.
Shorter Drum, Krugman, Brooks, et al: “The proper position for the working class is prone.” That is another way of framing “horizontal”….
Yea a piece of information any good data scientist or social scientist would see as a starting point: hmm so why is that so? And even then always with caution if they were going to be rational about it, he sees as a conclusion.
I don’t know how much more irrational non-critical non-thought like that this culture can take. Congrats Drum you just won the making the whole society stupider award of the day. Many compete, few win.
“that means economic anxiety is a white thing and its about demographics and white anxiety (read: racist worry that the dark ones are coming for their jobs).”
White people have personal or family memories of functioning Middle Class society from the 1970s to contrast with their economic reality today. Most Hispanics have personal or family memories of coming from streets with sewage flowing down the middle of them and absolute poverty which makes their surroundings in the U.S. look stellar.
Of course there is optimism.
Nice apologia for NAFTA and unbridled immigration BTW.
One could look at this and suggest it is sometimes far more painful to lose something than to never have it (such as economic security).
Recent immigrants, whose families have not experienced economic security, would not see it as normal or expected.
Maybe TPTB are trying to peacefully ready most American workers for a lower income lifestyle?
One can suggest there could be overshoot on the downside, that way the workers can gratefully experience an improved future.
So lower economic expectations, move the reference point down, then let the workers appreciate their improved lifestyle
We couldn’t have Bernie, or even Trump, say something like, “It’s the economy…stupid!”
That would mean to Obama-Hillary Party.
If Trump never says, “Its the economy, stupid” than I will know he doesn’t actually want to win.
I assume Trump is saving it for the convention…
Lambert Strether: Thanks for the mention of les grandes horizontales. You are a flâneur extraordinaire.
I am reminded of some wisdom from La Belle Otero:
But to introduce her, at least according to Wikipedia, “Six men reportedly committed suicide after their love affairs with Otero ended, although this has never been substantiated beyond a doubt. It is a fact, however, that two men did fight a duel over her. She was pretty, confident, intelligent, with an attractive figure. One of her most famous costumes featured her voluptuous bosom partially covered with glued-on precious gems, and the twin cupolas of the Hotel Carlton built in 1912 in Cannes are popularly said to have been modeled upon her breasts.”
To quote her:
La Belle Otero addressing Colette, “ Don’t forget that there is always a moment in a man’s life, even if he’s a miser, when he opens his hand wide…”
“The moment of passion?” [Colette, naively]
“No. The moment when you twist his wrist.
And then:
“[La Belle Otero] added, ‘like this,’ and made a twisting motion with her two clenched hands. You seemed to see the blood flow, the juice of fruits, the gold, and goodness knows what else: to heat the bones crack.”
I am also reminded that Colette’s book, The Pure and the Impure, is an unsurpassed essay on sensuality, sexuality, and gender (although gender-studiess majors in the U.S. won’t get what Colette writes about).
I have read it more than once: Like any classic, it opens up a new world, and each reading of such a classic brings new revelations and new delights.
Like a female Genet? (Or he could be said to be a male Colette?)
“although gender-studiess majors in the U.S. won’t get what Colette writes about”
Care to explain?
Also looks like Otero was a lifelong parasite. Not a particularly laudable character. So she won the genetic roulette, big whoop.
Really interesting, DJG – where does the anecdote about the Colette conversation come from?
Keep Talking Greece: A vet treats humans. [A wonderful vet does his duty toward his neighbors.]
From what I have read, the economy of Crete is much better than the economy of mainland Greece. Can anyone give details? How bad is medical care on the mainland? Reports here at NC and elsewhere indicate collapse of the health-care system on the mainland.
Luckily, the Cretans eat a lot of olive oil. Maybe olive oil is the cure for neoliberalism.
No gynecologist in town.
But luckily for pets, there is still a vet.
It’s Time To Bury “Economic Anxiety” Once And For All as a Campaign Issue
this blog post regurgitates another blog post that regurgitates Pew survey results. I guess that settles it! Everyone shut up now about economic anxiety. It’s microagressive and uncouth.
I sense a very recurring theme from Clintonland, and it mirrors a comment from Karl Rove (who Clinton almost surely admires given how much of his behavior she emulates): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Reality doesn’t flow from facts, it flows from dominance of the narrative. If facts get in the way, you’re surely powerful enough to quash them. If this worked to start a war that killed countless hundreds of thousands after some tenuous yellowcake claims and so on, why can’t it work for electoral politics?
And so the Clinton machine does not accede to any of the demands of the Sanders semi-left despite his strong showing. The Clinton machine, knowing the establishment right also appreciates a good narrative to gin up their people, screams horizontal differences. Not only is this screamed, but it’s dictated. Sanders supporters are expected to get in line and accept her (good luck with expectations of authoritarian following in a principle-based movement, by the way! Project much?). The broader public, worried about intergenerational strife, are forcibly to accept this narrative and close their own lying eyes. Some of them are malleable due to tribalism being so strong and identity politics so visceral. The rest of them will be whipped into line and told they’re too white and too privileged, punched as hippies or told they’re traitors to their gender, _team_, race or otherwise.
Is the neoliberal endgame really an explicit severing of the prefix socio from the suffix economic?
Nicely said Ib!
“She (i.e., Hillary) is an empire now, and when she acts, she creates our reality.”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/donald-trump-mainstream-conservative/
“Ah, but what of Trump’s famously mercurial and vociferous temperament? Surely that sets him apart from his most ardent opponents. Well, not all of them. Take radio host Glenn Beck, for instance.
Despite his long and self-admitted record of mental instability, Beck became one of the most prominent faces of #NeverTrump, even after he mashed his own face into a bowl of Cheetos in a bizarre attempt to mock the real-estate tycoon’s famously orange visage.
The #NeverTrumpers should never have allowed Beck within a hundred miles of National Review’s “Against Trump” issue. And yet there he was, despite his past claims that demonic forces were trying to keep his Blaze television channel off America’s cable systems, that President Obama would soon begin putting conservatives into concentration camps, and that God had “ordained” Ted Cruz to become the president.
In the end, the voluminous attacks against Donald Trump from the right didn’t amount to much, and not just because conservatives have long been far less numerous than they’d long believed. The attacks didn’t work because they were so obviously hypocritical.
The time to stop Trump was in the 1990s, when the movement’s intellectuals were busy prostrating themselves before Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as they sought to remake the GOP into a party for white Christians. The time to stop Trump was during the George W. Bush administration, when Republicans swallowed the nonsense that deposing secular dictators was a great way to promote moderate Islam. The time to stop Trump was in 2009, when Sarah Palin was dumbing down conservatism into an alternative lifestyle that glorified anti-intellectualism. The time to stop Donald Trump was in 2013, when Ted Cruz was opportunistically telling Republican voters that obstreperousness was the equivalent of conservative philosophy.”
===============================================
Excellent at cataloging republican hypocrisy with regard to Trump – had a hard time refraining from cutting and pasting the whole article.
The republican elite, perfectly willing to accept the illogical and inconsistent ramblings of Limbaugh, Hannity, O’reily, and most insanely, Beck without comment. The O so disingenuous deflection of birtherism by saying “I don’t know where Obama was born”
Repubs long ago gave up reality – accepting that Trump can and/or should be elected follows as surely as night follows day. They have reaped with double miles exactly what they have sowed.
There is more than just a person, Donald Trump.
The ideas, the thoughts, the emotions are there in the society, just as they are within a single individual, with the right brain and the left brain, the rational mind and the irrational unconscious, all the love and hate are all there. It’s how it’s balanced.
So, to stop what they don’t like, they have to stop a lot more people.
“California could become the first state to ask the federal government to let undocumented immigrants buy insurance under the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.”
“Buy”? If your income is too low, it’s subsidized by the state taxpayers.
So is the uninsured medical care at the emergency room.
Yes, but the emergency room doesn’t pay for long term care, operations and hospitalization at taxpayer expense.
I’d prefer Bernie’s Medicare For Every American CITIZEN.
Perhaps the U.S. could simply bill every foreign country for the cost of treating their citizens in our hospitals, money to be taken out of foreign aid or bank transfer payments.
Of course, it would only be fair to reimburse foreign countries for the cost of treating U.S. citizens in their facilities.
Well ok, but what do you expect them to do when they become ill working for Driscoll at $7 per 12-hr day in chemical-laden fields?
Let them eat Cheetos?
Oh, here’s an idea, offer national health care.
Even after 200 years, it seems we can’t get it through our thick skulls that slavery, like torture and rape, indulges hell.
We also need a national test for sociopathy, to be administered before any election and corporate interview, to all seeking leadership.
Put them on a medical vacation to Mexico? In Mexico the government provides health insurance for $250/yr. I don’t know how good it is, however. But they were trying to come up with a hospital certification program – using US hospitals as the “gold standard”. OK, maybe that sounds funny, but it’s better than the “bring the gold standard”.
The flip side is Mexico told Obama they would happily accept Medicare payments, if Obama chose to make it so. Obama refused. Maybe we can get something going with Cuba? All the Americans that had their jobs outsourced need a place to go?
I shouldn’t comment when angry. I used to work in those fields as a teen, when school was out. Early lesson in demoralization.
I can almost see a series of EMT buses driving the highway from the berry fields around Bellingham WA to Mexico because $250/yr. Global economy in action ;-)
subsidized how? I don’t think the proposal allows them to benefit from Medicaid expansion or get ACA subsidies, only to buy ACA plans.
Right like they buy car insurance in Tijuana before they cross the border?
“But without drivers licenses, how can the undocumented buy car insurance”?
BUYING insurance is never a problem. They’ll sell anyone, anything.
But, as a condition of the policy, any mis-representation voids the policy.
They have no problem taking the money, getting them to pay it out is always the hard part.
And very, very sorry, no refunds allowed. This is insurance!
Change priorities. Personally, I’d rather my taxes pay for health care for anyone and everyone residing in the United States than drone bomb a wedding party in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Does anyone know, are we still paying $9 billion a week to sustain foreign military operations?
I remember Obama “mentioning” it in one of his campaign sermons, but nothing since. Bush also did it “off budget”, which means it didn’t show up in the official deficit, but it does get added to the national debt eventually, and yes, the taxpayer is at least paying interest on it.
What it allows is the government to reimburse hospitals for care they would otherwise not be paid for as the mexican national bails to TJ, changes name after healing and comes back, free and clear…it’s an old story in san diego. You’d think “it must be nice”,… until you head out to ocotillo and imagine yourself walking the desert across the border. Can’t imagine it, and well worth the thought exercise for anyone in the southland. Hey at least GHWB wanted us to be a kinder, gentler nation, now we’re pure hunger games with a protected class who can do nothing (that will be considered by their peers) wrong. The ACA is and was intended to be a stick to beat us up with in order to get a dollar to a crony. On the other hand, maybe they’ll make indebtedness into a path to citizenship? When are they going to build the wall to keep us in?
You only walk the desert in the wintertime, then it’s not bad. Plus the rattlers hibernate, which is important too.
I still think most illegals get thru in trucks driven by “coyotes” right thru the official border crossing. There is a wall there already too.
Apologies, I can’t find the reference, but I had previously read that the majority of illegal immigrants simply overstay their visa. In other words, they arrive as tourists, students, or on business and just stay.
Actually, I thought that happened too, just never heard anyone say it before.
Actually, I have done some research south of the border at stripper clubs. Sometimes when I find one that speaks English, in my exuberance, ya know, I say, “wanna come to America with me?”. Just for something to say, I mean. One time I was with one that was particularly well endowed and looked like the role model of what a stripper should look like. She shook her head and said, “No, your State Dept. asked me if I would buy a car and start my own business. They refused to give me a tourist visa.” Another time, the girl says she has a visa and can go anytime she wants. I guess it varies.
the apparent voter suppression in CA dem primary seems to have legs in the media more than that in earlier dem primaries.
“Legs” Yes, to paraphrase an old saying,
The “internet has a thousand eyes”, or the internet is a millipede.
(They don’t actually have a thousand legs, but it’s close enough)
links? I’m only seeing hillary won which means she knows how to win, dissmissive mention of uncounted ballots, preaching about how it’s easy to register but hard to vote(no question at all that there was a more nefarious angle), no mention of how difficult it was made, maybe that’s implied in the she knows how to win (by cheating)just more “those silly kids” nonsense at the latimes. Can’t link already went over my limit but not really worth reading so no loss there.
tegnost, sorry, i don’t have time to sort through such a large number of links over such a long period. this observation is more of an impression (note i wrote “seems to”), based on my close following of each primary, the berners’ complaints about it, and the amount and seriousness of both MSM and non-MSM attention on it. the MSM and non-MSM attention to alleged voter suppression in the CA primary seem to me to have been more extensive and with more engagement by big city papers (latimes, sfchronicle) than on voter suppression in the primaries that preceded it. it could just be the egregious size of CA. i thought it worth noting and i wonder if anyone else has had a similar impression.
I would like it to be true, the only article I saw today was that la times, and their evening reporting makes it seem like the coronation is complete. Warrens sudden vocality has me urping up bile. Whatever happens from here on out, hllary and her supporters own it 100%. The wars, the terrorist attacks (they created these conditions and intend to keep creating them) the tent cities, the trade agreements and associated loss of soveriegnty, all of it. And I’m thinking the nevada delegates had the right idea, turn your back on them, don’t discuss it with them, no compromising, no policy discussions, no brainstorming about how “things could be better if” because it’s bs from top to bottom. And then vote with vengeance, because continuing with hopey changey leaves me with no hope that anything will change. Apparently bernie is talking to hillary now about policy in some fancy la hotel. I’ll be staying in the country because the cities are going to be a nighmare. Oh yeah, and don’t go to philly, i mean really don’t go, let them set up all their riot cops and instigators, and just go somewhere else with no stingrays or facial recognition crap, just a big flash mob in some blm land somewhere. Don’t be her crowd. The la times article said hillary didn’t try to get big crowds, and quoted a supporter saying”why would i go see her speak”, while calling sanders fans deadheads(yep, sanders supporters are just a bunch of deadheads), following him around city to city so he didn’t really have support, which is just bs. she should have a convention where only her few supporters should be there. Enough with the stealing fire.
Let them see if they can build their own, if the hillary supporters here on nc are any indication, they won’t be able to do it.
Bernie4unsg ?? There has never been an american runnig the un…would dent idea of his leading a wave of change domestically, but the wave was coming…the sandman just happened to be at the curb when the light turned green….
he had been standing up, and waiting, for a very long time.
I’m confused about the title of the FT article: “Stocks under pressure as bond yields rise.” If I understand the article correctly, bond yields are heading towards zero and are already negative in some countries. So I must have missed something subtle.
“Bonds” are not a homogenous market. There are corporate and gov, then low and high quality among those.
Junk bonds- low quality corporate. The yields here are growing. No more easy PE money.
They are rolling the former junk bond money into “high quality” gov bonds, driving DOWN yields there.
Risk off.
The headline is a mistake. Several paragraphs of text and a chart detail FALLING yields.
Sloppy work from a paper called the Financial Times.
As for junk bonds, their yield spread over Treasuries is sinking like a stone:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BAMLH0A0HYM2
RISK ON.
SNAP news
http://downdetector.com/status/snap-ebt
http://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/more-than-500000-adults-will-lose-snap-benefits-in-2016-as-waivers-expire
being that that is an ole Clinton loop hole…Hillary should be thrashing an barking like the bottom feeder she is
Thanks for more documentation on this jo6pac.
Your welcome;)
jo6pac
June 12, 2016 at 2:39 pm
Its astounding how many people need snap
Its astounding how many people are being cut off
its astounding how little this is noted.
probably the most important thing posted today….
Sam Husseini has proposed a solution to the post-Bernie voting dilemma in this article:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/10/bernieandboom/
He suggests that Republicans and Democrats can agree with each other to vote for third party candidates. That way the chance of a Clinton or Trump victory hasn’t changed while voters can support someone with better policies. His website for this is VotePact.org
much luck Belgium & the rest of the EU citizens http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-06-12/it-begins-one-european-bank-fails-another-one-needs-urgent-cash-injection
The day the green shoots died. Again.
No press conference in sight as Bilderberg stays largely under wraps
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/12/bilderberg-2016-dresden-press-conference-meeting-silence
Here’s my candidate for 2016: https://twitter.com/smod2016/status/741008642485325824
And of course nothing can be found on this in the Dutch MSM. Why am I not surprised? You cannot have that ruin the Brexit referendum now, can we?
Sanders today
From statement to press (there’s video)
From press release today quoting what he said on “This Week”
“
“she may disagree with me as to how we get there…….”
Hah, Hillary wants a society ruled by the elite for the elite. I wish Sanders would stop lying to himself about Shillary’s intentions
I don’t think he is under any illusions about her. I think this is his starting point for the meeting on Tuesday. She will then reject all of this. He will then say again he’s in it until the convention. Then there’s his pending win in California, the FBI primary, and proof of election theft that would free him to run Independent (not that he needs it, but he may want it.)
I think he’s playing Rope-A-Dope. Not sure if it will work, but it’s seems like a smart tactic.
I think it’s his way of forcing her to fish or cut bait: can she – will she – abandon the semi-progressive positions she kinda/sorta took on for the primary run now that she’s on a mission to get moderate Republican votes, or will she decide that the future of the Democratic Party is in keeping the millions of people under the age of 45 who signed on for the people-centered Sanders agenda?
If I had to guess, I would say that if her numbers people tell her she can win without the Sanders cohort, she will turn her backs on them in a heartbeat. At which point Trump crucifies her for it.
If she turns her back on the policies that Sanders voters want, and then goes on to lose the election to Donald Trump (now there’s an ouch that will certainly leave a mark) she will have no one to blame but herself.
Sounds like letting Hillary become the nominee, praying the FBI has nothing, and then losing to Trump is one way to get the D party to give up corporate money, to transform it, and to change rules.
Go Hillary now.
Go Trump later.
“Your way did not work. Now, try my way.”
Or, what I am afraid of is, she wins the election on seeming to adopt Sanders policy points, then pulls hard right in February. Leaving everyone holding the bag (save for the DNC)
This is why I am not inclined to even give her the chance.
Once Sanders introduced policies that would actually benefit working Americans, striving for anything less is pathetic and lame. Incrementalism is an excuse to do little to nothing.
2016 is rhyming with 1992. Winter is coming.
I don’t think it’s really a numbers issue. I think she WANTS Republican votes and WANTS to hippie punch. That’s where her heart (such as it is) lies. And her owners don’t want to give an inch to the left. Not one inch. During the campaign, she hasn’t even been willing to pretend to back actual progressive policy. She makes pleasing mouth noises, and makes false claims about her own policies to make them sound progressive. But it’s been more word salad and misrepresentations than direct lies — except about TPP. I actually found it interesting. She could have, for example, said “I support Swiss style universal health care.” That’s got private insurers involved (albeit heavily regulated). So she could have made a real effort to claim Bernie’s turf on policy, while still pretending it had nothing to do with him. And still, in the end, delivered nothing. But she didn’t even bother. She’s been willing to stridently say no universal health care ever, yet not the reverse.
I think it’s Lambert who has argued that the elites are affirmatively working to condition the population to accept continuously eroding quality of life. But it’s more than that — it’s what she wants, what she enjoys, and what her entire class of funders and cronies what and enjoy. They’re where they are because they LIKE exploiting and oppressing people.
So I don’t think the numbers matter. There’s copious political science research showing that poaching from the other party is much harder than driving out your own base. There’s no way this is the most viable strategy from a numbers perspective.
And she already has turned her back on progressives. She told Lester Holt on TV last week that Sanders hasn’t changed a single one of her policy positions in any way.
Bill Maher addressed this weeks ago- moderate Republicans are a myth. The entire R machine is organized around hating Team Clinton since 1992. Those bonds were forged well long ago. No moderates are going to rally around Her Highness.
It depends upon your definition of “moderate”. What we have seen is an increasing number of neocons turn to her as well as older “establishment” types who either face no risk for endorsing her (Lindsay Grahm) or who are out of the party entirely (Bob Dole).
To my mind the Neocons are more direct in their rationale with James Kirchick stating:
(see Salon)
These people are more moderate than Trump but only because they have no twitter account and because their formerly extreme views have since been normalized by time. They are not, however moderate in my view given their wholesale worship of capital and war.
Again, I keep being reminded of Charlotte’s Web: “That pig is muscular!” “That pig is horizontal!”
Actually, about 10 years ago I heard second hand thru a good channel that someone who had actually worked directly for Trump for a year before getting fired, say that that was the worst year of his life. But that would be a vertical relationship. Bad news for Trump’s VP, I expect.
As far as horizontal relationships with CEOs, we are dependent on wifes, suppliers, bankers, and customers for input. Everyone else is full of crap.
Who is David Brooks to critique anyone else’s “horizontal relationships”? As a matter of fact, why should I care about DTs horizontal relationships?
Lets go to basic principles: Is DT more or less likely than HRC to drag the US into expanded Neocon Nation Building (what a classical Orwellian term btw) failed adventures?.
OPTI, finally caught your reply to my ‘flyby’ post….SAILING! how cool is that…glad for you. i’ve only sailed once but will never forget the feeling…the Real Bliss
12 red flags of $hillary emails…my my…all the c.r.e.e.p. type sycophants are lawyered up with
“mrs meet the press”…
married off in nantucket by judge merrick garland…
interesting…
noriega…
oklahoma city…
FM policy focus…
she can keep a secret…and use it too…
Well, I have always wondered what life under Pinochet must have been like…looks like we are about to find out first hand for the next four years…
Where do the Clintons bank? Just wondering who the new Riggs Bank is.
FDIC insurance deposit limit is $250K, so the number of banks would have to be equal to the number of Clinton speeches.
per account or per person?
Let’s assume separate speeches and separate bank accounts. Economists have done worse.
whoops. (slips on joke, exits)
Speaking of money, where is our judy hoback (miller) to stand up and say enough is enough…who will help us follow the money…??? Are there any americans inside the loop who care…are there any who “have any decency left” ?? The creep crowd did not accident her (not sure why not), considering they had no problems dropping an airplane out of the sky (553 chicago)…
so “judy” circa 2016, whoever you may be, we await your call…
It took awhile to find the information…
Wealthy Clintons Use Trusts to Limit Estate Tax They Back
By Richard Rubin, Bloomberg, June 16, 2014
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-17/wealthy-clintons-use-trusts-to-limit-estate-tax-they-back
Opensource is a gifting bank model, but contrary to assumptions we are not stupid. The capitalists and socialists used the Internet to print money, as a replacement for labor, surprised that they are replacing themselves.
Trump still goes full loony bin over “Islamic terrorist”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/breakingnews/after-orlando-massacre-donald-trump-says-it-shows-he-is-%e2%80%98right%e2%80%99-about-terrorism/ar-AAgX2Q1?ocid=spartandhp
Financialization is strangling the economy. Good discussion with Chris Martenson and Rana Foroohar.
http://youtu.be/z0VCkN3ixRQ