Evolution of a species also involves the bacteria it carries Science Daily
Thousands of deaths from hospital superbugs are going unreported, research shows Los Angeles Times
Global Economy Remains Mired in Swamp of Low Growth Brookings
Crisis of Globalization Lies Behind Deutsche’s Woes WSJ
Deutsche Bank: 5 scenarios for the German bank FT
Deutsche Bank races against time to reach U.S. settlement Reuters
ING plans to shed 7,000 jobs, invest in digital platform Reuters
The Italian bank job: modern sins at ancient Monte dei Paschi New Statesman (J-LS).
Sheila Bair Called the Financial Crisis. Here’s Her New Nightmare Bloomberg. College debt.
Colombians vote against historic peace agreement with FARC rebels WaPo
China?
China Balancing Coal Capacity-Cut Goal Against Soaring Prices Bloomberg
The left in Europe needs to change political course Wolfgang Münchau, FT
2016
I notice that as of this writing that Democrat-leaning Eschaton has no substantive posting on the Presidential candidates at all, all the way back to September 29, not that there’s anything wrong with snarky oneliners. I take that as a sign that campaign coverage is at or near peak bullshit. We can only hope. –lambert
Hillary Clinton Told Donors Bernie Sanders’ ‘Ideas Are Indefensible’ Under GOP Onslaught HuffPo
Sanders Says Clinton Comments in Leaked Audio ‘Absolutely Correct’ ABC. I disagree. Clinton framed Sanders voters as being driven by inchoate “feelings,” as opposed to being attracted by policies proven to be successful in other countries that would bring concrete material benefits to them: Single payer (Canada) and tuition-free college (Germany). Clinton’s views infantilize Sanders voters. Sanders should not assist her.
Clinton resets campaign schedule with Sanders The Hill
Debate prep: Tim Kaine’s ‘tricky dance’ of being a Catholic Democrat McClatchy
WikiLeaks cancels Assange’s live balcony appearance over ‘security concerns’ RT. He will, however, appear in Berlin via video link.
WATCH: Jill Stein comes on Salon Talks: “Stand up and fight for the greater good” Salon
‘Finally. Someone who thinks like me.’ WaPo. “Intentional 1 dimensional marginalized figure dealing with mental health served to upper middle class readers to self-affirm views” @Chris_arnade.
My dad finally is dumping Trump — but not for the reasons you’d think NY Daily News
Donald Trump hopes to revive campaign after tax discovery caps a week of ‘self-sabotage’ Kansas City Star
Donald Trump’s Tax Numbers Sharpen Focus on Treatment of Losses WSJ. Tax lawyers quoted.
Trump’s tax writeoff shows his ‘genius’ at business, advisers say Reuters
Trump tax return shows disparity in system McClatchy
Establishment Media Caught Promoting Fake Russian Story On #TrumpWon Hashtag ShadowProof
How Facebook Is Dominating the 2016 Election WSJ
Official: No ‘manipulation’ of data seen in election hacks AP
Maine could become the first state in the nation to have ranked-choice voting Vox
Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive NYT
Body Cameras Are Betraying Their Promise The Atlantic. That was fast.
The Not-So-Wholesome Reality Behind The Making of Your Meal Kit BuzzFeed
Imperial Collapse Watch
Fake News & False Flags: How the Pentagon Paid a British PR firm $500 Million for Top Secret Iraq Propaganda Common Dreams
The Wholesale Failure of American Foreign Policy The American Conservative
Guillotine Watch
Panic, Anxiety Spark Rush to Build Luxury Bunkers for L.A.’s Superrich Hollywood Reporter
Kim Kardashian ‘robbed of jewellery worth millions of dollars’ in Paris hotel Irish Examiner
Class Warfare
Big Data Shows How Wall Street Profited From the Financial Crash Newsweek
Where Local Governments Are Paying the Bills With Police Fines Truthout
Ohio’s fast-track foreclosure law targets vacant homes, but it’s not a panacea (photos, video) Cleveland Plain-Dealer
This Is the Backup Career For More and More U.S. Workers Fortune. The “gig economy” is now being rebranded as the “platform economy.”
Chicago’s Struggling Schools Made Wall Street $110 Million From $763 Million in Bonds WSJ
How the Financing of Colleges May Lead to Disaster! NYRB
Hillbilly Elitism Jacobin
The Lost Language of Integration Foreign Policy
India Ratifies Paris Climate Change Agreement NPR
Feds say they won’t evict sprawling North Dakota pipeline protest camp Chicago Tribune
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
230 comments
Comments are closed.
‘With plans too expensive and inaccessible for many, the Affordable Care Act will almost certainly need to evolve.‘ — NYT
‘Evolve.‘ Rich. That’s what gonorrhea bacteria say too, when they have the night off.
What do actual physicians (as opposed to poseur politicians playing doctor on C-SPAN) have to say? Dr Cosgrove would like a word with us:
Well, there you go. The goals of consolidation and crapification can’t be met with individual practitioners still in the picture, making corporate medicine look bad with competitive costs and personal relationships with patients.
Whatever happened to Hillary’s “single standardized form” for health care claims, her “duh, why didn’t we think of that” innovation from 1993? She didn’t tell us about the football-field sized back offices needed to comply with 16,000 pages of Big Gov gobbledy-gook. Heckuva jobs plan, Hillary.
And these metrics and regulatory burdens are all a result of not just letting your beloved “market forces” control the field of play? Gee, how is it again that the ACA came into being? That all these “metrics” come out of Big Data grabbing, attempts to monopolize the medical industry, regulatory capture used often to crush competing monopolists, and all the related deadliness to actual health care and health promotion that “bidness” engenders, like ICD-10 and the ridiculous contracts and payment frictions the “privates” impose? Where do the initiatives for all these metrics come from? “Government,” where the staffers, so many of them, are trained up and expecting to move on into the “private sector,” which dumps those training costs onto the public while agitating constantly to cut and privatize the “benefits” that were part of the attraction that brought people of decent competence and good will and interest in serving the general welfare into “government” in the first place. Along with constant messages that “government employees” are all leeches and burden-imposters, to be scorned and scourged. Who owns and runs “government,” hmmm?
And of course “the government” is, in popular Narrative mythology, now some unitary beast that sucks in (an ever smaller amount, cheers to your preferences and personal benefits) of “tax dollars,” relative to economic activity at least, and is (with some increasing truth, but only due to regulatory capture, corruption and abuse, and the sway of imperial interests over all) an “enemy of the people.”
Not to worry, though, the team you root for, while noting occasionally personally irritating indiscretions and frauds, seems inevitably to own almost everything, on the way to killing all of us.
Victory! Mission Almost Accomplished!
“Big government” is conservative cant for “something that improves the lives of people of color in some way.”
Can we just note our complete inability to face up to and even properly name our problems. Our Pravda says the ACA needs to “evolve”. We hear that our MidEast strategy needs “fine tuning”. Meantime precisely *one* candidate has the stones to mention the colossal Fed bubbles, the media takeover of the electoral process, and the smashed-in-your-face failures of globalist trade deals. Of course he is treated like someone who just farted at a dinner party. We’re told everything is fine, just “stay the course”, be “pragmatic”, and elect the female champion of Goldman and Monsanto and the Republican neo-cons. The world is in flames, financial crime is unlimited, 90% of citizens are going backwards financially, and we have to hear about what a candidate said about a beauty contestant 20 years ago.
Both/and. Trump can be the candidate who does those things, and he can also be an abusive, cruel, misogynistic, racist, and unqualified POS.
They are in no way in opposition.
Weird, isn’t it, Michael?
I mean, think about it. Thousands of politicians since the founding would have, in a second, sold their children into slavery for a realistic shot at the Presidency. Exaggeration? Yeah, but, only a tiny bit. “Power, Power, Power.” Back during the Nixon, Watergate business, when he was weighing his options regarding his possible resignation, people were wondering, “what’s taking him so long? It’s a simple decision, fight it, or, resign. See, easy, peasy. My Pops was still alive at the time (he was a Freudian Psychiatrist.) He was sought by our government to do special research on our returned POW’S, primarily from the Korean War. “Brainwashing” is what it was called, and it was a fairly new, and quite misunderstood phenomenon , so, Pop, being a somewhat, known authority on the subject, got his clearances and went to work for Uncle Sam.
I don’t want to go into all that stuff, but, I brought it up here as background, and to give anyone reading this the knowledge that his opinions weren’t just idle chatter, and, suppositions. Anyway, tying it all together, it was at that time that he and I talked about Nixon’s decision that had become, necessarily, imminent. The reason he was procrastinating longer than those around him wanted it to be was because, of all the desires a man may have (maybe a woman too, think Hillary) the desire for power tops them all, more than sex, riches, fame, looks, etc. That may also help explain why the rumors of him contemplating a Coup weren’t all that far fetched. We can all thank some of the strong egos around him (Kissinger & Haig come to mind) for knocking some sense into his, at that time, fairly screwed up head. The point is, Nixon, having enjoyed the fruits of power for a while, the kind of power only an absolute dictator, or, a President of the United States can appreciate, was really torn about having to give it up.
I realize my little essay doesn’t shed much light on the dilemma you posed, Michael, but, I wanted to point out how very powerful the forces, and, magnetic draw of Power are that are working on the two psychopaths currently vying for the throne.
Man, I gotta tell you, I am truly fearful what that bitter, vindictive shrew will do with the power about to be granted her. And, anybody who believes there may some scores to be settled shouldn’t be accused of Paranoia if they, suddenly, changes their names, grab their passports, and, get the-hell-outta-here.
More about superbugs
About Jim Haygood’s gonorrhea quip: “Gonorrhea May Soon Be Resistant to All Antibiotics” (Scientific American)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gonorrhea-may-soon-be-resistant-to-all-antibiotics/
CherrO Y’all…The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and that the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How though do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.”…gotta laff!
Yuval Noah Harari, קיצור תולדות האנושות
Confucian’s ‘ideals’ were and are mostly worth piss. He created a philosophy the ruling classes found convenient, so they endorsed it. Know your proper place, and all will be harmonious.
I will say though that his ideas on the importance of family have definitely been reduced to a farce. The Confucian influenced societies of China, Korea, and Japan seem to frequently disown children for being gay, or expel daughters who get pregnant out of wedlock, or put recently deceased grandpa’s illegitimate kid up for adoption because its very existence is an ’embarrassment’ to the family. So much for blood being thicker than water.
I’ve noticed how the most honor obsessed cultures frequently engage in completely horrific behavior. When you’re disfiguring your daughter’s face with acid because she had sex, the one without any dignity isn’t the girl writing on the ground.
Another sensitive and reasoned post.
And Prof. Krugman descends into the eighth circle of self-parody.
Also too, praise for Paul Wolfowitz.
If you think of economics as supposedly having to do with flesh and blood human beings, you would think that an economist who has won his profession’s highest honor would understand at least a smidgen of basic psychology. Why K. thinks that repeated insults and tongue lashings will get people to the polls to vote for his chosen savior is hard to fathom. In the words of another great Democrat, he must think we’re f*cking retarded.
“better to see the center-left defeated by the hard right … [as] in 1930s Germany”
How clever of the hard right to call itself the National Socialist party. Everybody thought they were going to implement anodyne policies such as building autobahns, banning smoking, and imposing sensible gun control.
Oh, wait …
Still at the old trope that because a Facist regime (which is politically defined as, yes, hard right) used the term socialist in its named in order to bamboozle some workers into thinking that the Fascist party actually gave a damn about workers when, instead, Hilter and his crew pandered to the industrialists and crushed independent unions?
I think you’ll also find that plenty of die-hard US Republicans were and are happy to fund US interstate motorways in order to facilitate business interests, and that many US conservatives are squarely behind banning cigarette smoking in public places.
Let’s be clear at this point both parties are perfectly comfortable controlling personal aspects of people’s lives.
The GOP is not only okay with banning smoking in public places but also telling people who they can marry, telling people what kind of medical procedures and medications they should have access to, telling people what kind of worship they can and can’t have access to, etc,etc
You’ve got Daddy Republicans who are indeed authoritarian.
Nationalist Socialism was socialism for the few, much like America has today. Socialism for the rich and socialism for their enforcers and administrators; free market sink or swim for the majority. There was no socialism for Jews, Poles, Gays, Ukrainians, Russians, Gypsies, handicapped and others; just free market neoliberalism.
Except the actual Socialists mostly didn’t buy into it.
PK telling us that the only way to defeat fascism is to stop thinking lefty thoughts is a good as it gets.
It seems that PK and the Democratic leadership have figured out that since we now live in utopia that they have nothing to offer as a voter incentive. Now the task is to shame the poor and dwindling middle class into accepting that this is the best of worlds. Once you accept that your betters are supposed to live a life of overbearing luxury and that you must make sacrifices for their greater good, the path to enlightenment will be complete. Reeducation from peer pressure takes time when it comes from above.
Once they get TPP and the other corporate empire rules, with their secret courts, in place the grumbling will no longer matter in any event. The rule will be one dollar one vote for corporations and all the bellyaching about justice or the environment will be irrelevant.
Krugman is a high price columnist. If Hillary doesn’t win in a blow out (not a big “if”), there will be media repercussions. During the height of the Democratic primary, MSNBC’s ratings matched their January 2013 numbers which were naturally abysmal as the election fallout had passed and team sports partisans tuned out. Krugman has not tarnished his brand over eight years when he went full Obama, often contradicting previous columns. The NYT is a money making venture and has to ask question which is does Krugman (any columnist or elite news presenter) do anything for the NYT readership that a Franklin W. Dixon wouldn’t do? For Krugman, his column gets him invited to the kool kidz parties, but without his column, he is no different than a random professor who once made a buck on a real estate investment.
Who likes Krugman at this point? Team Blue fanatics who want their egos stroked. If he changes course, he loses them, and if he loses them, he won’t rebuild because he went full Obama and lost readership. He has to know that at this point. Access for loyalty is his best bet to retain his column because “Franklin W. Dixon” can’t simply demand access.
Maybe we can have a debate between Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene.
After Prof. Krugman’s slow descend into being a shill for the .01%, referring to him as PK is quite apt as it is the usual abbreviation for 仆街 (a common curse phrase in Cantonese).
Well you’re getting an F from Prof Krugman arnt you! You had better buck up your ideas or you will be falling his course!
It’s been 40 yrs since I escaped from the CUNY grad center, so it’s a little late for that PK to F up my transcript!
Speaking of f*cking retarded, why do all pundits and politicians forget about the Electoral College? They’re busy hectoring us to vote for HRC and assuming we have a national popular vote while the candidates and their campaigns focus on a mere 7 states.
Why should voters be any less scientific or calculating than the campaigns? HRC doesn’t give a rat’s a$$ about my vote in Kansas. She doesn’t need it, so why should I give it to her? Because Prof K called me an fascist enabler? No, Prof K, I’ve learned from your neo-liberal textbooks. I’m a utility maximizer. I will get satisfaction by voting for the Green party. I get absolute zero for voting for HRC in Kansas.
Advertising dollars. It’s tough to measure how effective advertising is, but if Hillary can’t win big against a racist, clown (Hillary’s chief problem is this describes her), what does that say about the importance of a news presenter or Facebook algorithms.
If silenced third parties do well, ad money will look for other avenues or not be spent altogether.
Even on the Democratic side, elected Democrats believed Hillary would win steamroll to a victory, but with all the money in the world and the “best people in the biz” (she has the cast of the West Wing I her side), how did Hillary do so poorly compared to a reality TV show host? Even the densest of Senators will understand enough to ask these questions. Sanders did very well outside the GOP dominated South. Democrats will be asked if they heard Hillary say insulting things as time goes on. These electeds are pigs already. They will blame underlings, not themselves as often as possible.
How ironic is it that if:
Trump, simply showed up every few days, smiled pleasantly into the cameras, repeated some warmed over homilies given him by his handlers, had a half dozen, memorized “solutions” for the issues discussed in every campaign, “improve education, tighten up waste, fraud, and corruption, be a force for peace and freedom worldwide,” and, become a magnet, by example, for all those third world countries who aspire to become just as great as we are, if this nitwit could only do these few basic, simple, “any 8th. grader could do it,” tasks, he would, undoubtedly blow Hillary into the stratosphere, unequivocally, absolutely, and, irrefutably!
And, still……
How much does the voting public hate Hillary Clinton when the situation is:
about one month out,
polls, basically tied,
spent countless millions of dollars,
continuously, frantically, shrieking for more,
One Billion spent/wasted to date, panic on full display,
Deliriously, croaking in fear, “:everyone not “with her” yet,
All day/night, whoring for 100K+ “contributors”
“More, more, more,” “We need more!”
“If we lose, it’s your fault,” didn’t give enough
OTOH, opponent’s campaign tactics:
basically, masturbate publicly at Broadway & 7th. Ave.
fondling & fantasizing re: daughter,
shoeshine administered by a ragged AA
chomping a taco
taking countless selfies as
CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, Fox, etc, etc, etc devour everything.
Barring last minute catastrophe, she will win,
Then, god help the country.
curlydan, campaigns are run to invite the populace to trade their own interests for in-group status and to encourage popular psychological investment in their lords’ contests and outcomes. Why should voters play that game at all, other than the marketing campaign received at formative junctures through K-12 schooling and other big-business-sponsored, big-business-labeled forms of cultural participation? Would they not be better served to simply drag their “betters” to their lockers and strip and humiliate all the “better” right off of them? I think they should.
Because he’s a good soldier. He parrots all the memes that the DNC puts out to keep his credentials intact.
There is no way Krugman isn’t positive Clinton will win. He just gets off on spitting on the worker and the peasant class. After a win, his elitism will get even more deluded.
Krugman fails to realize that Trump is the major center-left candidate in this race. That’s how far down the rabbit hole we’ve gone.
Here is a corrected link for the shameful Sanders defense of Clinton:
Sanders Says Clinton Comments in Leaked Audio ‘Absolutely Correct’
I vehemently disagree with Bernie on HRC. That said, reading for context, it seems to me that he was rather specific with regard to what Hillary was absolutely correct about, and it wasn’t her entire speech. Emphasis mine.
” Bernie Sanders told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Hillary Clinton was “absolutely correct” when she said many of his supporters were living in their parents’ basements and struggling to find jobs.
“During the campaign we had our differences, but what she was saying there was absolutely correct,” Sanders said during an interview Sunday morning in response to the newly leaked audio of Clinton talking about Sanders’ supporters during a private fundraiser in February.
“You have millions of young people, many of whom took out loans in order to go to college, hoping to go out and get decent-paying jobs and they are unable to do that,” said Sanders, who endorsed Clinton two months ago. “And yes, they do want a political revolution. They want to transform this society.”
Another quote from CNN:
“Bernie Sanders on Sunday acknowledged being bothered by Hillary Clinton’s unflattering perception of the young Americans who backed his longshot primary bid against Clinton, saying their campaigns still have “real differences,” despite their joint effort to defeat Donald Trump.
“Of course it does,” Sanders, a Vermont senator, told CNN’s “State of the Union,” in response to a question about whether Clinton’s remarks at a fundraiser amid their hotly contested Democratic primary bothered him. “We have real differences.”
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/02/sanders-admits-being-bothered-by-clintons-depiction-young-voters-who-backed-him.html
The quote sounds much better in context. I think the Nader article from the other day explains Bernie’s recent actions very well – he’s playing good soldier so he doesn’t end up marginalized and excoriated the way Nader has been. If Trump wins I’m sure Clintonworld will still blame Bernie somehow but nowhere near the way Nader has been made the scapegoat for Bush / Gore.
While it turns my stomach to see Sanders stumping for Clinton at least he’s … hmm. I was trying to say something glass-half-full but I don’t really have it in me at this point of the campaign.
Sanders has clearly been offered something in Senate next term in order to continue defending Hillary after these revelations. Embarrassing he’d throw his own supporters under the bus after she mocked them openly.
is there a quote where he actually throws his supporters under the bus? i don’t think that saying they are in bad economic circumstances and want a political revolution qualifies as that. i don’t like his decision to support clinton, and i wish he wasn’t campaigning for her, but it doesn’t sound like he was being disrespectful in that interview.
It’s weasel language of the highest order, very subtle and potentially very effective. Sanders’ statement on it’s face seems harmless enough and in line with what he’s always said, but as I always tell my students, you can’t just divorce something from its context like that and expect no one to bring it up. The context here is the clear contempt in which HRC holds young people, and by not calling her out on it and by continuing to campaign for her as if nothing happened, he gives tacit approval to the claim and the animus it generates. It almost would have been better if he said nothing, though even that would speak volumes.
to answer your question: no, there isn’t, because he didn’t
Agreed. I see nothing wrong with what Bernie said there. (well, I do, from my perspective, but nothing related to disrespecting anyone)
The media is almost fully morphed into nothing but propaganda arms on behalf of a political class who clearly despise not just people like me, who loathe them in return, but also the same constituency that turns up to defend and turns out to support them. Who then read these headlines or selective outtakes that are deliberate distortions, and take the articles for truth.
He threw them under the bus long ago when he backed Hilary. Kind of like Liz Warren, who says good things about bank crime, then that afternoon stumps for the banks with Hilary Antoinette.
One could say he threw them under the bus and ran the bus over them amidst their screams of anguish.
Offered something … like a monopoly on the staging of rapidly depreciating gently used sales of F-35s?
In context it’s not as bad as I had been led to believe. I appreciate Sanders understanding how to be as effective as he can in the closing years of his career and expect him to continue to have my best interests at heart. It still goes back to the claim by Sanders that he can’t deliver his supporters, hill has to win them herself and she and hers have chosen to spin sanders context and shame/blame (see todays krugman unit) sanders supporters which is a hollow ploy destined for failure. I recall arguing this point (re:sheepdogging) to inconclusiveness earlier this year (hopefully not disrespectfully) with walden and oregoncharles and I imagine all of our views have evolved. I still think he got farther than he expected to and honorably left the field.
Thank you, Jen! I was getting increasingly annoyed with the misrepresentation and just about to hunt for the quotation when I found you already had.
And from the link: Clinton resets campaign schedule with Sanders The Hill
Sanders, who ran for president as a member of the Democratic Party, said “of course” it bothered him that Clinton said he sold a “false promise” to his supporters.
“False promises” that have “evolved” into her own policies now that she has become the nominee, and has been pushed to the “left.” Or so she claims, just as she claims that TPP is no longer “the gold standard.”
Sanders:
Clinton:
Note the denigration in Clinton’s quote. You don’t “feel” you’re consigned to being a barista. You are, in the same way that you don’t “feel” you have a broken leg, you actually have a broken leg. And the “revolution” (“maybe, just maybe”) is “appealing.” As opposed to being “wanted” on the basis that they’re seriously in debt and can’t get a decent job to pay if off and have a future.
Clinton’s reframing is insulting and vicious, and she’s doing everything she can to make sure that “maybe, just maybe” turns into “never, ever.” Sanders shouldn’t have given her an inch on this one. Of course, even his mild disagreement didn’t kowtow sufficiently, so he’s off the trail with her (a blessing, in my view.)
NOTE * Note that meritocratic perspective, as well as the qualification of “much of a.”
Look at the next link; Clinton, apparently, feels that Sanders failed to demonstrate sufficient ritual fealty.
???
Instead, her primary rival will now be on the campaign trail Wednesday in Iowa and Wisconsin instead.
“Wednesday’s Des Moines stop was added to make up for appearances tentatively scheduled in Iowa on Monday, October 3,” the campaign said in a release.
Sanders will be in Des Moines, Iowa, in the morning, and will host rallies in Madison and Green Bay in the afternoon.
“Hillary Clinton’s campaign announced Sunday night that it had canceled tentatively planned events with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for Monday. ”
Sanders has been denied the royal presence.
Remind me again why we’re supposed to give a sh*t about anything any politician says (including Bernie)….I keep forgetting. It’s just for the entertainment value, right? We’re not expected to formulate any kind of political analysis based on this stuff, are we?
Hillary says that she wants to set up a no-fly zone in Syria, and get super aggressive with Russia, Iran, China etc in other ways. To use an analogy, if a known liar and arsonist came up to me and said that she was planning to burn my house down I’d still call the police.
The time when America could use military diplomacy (threats) to bully Iran, Russia, and China is well behind us.
* Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz to all oil shipments, indefinitely. It will take them about an hour, and it will cut off a fifth of all global oil supply, crashing every Western economy the same day.
* Russia can flatly ignore a no-fly zone in Syria by supplying Syria and Iran with plentiful supplies of their AS-400 anti-aircraft missiles, and by making it plain that the price of them losing a single aircraft to American aggression will be Boston. Then New York. Then LA. Russia can place nuclear cruise missiles in Syria, Iran, and in the Mediterranean to keep Israel completely out of the fight.
* China, like Russia, is too vast to conquer or occupy. All America can do is nuke either or both nations to ashes, and be nuked in return, thus ending the human species’ time on this planet. Our Navy carrier groups already know better than to be anywhere near the South China sea when the shooting starts. They have no defense against salvos of sea-skimming Mach 3 missiles.
Hillary has no such options as she claims. She is thinking of fighting a conventional war. It won’t be. It will be nuclear from the start.
You sum this up nicely. The American approach is to create Islamic revolts in countries that have resisted Color Revolutions. Every nation in the SCO have sufficient radicalized Islamic populations to destabilize these countries.
Also, much of America’s “shit” is made in China. Shoes, food, machinery, telecommunications gear (phones etc), security stuff, more stuff, stuff, stuff….
USA brainiac economists, have created a country with no resilience, no redundant systems, but verrrry efficient- (super dumb, IMO) The USA helped win WW2 because it MADE lots of stuff. Now the USA does not make stuff. China has the USA by the “short and curlies” (pubic hairs)
If China stopped supplying chlorine, copper sulfate and deflocculant to USA water treatment plants, how long before the water supply would collapse? How about the replacement bits for the electrical grid??? And so on. It is very genius (sarc) to make yourself reliant on the charity of your rivals.
I am sure that the Chinese and Russians are quivering with fear at Hillary’s threats! (not)
Pretty much.
Who knows what he’s been promised behind closed doors and what his motivation is to stump for her at this point? Not me.
It’s cute though that we’re still pretending we’re a democracy.
I too read the depressing “Finally someone who thinks like me” article from the WaPo and forwarded it to Links. I agree with Chris_arande’s characterization but would add that while rich Post readers are wallowing in their self-righteous scorn of the “deplorables,” they will fail to note how the “Trump is s-o-o-o-o bad” Hillary ads will fail to reach these folks — or many other Trump voters. Not because the Trump voters are all as mentally ill as the subject of the article, but because Trump resonates so strongly with them, and that is amplified by Fox news [sic], and all of the Hillary scare ads. Hillary et al. are just re-enforcing the loyalty to Trump.
Now I’m off to read the comments to the article and listen to the readers congratulate themselves. [It is the Most Read article at the moment.]
Edit: Oops; no comments. “We turn off the comments on stories dealing with personal loss, tragedies or other sensitive topics. “
Coupla nuggets from Bob Hutton’s review of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy:
America’s political dichotomy could be described as the Appalachification of the interior vs the Californication of the coasts (not including the third coast on the Gulf, of course).
Dividing it up would be one answer. But then Cali and New York would end up like East and West Pakistan. Tragic …
As a Californian, I’m very happy to remain essentially uncolonized by New York’s financial elite; they can have their own country, thanks.
How’s the fracked water taste? But you aren’t colonized…
Bullshit were not colonized. Our water is set aside for trans-national farming corps so they can export their water intensive crops. Whatever water that remains is appropriated by Nestlé so they can sell their over-priced crap to the rest of the world, be damned our own. Our universities cater to non-Californians so as to collect the add’l out of state fees and our real estate is just another market exchange where regular folk try to get in on any penny stock that remains.
California Uber Alles
Anti-democracy natural personhood applied to corporations under the fourteenth amendment was affirmed by the Supreme Court of a 1886 California case. Personhood protection under fourth and first followed.
I read that WaPo story on the 52-yr old woman in PA who is so relieved that “finally – someone who thinks like me” is running for president, and I had two reactions to it: a combination of horror that I know without a doubt there are a lot of people like this woman who support Trump, and the number of people like her are growing within the GOP, and cynicism over the paper’s deliberate effort to create an equivalence between the candidate and the people who support him.
But then I realized that Trump latched onto the insanity of the birther movement like a dog with a bone. That he’s also alluded to “perhaps” the Clintons did have something to do with Vince Foster’s death. And I realized that these are the reasons why people like the woman in the article actually do see Trump as a kindred spirit.
Now, I guess the question is, does he really believe the conspiracies and crazy things he traffics in, or is this just politics? If it’s politics, someone needs to explain to me why he’s so interested in attracting people like the woman in the article. Is it a case of people like her being so distracted and attracted by their belief that he’s just like them that it’s easier, with their blind support, to push policies and an agenda that in the end are far more damaging?
The whole profile was disturbing. The WaPo’s decision to run such a long article that exposed this woman was disturbing and made me feel a little dirty. Made me wonder what she thinks of the article – is she happy? Proud? Feeling like she was used?
But then I go back to Trump himself. A man who says he wants to be president who spent the last week on a twitter rampage over a beauty pageant contestant. What’s his mental tipping point?
How much more of this are we going to be able to take?
Within the story it notes the number of people she has as Twitter followers and Facebook friends. You can see how these folks re-enforce each other’s craziness, spurred on by Fox broadcasts and late night religious nuts on tv.
They’re not reading [and being swayed by] op-eds in the Post or NYT. Yup, that massive advertising budget is really gonna work, Hillary.
Sure, sure, Trump followers are all “crazy”. As opposed to someone with “sane” policies like sending all American middle class jobs offshore, letting multi-billion $ bank crime go entirely unpunished, and pretending Muslim nations will act like American colonies if we just drone bomb them hard enough.
From another p.o.v., how can you and I get some killer PR like this? (Poor woman didn’t even manage to work her website into the photos.)
Most striking to me is the photo of Trump on a giant screen at the Republican convention in July. Thirty-six (36) U.S. flags are massed beneath the screen, with two shadowy armed security figures watching on either side.
In countries with a militarist past (e.g. Germany, but also in Asian and Latin American nations with a history of military dictatorship), national flags are seen mostly only on government buildings.
Our fetishistic, bipartisan displays of massed flags — not to mention the ones mounted on every telephone pole in many towns, which stay up all year now instead of being taken down after the Fourth of July — are straight out of the Nuremberg rally in 1936.
Make no mistake. The Depublicrat party is preparing us for another bloody war.
The flag thing…ugh. It’s right up there for me with all the God talk.
I hate it. And I have an innate suspicion about those who feel compelled to portray themselves as more patriotic or more religious – in other words, better – than those of us who don’t feel the need to be as vocal or as red-white-and-blue as they are.
All those flags behind Trump don’t prove anything, except that in true Trump form, he panders bigger and better than anyone else.
As for the woman in the WaPo article, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that she actually believes Michelle Obama is transgender, that Obama is gay, and that the Sasha and Malia were kidnapped from their real parents…and trying even harder not to suspect that Trump may be open to believing these things, too. I mean, if he can be the leader of the birther movement, I’m pretty sure it’s not the only crazy thing he believes.
‘Michelle Obama is transgender, that Obama is gay, and that the Sasha and Malia were kidnapped from their real parents.’
Likely these notions began as mocking, insider jokes. But they spread to people who can’t distinguish myth from reality. Same as it’s always been.
A neighbor of mine in all seriousness was setting up a shooting range in his back yard to prepare for a zombie invasion. He got popped for torching an excavator in a fit of rage. Now that he’s on stronger meds, he’s the soul of charm and politeness. :-)
Zombeez are not as bad as they are made out to be by hollywood..as anyone who meandered thru alphabet city in the 70’s & early 80’s in lower manhattan can attest to…
My neighbor is on medication for moderating his rage and PTSD yet somehow just got his FFL. Guess those military and law enforcement connections really pay off. I like my guns and all but it might be time to move.
These people are Obama’s best friends. They are his excuse for why his presidency has sucked so bad. “If only we had gotten some cooperation.” The more he appeased them, the more they despised him.
No kidding, how many of these memes were self initiated to create a larger synthetic context of persecution?
As far as the birther movement goes, i didnt follow it closely as my fundemental issues w bho have nothing to do with where he was born, i really dont give a sht, Ut it was (is) his strategic choice to obfuscate birth documentation to cultivate a perception of persecution. To be fair, by current laws regarding birth origin, it should be inequivocally proven up front so it is a nonissue .
I blame the Internet.
Republicans will say anything about Democrats, but those same Republicans are jockeying to curry favor with voters or gain some kind of unique standing. Now I’m positive you could find a person who thinks Lizard people people everywhere, but they would have no platform beyond a soap box in a park. Now they have the Internet, and those same Republicans jockeying for their place in the sun have to compete with the real looney tunes. If they don’t say “Kenya” and really emphasize “Hussein”, someone else will steal their thunder. Obama’s name and time spent in “Keenyah” and “Indo…I don’t know but it sounds funny” and skin color are just natural ways to go. If Gore ran against a McCain in 2000, you can bet there would have been email chains that started “I ain’t no senator’s son” where things would get freaky. 43 made that particularly difficult to do.
Besides wasn’t correcting people volunteering at Team Blue phone banks that Obama’s name was “Barack” not “Baraka” just plain fun..
Yeah, white people weren’t racist and had no gender anxiety at all before the internet.
Sigh.
Maybe you didn’t read the post. It’s why elite Republicans were saying it.
Sigh….can’t Hillary hire smarter trolls?
Yeah, white people would have responded with restraint and relaxed acceptance to an African-American President before the internet.
I find this thesis valuable.
But you’re lucky. People who categorize white people as a group using disparaging terms still aren’t racist. Count your blessings!
If I cared to dig a bit, which Idont, Icould post a couple links of bho basically endorsing the perpetuation of the birther meme as being to his advantage.
I wont argue abt the origin, I could argue he hitched his wagon to it as an example of his being persecuted.
I could go on, but he’s done and not relevant. What is relevant is HRC’s perpetual whine about being persecuted as a deflection strategy.
Hillary helped, mailing out racist flyers, but every GOP pundit picked it up.
I found a link to Karl Rove claiming it was an Obama plot after he couldn’t get Rick Perry types to drop it. Rove recruited Perry into the GOP after all.
Do you remember the long for and short for birth certificate? Republican electeds and pundits picked up on that.
I think my favorite was the idea that Bill Ayers authored Obama’s books. There was a whole cottage industry as Republicans had to compete.
Yes some real groaners, the Rs have nore than their fair share of idiots.
Bill Ayers, a spoiled dillitante child of a US Steel exec ftom Glen Elynn (an uppermiddlr class western burb.)
Such an anarchist he recieved an annenburg grant iirc and has a very nice UofI pension.
Speaking of Nuremberg, this from the links above:
The left in Europe needs to change political course Wolfgang Münchau, FT
Speaking of flags:
A few weeks ago I was endangered while riding my bike by some yahoo in a giant Dodge pickup which had two huge flags flying in the rear bed: a Confederate flag and a US flag in black and white with one blue stripe. Later that week, I saw the same truck going at some crazy speed on US 80 in NNJ (NYC metro area). So I had to look up this modified flag, and it is apparently showing respect for ‘law enforcers’ – the thin blue line. There is a whole family of these flags with various color stripes denoting support for various ‘heroic’ macho occupations. What a great idea: show your respect for the law by breaking them!
Reminds me of the days when a certain colored bandana in the back pocket of your jeans was supposed to symbolize something….
On the short list of the kind of ppl i hate, the pickemup truck knotheads with the giant flags have a special place
How much more of this are we going to be able to take?…actually, that’s what she’s been asking. after the elections, the fun will begin…will ‘they’ adjust to the realities they endure?…and How will they adjust? the deterioration of America will not stop for anyone. we are the 3rd world we devoured.
there is a confused majority living a dream state because on the surface everything ‘looks’ normal…a cell phone in every pot. Fractured Hope won’t be pretty…
not even the 3rd world, at least the cost of living is low in the 3rd world (to match the wages).
Back in May, wapo/jeff bezos announced that an “army” of 20 “reporters,” including the “esteemed” bob woodward, was being fielded to “dig into ‘every phase’ of Trump’s life.”
What a lucky “get” this woman would appear to be. Out of 316 million people in america, this intrepid reporter finds the one woman, in some Pennsylvania backwater, who not only embodies the preferred caricature of twisted Trump supporter, but lets the reporter (and presumably a photographer) into her home while her boyfriend sleeps on the sofa with a pillow over his head. And she then proceeds to confirm every foible wapo could have hoped for to denigrate Trump’s “base” and, by extension, Trump himself.
I couldn’t help but wonder how they found her. I seriously doubt she was “a friend of a friend.”
It reminded me of some of those great tv “reality” shows. The ones where a group of “desperate” humans “survive” on a desert island by eating bugs, while a producer and film crew record their “struggles” and “alliances” for the rapt, gullible viewing audience. Oh, and to have something to watch between commercials.
It also reminded me of Jayson Blair. Or the nyt headline that Trump “might not” have paid taxes.
The other thing that completely befuddles me is why a Trump supporter would talk to anyone from the Washington Post. I mean, don’t you have to know their intention is not going to be to paint you in the most flattering light?
It has a feel of someone who thinks there’s no harm in talking to the cops if you haven’t done anything wrong.
Her story, though, is as dark and sad as the hometown that has fewer residents than Michelle Austin has FB friends and Twitter followers.
I found this to be the kind of sad turning point that has put a lot of people off the major parties (my bold):
I just haven’t figured out how that manages to turn her toward Trump, unless it’s that she identified with his opposition to people she saw as connected to the system that screwed her.
But you know who’s going to eat this up with a spoon? The right-wing media who are, if my brief glances are correct, OUTRAGED at how Austin was taken advantage of. This is going to launch Austin into the right-wing stratosphere, a place that may not treat her well, and which she may be ill-equipped to handle.
I really wanted to know more about the overturned $450k verdict. That’s a life-destroyer.
I commented on that, too, lower down in this links thread. That’s a really whopper and it shows the WaPo’s agenda by dropping that story line so they could talk about her belief in Obama’s secret homosexuality!
People like her feel like society has treated them like garbage…and they’re not wrong. How a given person handles it is entirely up for grabs….maybe they direct their frustration in a positive direction, maybe a negative one….but you can bet people like Austin are going to find something to which they can dedicate their energies. The other option is to dull the pain like all those heroin addicts that she spoke disdainfully about.
Michael
October 3, 2016 at 11:25 am
Now a cynic would point out all the stories about how businesses are unfairly forced to pay these YUGE damages, by juries, yet somehow these verdicts being overturned by courts are scarcely ever noted….
But only a cynic would imply our legal system is designed to protect the rich and screw the poor…because that would be cynical.
“I just haven’t figured out how that manages to turn her toward Trump, unless it’s that she identified with his opposition to people she saw as connected to the system that screwed her.”
This comment, I would venture to say, is the whole point of the article. She turned to Trump for exactly the reason(s) stated here. More interestingly, who did she support in previous elections? Dems?
Curious to me, also. Out of a job, boyfriend laid off, and the only thing between her and her boyfriend’s homelessness is her disability check. So of course the candidate she feels the love from is Trump.
“#STOPBERNIESANDERS” indeed!
‘Feared Factor’ …
It’s what the UniParty thrives on …..
Deplorable Trump supporters.
Basement dwelling Sanders voters.
Only Hillary’s people are virtuous. If you are for her, you are good amidst this evil world.
The Washington Post is following a classic Totalitarian agenda. (1) identify a group; the poor whites, the Hereros, the kulaks, the gypsies, the intellectuals, the useless eaters, the Armenians, the counter revolutionaries, the Slavs…..(2) relentlessly defame and diminish them (3) declare them to be sub-human or not real human beings (4) Whip up a general frenzy (5) Then liquidate them (mass murder) (6) Declare that the World is a better place because of this “distasteful, but necessary “work””. (7) Distance yourself from the “hateful brutality”
It is history
The Media (the “explainers”) and the Economists (the “rationalizers”), are up to their eyeballs in the blood of the innocent.
It is happening as we speak
Nah, the genocidal mission is still anti-black. But their willing participation in that will be the excuse to let them wallow in their own filth, like the other uncivilized savages of the third world.
Or they could not participate.
” I seriously doubt she was “a friend of a friend.””
Well, I don’t know. It could happen.
Nearly every American I have met is nearly as deluded as that woman, they simply believe falsehoods that appear more reasonable according to the prevailing world view, but never-the-less they are still falsehoods and complete fabrications. This isn’t just an American disease, but a human condition which intellectual laziness plays a considerable role.
There are a few things at play to explain this woman.
-the economy is not good a day has not even good for a long time.
-this woman doesn’t know Michelle Obama, but she knows the media portrays Michelle as a woman and tells her the economy is booming.
-the person who told the woman that Michelle is a lizard person also said the economy is bad.
The only part she can verify comes from the lizard person source. Third Way politics and accepting lesser evil has had long term consequences. Blaming a rube for being intellectually lazy misses that the rot starts at the top.
It’s not just the rube, or what part of “Nearly every” fails to cover those who believe things like the Democratic Party is pro-labour or the Republican Party is pro-small business?
I would say those people are rubes, just because they aren’t drooling doesn’t mean there is much difference when it comes to marks.
Take the small business and the GOP. Chomsky wrote about this, but the basic gist is a GOP congressman will listen to a small business owners concerns while a Democrat blows them off. Both parties serve the short term interests of those who control large industries, but plenty of small business owners see one party feign listening and another tell them how they vote against their interests and then offer nothing but the occasional insult.
Conversely, Democrats usually show enough self interest to lie to unions, and the GOP always kicks them. Enough union voters fall for the Democratic lies even when those union members seem put together.
I would add that it’s easy to call out the poor and powerless for their odd beliefs, but the moment you point out the emperor has no clothes or believes things like “tax cuts will stimulate the economy,” then a sea of credentialed talking heads will pounce to put you in your place. The difference between, say, Ms. Austin and Paul Ryan is that Ms. Austin doesn’t have a political party to repeat her baseless truisms daily on panel shows or C-Span.
That’s an excellent point. Why is one person’s belief in lizard people or zombies or that Obama is a gay man married to a trangendered woman and raising two kidnapped children any more crazy than the belief that tax cuts to the wealthy create jobs? Or that climate change is a hoax? Or that the only way to save Social Security is to reduce benefits?
These kinds of things don’t just get the power of the political parties, but they also get the media microphone, and an internet that often has much less credibility that people like to think.
The reality is that neither major political party is going to do a damn thing to improve this woman’s life, or the lives of so many just like her. The even sadder reality is that that is just as true for those of us whose life circumstances and means are much better than Austin’s – it’s not that our lives are so terrible, but there’s only so long we can tread water before we slowly sink below the surface and drown.
The winds of a new dark age beckon ……
We’re in the dark age already :)
The clock changes next week!
“it’s not that our lives are so terrible, but there’s only so long we can tread water before we slowly sink below the surface and drown.”
yes, especially as costs keep increasing even if income is treading water, rents, healthcare, when does the insanity stop. The rent (of all forms including for housing of course) is too damn high.
jrs
October 3, 2016 at 2:47 pm
Never can be said enough – – – even 1% inflation, if your in the 50% that hasn’t had a raise in 40 years, is a big f*cking deal…
There was an article last week about economic hardships paving the way to cognitive aging in middle aged adults.
Uahsenaa
October 3, 2016 at 11:10 am
Agree 1 squillon percent!
And as Anne notes, believing in zombies and lizard people is far, far less provably absurd than that tax cuts for the 1% create jobs.
Like a lot of things, what is mentioned is often not as important as what is not mentioned. Why are tax cuts for FICA never, ever even spoken of, as if to do so would summon swarms of demons? Why are deficits caused by war and tax breaks for the 1% acceptable, but deficits for social programs unconscionable and can by some unknown law of physics never ever be funded by general revenues??? Why is the incredible burden of fees, sales taxes, use taxes, FICA taxes, never even mentioned, and how lowering THESE taxes would be good for the economy? FUNNY (no its not) how the tax cutters are seemingly not even aware of all those taxes…but the holy grail is cutting Federal income taxes….
NotTimothyGeithner
October 3, 2016 at 10:45 am
“The only part she can verify comes from the lizard person source.”
super great insight.
Love your posts, but could you please check over your spelling, etc. before posting? So much of your message is obscured otherwise.
this site is full of people encompassing English as a 2nd and even 4th language…its the message that counts, luv
“Government is like a household” is ubiquitous in the political class, and it’s done more harm than this poor powerless woman and everybody like her could ever do.
Amen.
If you want a good laugh and cry read his twitter on taxes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/us/politics/trump-taxes-twitter.html
Just what the WH needs a politician with no apparent self awareness and a twist of hypocrisy.
My favorite tweets are the one in 2012 when he opines about the half of Americans that don’t pay taxes or the one in 2013 when he say “What wealthy tax breaks!”
Special snowflake Donald deserves his tax breaks unlike those basement dwelling baristas with an unrealistic belief that the government should help them attain education or make sure every American has access to health care. It isn’t like there’s some sort of document that suggests that our government advocate for the common good or anything!
Note: Clinton is just as “smart” as the Donald, she also used business losses on her 2015 tax returns to pay less. Isn’t it nice to know that tax dodging is a bipartisan and savvy past time. No wonder Clinton is cynical about a revolution- she’s getting along just fine with the way things are thankyouverymuch.
And then there’s the nyt’s pot-calling-the-kettle-black own tax “strategy:”
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/02/ny-times-october-surprise-trumps-tax-returns-transparent/
Oh absolutely.
In the twitter rants of 2015 the Donald gives a shout out to Bezos and the Post. Apparently Donald was the only one who was supposed to be “smart” and limit his tax liabilities by writing off his losses not Jeffy!
As I said, lack of self awareness meets hypocrisy. God bless the special snowflake 1%ers hearts,
I’m tired of this nonsense being called “smart”. Yes ok if tax breaks are there people will take them, that is true. But it’s not @#$# smart, it’s being a rich a$$h0le who doesn’t have to pay taxes because your rich (yea and you are an a$$hole if you have more money than you can ever spend in your lifetime and probably your children’s as well, while people go hungry). Plenty of smart people of lesser means have no such options.
I think there are tax credits and deductions for the rich and not-so-rich as well, but a lot more for the rich.
For the not-so-rich, children can be used to reduce taxes.
A little higher up, property taxes are deductible.
And further up, an income property can generate paper losses.
Finally, there are the 0.01% who can just rewrite the tax code
Using children to reduce taxes would be like using a bandaid to cover a gunshot wound.
You have to feed, house, clothe, educate, and care for them. They cost way more than the credits used to offset your taxes.
Disagree, it is “smart”. Just like Hilary funneling Saudi and Monsanto millions through her TAX-FREE “charity” is smart. She personally benefited in the hundreds of millions of dollars by secretly selling the business of our government to the highest bidders. Smart lady!
Yep.
The problem is that the bourgeoisie have nowhere to hide their money, since most of us are making it strictly through wages, and spending almost all of it from paycheck to paycheck. Oh, some of us are making 401(k) contributions that are made with pre-tax dollars, so we have that going for us, but generally speaking, there are few advantages and strategies available to us through the tax code.
It’s that old thing of needing to have money to be able to make money, and the rich being able to take advantage of the tax code so they stay that way.
It’s not Trump’s fault that the tax code allows someone in his business to use losses the way that it appears he has, but it’s entirely his fault that his plan for reforming the tax code is heavily weighted with ongoing advantages that will accrue to people like him. And while I see a lot of reform consisting of “taking away” some loopholes and strategies, I don’t see any that “give back” any advantages to those of us working for a paycheck. Why, for example, must one have medical deductions that exceed 7.5% of one’s income before any of those dollars over that 7.5% are deductible? Why aren’t there more credits available, and why are things like child care credits limited to some defined amount? Who decides what the standard deduction should be? Why do we all pay the same level of sales taxes when it ought to be clear that the 6% that someone making $20,000 a year is paying hurts them more than the 6% that someone making $200,000 a year is paying – it takes a proportionately larger chunk of cash flow at the low end of the income scale than it does at the higher end – which is why sales taxes are regressive.
I don’t see any effort, really, being made at this end of the income scale – why is that?
Trump is right that no one wants to pay more taxes than they have to, but if people were getting more tangible benefits for the taxes they paid, that kind of thinking might change.
In the meantime, of course, the bitterness and anger grow, the class divisions get deeper and we move farther away from anything approaching equitable. The support for Sanders should have showed how hungry people are just to get a fair chance at a decent life, but instead, it just turned him into a threat to a status quo that is pretty happy just the way things are.
We agree on a lot.
However, we disagree on this.
It’s not Trump’s fault that the tax code allows someone in his business to use losses the way that it appears he has…….
The guy who brags that he has “bought” politicians for favors and when he needs things, isn’t blameless on why these tax breaks exist to begin with. In 1986 tax laws were rewritten so that not everyone could write off their losses by investing in a real estate partnership…..surprise, surprise though in the 1990s(who was it that was the President again during the 90s?) the real estate “professionals” pushed back and had legislation rewritten to allow those who had at least 750 hours of real estate “business” the means to write off losses against personal income.
I’m going to hazard a guess that the guy who “buys” politicians and had real estate holdings had no problem lobbying for his little write offs.
Then there is this…..
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/07/us/politics/donald-trump-pam-bondi.html
Although you have to love the OUTRAGE of people like Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump was not held accountable for his behavior!
How dare Pam Bondi play politics with an accusation and hold Mr Trump to another standard!
Apparently I’m supposed to pretend that the only reason Hillary Clinton isn’t being punished for her emails is intent, not politics and certainly not President Obama protecting his craptacular political legacy and attempting to assure the flow of money to his and other Democratic members coffers.
There’s nothing like a contest to see who can be the biggest hypocrite this election cycle.
Trump brags about everything, which is why I tend to take what he says with varying amounts of salt. He’s claimed that he’s smart for not paying taxes, but I haven’t heard him brag that, hey, he worked hard to change the rules and everyone who can should take advantage of them.
That being said, to the extent Trump lobbied – or had people lobbying for him – to get the rules changed, then I would completely agree with you that he has to take some responsibility for the advantages the tax code conferred upon him and his business.
Further, he can’t rail against the system and call it rigged if he was part of the effort to rig it – well, he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that, but we’ve seen time and again, that Trump never lets that sort of thing get in his way.
He probably cannot stand that someone could get away with claiming more losses than he did/does – he can’t help himself, he has to be the best even of the worst. He has to win at everything – I can’t imagine growing up in that family.
As for Clinton, I am just so over her, and I know there’s going to be even more come out about her – or Bill – even in just the next month. If she happens to win, she will – if not forced to resign and leave us with President Kaine – be possibly one of the most ineffective presidents ever, simply because it’s hard to govern when you’re constantly under investigation or being impeached. That won’t, however, stop her from getting us into another war, probably.
Just so damn depressing. Pretty sure that right around the time I want to retire – early 2019 – the economy will be in the toilet, too.
Yippee!
Of course, the state of the economy shouldn’t affect your ability to retire with dignity, but since the neoliberals scammed us with the 401(k), that’s where we are.
We reap the rewards for decimating our education system for oh these many years. An education system that once was once good enough to educate the “Greatest Generation” this country has ever known now produces minds feeble enough to be conned by Trump et al.
Body Cameras Are Betraying Their Promise The Atlantic. That was fast.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/outrage-police-shooting-drunk-driver-paradise-california-officer-patrick-feaster/
The link of the man exiting a SUV is incorrect in that prosecutors, undoubtedly due to public outrage, have charged the cop with involuntary manslaughter.
(not being a lawyer, I find it difficult to comprehend how pointing a gun at someone is “involuntary” and the excuse after the lie of non-cooperation by the victim was exposed, that the gun “discharged” on its own).
I think this video is particularly illustrative of the problem – police mindset. This is a person crawling out of an overturned vehicle. It is apparent that the victim was unarmed. It is also apparent that the cop lied.
But think about a cop coming upon an auto accident – yes, the SUV was driven a drunk driver, so SOME caution is defensible. But it seems to me that the officer fired when it was apparent that the victim was not in a position to draw and fire a weapon – shoot first and ask questions later.
BUT WORSE, the first instinct of his superiors is to excuse his conduct….and the charging seems light.
Astounding
And with regard to the Atlantic article, thus was it ever. Despite a extensive surveillance state, no one in our “DoJ” can ever figure out illegal activities conducted by the 1%…or the guardians of the 1% (i.e., the police)
They want the jury to actually convict. We forget that even with absolutely unquestionable video, white juries still decline to convict, because they want Law and Order.
Michael,
And how do you know the juries were white, other than that is the narrative?
Back in the day I tried a civil jury trial in Compton Superior court, a branch of Los Angeles Superior Court. It was kind of shocking to discover my jury pool was almost entirely white.
Why? Jury’s are chosen from registered voters, only government employers and large businesses give their employees time off for jury service, working people can’t afford to go to jury service?
no they are chosen maybe from registered voters but also from anyone with a drivers license, so no you won’t escape jury duty by refusing to register to vote, not if you drive, at least not in California.
But I do think it is true they don’t tend to pick those whose employers won’t pay, this is a blessing, it’s a real financial hardship for most working people to go days without pay even when it doesn’t technically qualify as a “financial hardship” exclusion (you have to be nearly living on the streets for that).
I assume state and local governments in CA pay for workers to have time off to go to jury duty.
But CA’s jury duty policy belies its myth as being a liberal state. No pay at all for your first day if your employer does not pay; only $15 per day thereafter. Yikes.
In NYC, many years ago (like maybe 2004), jury duty paid $40 a day in NYC. Still pretty shabby but light years better than CA.
This would seem to set up a lawsuit for not being tried by a jury of one’s peers…
One should not be payed for performing a civic duty and neither should one be impoverished. There is little discussion on where the two balance out.
There’s a simple solution to this.
Cops paid an hourly salary are only paid for the time that their body cameras are on and rolling. They can turn it off when on breaks, but they don’t get paid for that time.
There should be livecasting from police cars so that the signal from the body cam goes to the police car that then sends it out to a webserver accessible to the public. Is it Orwelian? Damn straight, but with the salary and the benefits cops get, it’s justified.
Dave
October 3, 2016 at 1:23 pm
I agree 1,000%
It is amazing how public employees, performing life and death public service, have rights to counsel, special additional time periods before interrogation, etcetera that the average citizen does not.
The fact that your good idea will never happen just proves the point that the police are not here to serve the public but protect the plutocracy.
I hope this works. Ann Arbor, Michigan tried this in the mid-70s. It resulted in a Human Rights Party mayor. Ds and Rs then united to scuttle it. The bit in the article about the objection that poorer voters would not benefit as much is simply bullshit, since otherwise the possibility of their gaining adequate political representation is pretty low.
Yea, would be amazing to see Ranked-Choice voting at a state level! Would be good to break out of the protection racket: https://unorthodoxmarxist.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/politics-is-a-racket/
The Wholesale Failure of American Foreign Policy The American Conservative
One has to wonder just how much longer the American people will silently permit the categorical failure of American foreign policy, both in theory and in practice. The evidence confirming the totality of our failure is breathtaking in scope and severity. Changes are needed to preserve U.S. national security and economic prosperity.
Recent headlines have captured the character of this failure. Fifteen years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released findings that “corruption substantially undermined the U.S. mission in Afghanistan from the very beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom. … We conclude that failure to effectively address the problem means U.S. reconstruction programs, at best, will continue to be subverted by systemic corruption and, at worst, will fail.”
Earlier this month, a British Parliament study found that the result of Western military intervention in Libya “was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.”
Airstrikes and drone attacks are accidentally killing thousands of civilians, aid workers, wedding parties, and now even the troops of a nation against whom we are not at war. Each of these mistakes, repeated hundreds of times over the past 15 years, creates more antagonism and hatred of the United States than any other single event. Whatever tactical benefit some of the strikes do accomplish, they are consumed in the still-worsening strategic failure the misfires cause.
=================================================================
It is hard to imagine a more schizophrenic nation on earth than the US. Incessant chanting about how we are the greatest, richest, most beloved by God, the most powerful military on earth – yet a country incapable of defeating adversaries whose most advanced weapons systems are Toyota pickup trucks…
And of course, the greatest democracy/republic on earth that gives us the wonderful choice of Hillary versus The Donald…
Or as I put it, Skankles vs Combover.
It sounds like you are embracing the new Alt-Right racists meme verbage. :-( https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/racist-social-media-users-have-a-new-code-to-avoid-censorshi?bffbmain&ref=bffbmain&utm_term=.veljZvjA7#.nuJMDQMbO
Ugh. You’re both wrong:
Afisher–
a) Skankles is a play on “cankles,” which is one way Clinton was insulted in 2008, before alt-right even existed*; I remember it, having been there. As for combover, it’s not news that Trump has one. Neither synecdoche has anything to do with alt-right, and in fact the glossary of alt-right verbiage you so helpfully attach does not include them.
b) Why you would feel that smearing a regular commenter and the site as racist while simultaneously purveying bad data is the optimal way to support your candidate is beyond me, but it’s a funny old world.
Haygood–
I’ve spoken to you about this toddler-level snicker-creating verbiage before. Don’t do it again. If I can go through an entire election season without making fun of Chris Christie’s girth, you can control yourself on Clinton’s physical characteristics. Do so.
NOTE * Insulted by Obama supporters, I might add.
I warned you that if you ever engaged in partisan hackery again, you would be banned. After you made another comment that was precisely that, plus an attack on the site, I was generous and merely left your comment in moderation, to give you one more chance to shape up.
But no, you doubled down a second time. So I’m blacklisting you.
Our policy is that anyone who manages to jailbreak not only has their comment expunged, but may also have their entire comment history expunged.
I do not think they care, perhaps other than war where they have family involved and even that they care about their friend/family and not the whole war, I visit frequently and spend much of my time with university graduates, yet I doubt a plurality of these Americans care about Foreign Policy. I’m always amazed at not just the ignorance but the indifference, insensibility, lassitude, and lethargy about anything outside their local sphere. They don’t even know what’s going on in the neighboring county or state, much less have any interest in what goes on “over there”. A significant plurality of those rare birds that do express interest mostly are curious about either sex mores or opportunities to make money.
When I was a student I and every last one of my classmates went to the streets and got our heads bashed when we saw pictures of a naked Vietnamese girl crying and running away from an American napalm bomb attack.
But when our nation today kills 42 patients and doctors in a MSF hospital the reaction by our best and brightest young people is “hey did you see Instagram now has emojis?”.
So I’m sick of hearing how “engaged” and “aware” today’s crop of students and millennials is. Self-absorbed, coddled, entitled, narcissistic little creeps. They know, but they make the choice not to give a single solitary damn.
OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL, I thought you were about to tell us what our nation today does when they see pictures of a naked Vietnamese girl crying and running away from a US napalm attack: censor to protect the girl’s “dignity”.
That Vietnamese girl was naked because she had stripped off her clothes in an attempt to stop the napalm that hit her back from burning all the way through her body. Good thing it wasn’t white phosphorus, “willy pete.” The wiki article on her ought to shame us great imperial USians, if only we were capable of shame. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Thi_Kim_Phuc
+++ 1 +++
Oh sure, and what chance did my generation have, to change anything? I was a teenager in the 80’s. Much less, kids growing up today. What do they get? Their minds are not their own.. You guys had something going, and you dropped it. And after that, the machine got a whole lot smarter and more vicious.
The boomers had the window of opportunity for real change that was the 60’s, and we know what happened, don’t we? To a large degree, drugs happened. Drugs helped to spark it off, and drugs were the end of it. The boomers bought the lie, they bought the cocaine, they bought the heroin, the quaaludes.. and the revolution was co-opted.
Anyways.. it’s a vast generalization, but certainly no more of one than yours, gramps.
I would bet that the flyover states who sent their kids off to war to have them come back maimed, with PTSD, and to no jobs care a good deal more than the Acela Corridor does. That’s one reason “America First” resonates; it squares the circle between the “USA! USA!” and not have the elites piss away your kids’ lives.
I do not think they care, perhaps other than war where they have family involved and even that they care about their friend/family and not the whole war,
I suspect, no, I’ve experienced that most of them are perfectly okay with drone strikes and selling the Saudis et al American made weapons (that provide “good paying” American jobs).
…AND the F-35 !!
The F-35 cannot survive straight and level flight;
Insulation peels off, its one engine coughs,
It’s fat and slow, can’t turn, won’t go,
So they’re usually found safe on the ground.
re: Hospitals and Superbugs…”County health officials explained that they had stopped requiring health facilities to report CRE infections in 2012 “due to resource limitations,” though some hospitals voluntarily submit bacterial samples from patients diagnosed with the superbug.”
Lisa Goldstein, the head of health care bond ratings at Moody’s, argues that better quality control can improve hospitals’ financial performance. “A strategy aimed at quality can result in improved market share, better ability to recruit and retain physicians, lower nursing vacancy/turnover rates, improved financial performance,” she wrote in an influential report. Moody’s now looks closely at hospital clinical quality measures when rating debt offerings.
The median operating margin for 200-bed hospitals and above was slightly negative (-0.7%) last year. That means the money that was brought in from patients fell short of what they needed to spend on staff, equipment, buildings and other items. http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/30/profitable-hospitals-hca-healthcare-business-mayo-clinic.html
“You think of killing him
on the spot
but discard that thought and
leave,
down into the urine-stinking
elevator,
they have you crucified too,
America at work,
where they rip out your intestines
and your brain and your
will and your spirit.
They suck you dry, then throw
you away.
The capitalist system.
The work ethic.
The profit motive.
The memory of your father’s words,
“work hard and you’ll be
appreciated.”
of course, only if you make
much more for them than they pay
you.” .Bukowski
I related my Bukowski stories a while back, but I lift my imaginary wine glass in his honor. Anybody can learn so much about writing by reading his poems. Forget the filthy pornographic morally degenerate subject matter — which unless it is banned and his books are burned in an auto de fe — is sure to corrupt the virtues of anyone who reads them, particularly young men and young women who may be tempted to devote their lives to drunken debauchery. (Just kidding! I trust that’s obvious). But where he places the silences and where he places the sounds and (when he was at his best) how the rhythms of the words flows smooth as water running over stones in a creek — the way good English should. That’s what’s there and he was one of the best at it.
for some reason I was moderated trying to engage in literary criticism. Get me da fukk out of moderation!
Ma ma ma ma moderation
Get me out
Ma ma moderation
Get me out
Words are stuck in detention
It’s so bad
I say without a pretention
It’s so sad
To convey such an invention
Such an invention, it won’t make you mad
it won’t make you mad, won’t make you mad
Ma der ation, ma ma ma ma moderation
That’s sort of like Ritchie Valens “La Bamba”, which I was listening to yesterday over and over.
It would also be cool sung to the tune of “Surfin’ Bird”
Yes, Ritchie Valens, gone way too young.
Maybe you can put some of your lyrics to music (but not these), craazy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/08/gloomy-don-mclean-reveals-meaning-of-american-pie-and-sells-lyrics-for-1-2-million/
WoW Chauncey, Thanks for catching this for us/me!
“I would say to young songwriters who are starting out to immerse yourself in beautiful music and beautiful lyrics and think about every word you say in a song,” he said.
Regarding “ailing Obama healthcare act”: Lambert has given us the brilliant, blow by blow takedown. So nobody should have been surprised to see Obamacare fall apart.
One third of the senate? Then it’s not happening, period.
What absolutely flabbergasts me about Obama’s term and the upcoming Hillary term is how Democrats seem oblivious to the act and action of governing. Governing is not just about running the executive branch. It is about corralling your party and reaching consensus. You cannot govern by email, no more than a manager in a business can manage by email. But that seems to be what Obama thought would get him consensus.
Where LBJ would be literally punching people in the balls – for all his other faults, LBJ did go out of his way to get congress in line – the Democrats seem content to sit in the White House and wonder why nobody listens to them.
I foresee four years of Obamacare falling apart and total gridlock.
It also strikes me as absurd that the 97-1 over-ride of the 9/11 bill could possibly have come as a surprise.
The kayfabe is right out in the open, yet, the rubes still refuse to see it.
Washington lives In a bubble. The GOP was out to embarrass Obama, but I think two major things happened: Hillary isn’t opening up a lead and my guess is the individual Democratic offices didn’t get a single call telling them to stand with the House of Saud. I think 90% of the country would support a “liberation” of the Arabian peninsula.
So they all went in expecting that there would be no way the veto would be over ridden. At this point, lying to Obama won’t hurt.
atrios works for david brock and hillary clinton
Atrios works for Media Matters, which is the tentacle of the Brock operation with respectable branding.
So it’s interesting that even he can’t stomach what’s going on, isn’t it?
The health insurance industry is incredibly stupid to lobby against the public option. Firstly, it might buy their parasitic industry several more years of living off the host. Secondly, the health insurance industry, if they deign to agree to this socially just panacea, will obviously be gratefully rewarded by being allowed to write the law to their benefit. Legislators are far too busy to write laws anyway; they need to spend their time doing their real job (chasing $$$). Thirdly, the whole point of the thing is for the government to sell policies that lose money! while continuing to subsidize the more profitable policies while simultaneously coercing the public into purchasing them. Feels like a win win win to me.
I take it back. They’re being totally rational. Fear of slide toward government takeover and uncertainty might cause their stock options to lose value next quarter. I don’t believe that I made the mistake of thinking that anyone in the oligarchy plans for the long term anymore.
Considering how PPACA came to be it’s likely they will be against the P.O. while they are for it / write the new law /paychecks. The duopoly has to look busy on occasion and their owners always need more $.
I’m wondering just how much uncle scam (Fed and States) have spent on Obamney, not care since it passed? Supposedly at the time it was what, a nine hundered billion dollar bill? Probably impossible to find out.
@wikileaks reporting that Hillary proposed “droning” Assange:
True Pundit: Under Intense Pressure to Silence Wikileaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Proposed Drone Strike on Julian Assange
Hillary the Psychopath for President!
It’s not too late.
If “we” drone their embassy in London, what is Ecuador going to do about it?
They don’t have any nukes. /sarc
Time is of the essence, given Assange’s threatened outburst tomorrow.
As a backup, is the crack-shot “JFK team” still around?
Not if prof. Kokintz, protected by English archers, is on Ecuador’s side.
Just tell everybody they were targetting the Chinese embassy and mistakes were made. So sorry, missed by only 2 miles.
corrupt warmonger.
Wikileaks has a bad tendency of bringing up old stories at currently relevant times in a way that makes them appear contemporary. I have seen this story floating around previously, as well as that Fox News clip that was from 2010 but picked up by some as if it was new. I wish they would be more clear.
They have a new batch of data for Wednesday? I believe. They copy the strategy of television in playing original movies repeatedly before a sequel comes to the theaters. It may be background for a coming discussion.
“Death solves all problems – no man, no problem.” Joseph Stalin.
OIFVet, +1%. This, this, this is exactly the sort of attitude we should be applying to our betters, to those people who are troubled by owning too much stuff or having market-based ideals for the world…
True Pundit is terrible sourcing. Not credible at all. New York Magazine actually gets this right.
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/10/alan-greenspan-misjudged-the-risks-in-the-mid-2000s-alan-greenspan-was-not-a-coward.html
Exasperating. But it is a good example of beside the point arguments that so pervade our society today.
To paraphrase DeLong’s own stock phrase and use it against DeLong “Why O why can’t we have a better economics core?”
Manufacturing bounces back:
No joy for the doom mongers yet. Their long-awaited recession has been postponed to 2017.
It should be up, look at those record weapons sales that were made in the last 12 months. Mom and Pop are praying for war to save their mortgage.
Look out below if the deplorables elect Trump. I have no doubt that the punishment will be swift and sure.
Probably true.
One would expect a brief burst of new-regime optimism, followed by a Wile E. Coyote realization that there’s nothing but air under our feet.
As an historical analogy, the Dow Jones peaked on Dec 3, 1968 — one month after Nixon’s victory over Hubert Humphrey — and proceeded to fall 36% into May 1970, in the teeth of a nasty recession.
In India, they’d be called the untouchables, the Dalits
Burakumin, they are called in Japan, or Baekjeong, in Korea.
The grey cloud to that silver lining is the fact that while manufacturing is “coming back” to a slight degree, it is NOT bringing jobs with it. It is bringing robots. Automations.
Basic Income IS necessity, just, and correct. Why work when robots can do it? Why should people HAVE to work to live? That’s ancient, backwards Puritan nonsense thinking.
The glowing future always envisioned by futurists is one of all people living happy lives of doing whatever they want while robots do the work. Well, with that MUST come basic income.
Well, with that MUST come basic income. Praedor
Especially since automation has surely been largely financed with what is, in essence, the public’s credit due to extensive government privileges for private credit creation.
And a basic income precludes neither work nor working for someone else (a job). What it does preclude (to some extent*, at least) is involuntary employment.
*A basic income might be insufficient for someone to work, e.g. a farmer needs land to farm, a mechanic needs a garage, etc.
Yes, that’s what the Hotel News Notes said the people planning capital expenditures for hotels think, a few days ago. Not this year. Next year.
The Kill-Kill-Kill mindset of police is induced in part by people like (Lt. Col.) Dave Grossman and (Dr.) Bill Lewinski who have made very profitable businesses out of consulting with, training, and lecturing police departments all over the country in use of force “science” and the “science” of Killology.
In a sense, they’re con artists going around inciting police to be or become killers and defending their kills as “necessary and proper,” regardless of objective facts or well-known alternatives to summary execution.
They want dead perps, period. And they pretend that cops who kill are performing their highest duty to the public, regardless of who they kill or under what circumstances.
This all goes back to a post-9/11 warrior mindset to cope with terrorism that most police departments have unquestioningly adopted, and further back to the Columbine massacre and the subsequent wholesale revision of how police should handle “active shooter” situations.
The problem for the public is that police now regard disobedience — particularly by black men, mentally ill or otherwise in-crisis men, men accused of domestic violence, fleeing men, and combative women, among others — as the equivalent of “active shooters” and respond aggressively, too often lethally. They have no qualms about it. Their supervisors and commanders typically support their officers no matter the objective facts, and they expect and require their officers to behave in the manner they do. Cops follow their orders and their training/conditioning. They are often rewarded for killing a perp, and they can be disciplined or dismissed for not doing so.
Public outrage is having an effect but so slowly that it will take many lifetimes to effect change throughout the domestic policing realm. When killings by police are reduced in one city, police violence and killing increases somewhere else.
Alternatives to summary execution — particularly crisis intervention — are no mystery. They simply aren’t used as a matter of policy. The beat cop who kills shares responsibility, but those who make the policies — police chiefs and sheriffs, city and county managers, and elected officials — are primarily responsible for the killings that continue to take place despite protests.
Many jurisdictions, too, employ snipers and kill-squads whose job it is to kill, sometimes it’s their only job. When they are deployed, they do their job. No matter any other objective fact at all.
An incident happened not far from my home. The sheriff and a man’s parents were on the phone negotiating with a man in crisis. They were making progress. A state police sniper was sent to the scene, and within minutes of arrival, he shot and killed the man, while negotiations were under way to the shock and horror of the sheriff and the man’s parents.
The sniper had been deployed to kill — it wasn’t his first rodeo — and that’s what he did.
Until we can change the police and overclass mindset that devalues the sanctity of human life, we’ll keep seeing these killings and general police violence.
Yawn, in some unnamed city in some unnamed year a state police officer – what state was that in? – shot someone “while negotiations were under way” ! – “it wasn’t his first rodeo!” ye haw. Again, what state, city and year was this?
“The problem for the public is that police now regard disobedience ….”
Which police are these? The University of Michigan police? The Alaska State Police? The City of Klamath Falls PD? The Flower Mound PD? There are a few thousand other local and state police forces to mention. None of those are federal police forces but then that’s not what you meant, was it? Perhaps the Smithsonian Office of Protective Services are out there kill, kill, killing? (That’s the Smithsonian’s own PD) How about the National Park Service police? No? Of course don’t think of all those civilians killing civilians in Chicago, those don’t fit the KKKrazy glue narrative.
Yawn? I see, sure. Whatever.
It may not matter to you that police use lethal force the way they do. It may not matter to you why they do it or where they get the ideas they do about killing. After all, who could imagine ever being their victim without justification? Except it happens practically every day.
For your information, Ernest Atterberry, 36, was shot and killed by New Mexico State Police sniper Shane Todd in January of 2014; Todd had previously shot and killed Kendall Carroll in Albuquerque in March of 2013, and he would later be involved in shooting Daniel Olguin in Los Lunas, NM, in May of 2014. He was just doing his job.
For your information, Atterberry was falsely reported to have fired at sheriff’s deputies and a news helicopter circling overhead. It was later reported that he did not fire at deputies or a helicopter. It’s not entirely clear that he fired his weapon at all. He did have a rifle, but he wasn’t firing it or even holding it when he was shot and killed.
For your information, Kendall Carroll was shot and killed on accusations that he was engaged in a shootout with Albuquerque police. His family says that he was not firing a weapon at all, that it was his brother (who surrendered to police and may already be out of jail) who had actually been firing on police, and that in effect, Kendall was a hostage, not a participant in the shootout. Kendall was killed because the sniper, Shane Todd, had him in his sights and did not have a clear shot at his brother Michael.
False information, mistaken identity, and so many other factors enter into police killings. That they are almost always excused is part of why so many people don’t trust police to do the right thing.
“It may not matter to you…”
Your words not mine. I am not doing an investigation on the competence of the New Mexico state police. Perhaps you should vote in a new District Attorney so you can get the investigation you want. You left out any response about all those civilians killing civilians in Chicago, they’ve killed far more people than the New Mexico state police.
You poor SOB.
No that would be the guy shot by the New Mexico state police.
the last district attorney was threatened, and felt she needed protection from the police, iirc. if you knew anything about the subject you would know of the notorious albuquerque cops.
Indeed she was. (Kari Brandenberg is still DA.) She also filed murder charges on the two APD officers who shot and killed James Boyd, a paranoid schizophrenic homeless camper, in March 2014. They are currently on trial. A special prosecutor is handling the case. She reduced the charge to Murder 2, with a lesser included voluntary manslaughter charge. The judge threw out the voluntary manslaughter charge last week saying the prosecution hadn’t shown proper evidence. That leaves Murder 2 for both officers and aggravated assault for one.
They are almost certain to be acquitted.
So it goes.
Regarding hospital superbugs:
‘Dr. Yasmeen Shaw, who treated McMullen in the ICU and filled out the death certificate, said she was following directions from health officials by recording the underlying cause of death, which in her opinion was the perforated ulcer.
‘“Everything that happened to her health is a consequence of the initial condition she came in with,” Shaw said. “Had the patient not have had a perforated ulcer they wouldn’t have been in the hospital in the first place.”’
By this logic, surely the cause of death should be listed as birth. Or conception if you prefer.
Haha! You beat me to it. Cause of death could also be “having a stomach located inside her body.”
Cause of death: Going to the hospital.
Gee ….. I guess forking over the ‘mandated’ sum to the Federal Extortionists is not a bad price to pay for after all … considering the alternatives !!
There is a word for that, except I can’t think of it right now. Maybe some can help.
uh …. humm …. ‘REDRUM’ ??
It’s more Norman or Latin.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-venezuela-maduro-government/
Again, for the peanut gallery:
I am related to 20 of the woman in the “Someone who thinks like me” if you go 2 steps out in my extended family, and about 10% of my friends’ parents or grandparents fall into her category.
She exists, she matters, she is ubiquitous. I grew up in the Midwest, and there’s a reason I fled.
HRC locks up the Rapiscan vote:
To refresh your memory, while you’re waiting in the TSA line:
Ex-Homeland Security chief head said to abuse public trust by touting body scanners [WaPo, 2010]
Of course, people who fly on a Gulf Stream 5 don’t need to go through no stinkin’ Rapiscan.
You mean, like, with a scanner?
Superbugs: L.A. Times article
Do understand that these ‘superbugs’ aren’t merely hospital acquired infections, though contagion is highly observed and deadly in healthcare settings.
Someone I know well contacted an antibiotic-resistant bacteria (the superbug pseudomonas aeruginosa) from swimming in a polluted No. Florida river, which was contaminated with agricultural/pesticide/fertilizer run off. The river was clear as a bell but smelled to high heaven, as did the nearby residential spring fed water supply. He had great insurance, was otherwise healthy, and was diagnosed through a sputum test; antibiotic choice made by lab testing his strain of bacteria against antibiotics that might work. He was lucky, but ‘persister’ cells are believed to remain dormant in our bodies until and unless infection strikes again. His doctor said his condition wasn’t contagious. Wrong …
I so appreciate Yves including links regarding this healthcare tsumani that is approaching us worldwide as antibiotics become less and less effective. Note that one young man in this article who died was thought to have contracted his antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection from bacteria on a pad he laid on while having an MRI. Note that throwing antibiotics at any infection or having any procedure that compromises your circulatory system (bloodstream) can be deadly, as it was for the woman in this L.A. Times article.
We need to be informed about how important this information is and how informed our healthcare choices, when we have choices, must be. In recent months they have been found in plants and meat (especially due to E.coli, which is developing antimicrobial immunity). A healthy immune system is our best defense at present. Children, seniors, immune compromised individuals are most at risk. What can we do? So far the only advice is wash hands frequently and cook your food. And I say, learn as much as you can.
Also, be sure to let your children play in the dirt, because that strengthens the immune system.
Quite the opposite of what the 10% would regard as appropriate behavior for their over-scheduled little scions, but so it goes.
I actually read that WaPo article that Chris Arnade is disgusted with, and he’s mostly right. But if you cut out 2/3 of the article which goes on and on about the loopy stuff she says, and just pay attention to what she’s experienced in her life, there’s an actual story there. It’s certainly not the one the WaPo is really trying to tell, but it’s there if you look for it.
It’s the story of her life falling apart, her community falling apart and the people who live there trying to come to grips with it.
The woman spent years working for the railroad company, dealing with tons of sexual harassment, was brave enough to bring a lawsuit and even won! Then had it yanked away by a judge that overturned the verdict. She had to care for a sick sibling who eventually passed, and had to deal with the hassle of the medical industrial complex, bills, bureaucracy, etc. It’s no wonder she’s on a ton of anti-anxiety meds.
It’s worth thinking about how fragile our mental stability really can be. Can anyone say that they’d handle this same set of circumstances much better than she handles them? The problem for the elites is that people like her will only take so much abuse for so long. Eventually, they will find their voice and find a driving purpose for their lives. Sadly, hers is supporting Trump and saying/reading and really terrible stuff online. How is the problem dealt with? Let’s leave it to Mark Blyth…
“And you basically take the bottom 30% of the income distribution and you say we don’t care what happens to you. You’re now something to be policed. You’re now something to have your behaviors changed. We’re going to nudge you to better parts …
It’s a very paternalistic, it’s a very patronizing relationship. This is no longer the warm embrace of social democracy, arm-in-arm in solidarity. They’re there to be policed and excluded in their housing estates so that you feel safe in your neighborhoods, so that you can have your private schools; they have their public schools …
As I like to say to my American hedge fund friends the Hamptons is not a defensible position … Very hard to defend a low-lying beach. Eventually people will come for you.
The WaPo readers can sit there feeling smug and look down at people in those small towns with their underemployment, depression, and drug use and shake their heads in disdain, but this isn’t a sustainable state of affairs. I’m not sure how it gets resolved, but it sure as heck can’t be ignored anymore.
It’s worth emphasizing the YEARS of sexual harassment to the point where she was THRILLED to get fired from the job for safety violations. If you’ve ever spent any length of time at a job you hate, you’ll have a sense of the kind of stress she probably felt.
Same goes for taking care of a cancer patient….slow, crushing, destructive effect on your mental state.
She’s 52. Most of the millions like her in ‘flyover’ country are similarly middle aged. They are not going to be a problem over the time frame you are considering here; they are going to be dead.
That’s how it gets resolved. The immiseration of their kids is another story however. That may have repercussions.
JohnnyGL
October 3, 2016 at 11:42 am
good analysis!
I’m not sure how to make sexism and smugness commensurate (one of the big problems of this election). But the smugness, at the class level — call it a superset of personal networks, if “class” makes you uncomfortable — is also terribly pernicious.
Again, we have an AIDS-level epidemic of excess deaths in the (white) working class flyover states. You can bet that if there were a superbug that attacked the cartilage in little Emma and little Josh’s fingers so that they couldn’t go to their violin lessons that the Times and WaPo would be all over it. But if a few tens of thousands of “irredeemables” kick the bucket, well, they’re irredeemable, aren’t they?
The article by Wolfgang Munchau was far better than anything one would expect to find on an FT op-ed page. Just one tiny correction. The March 1933 election was Germany’s last election, but it was not the last free election. At the first flame from the Reichstag Germany was, as planned, plunged into full-scale Nazi terror. By March 1933 the Brown Houses were in full operation, the Communist parties had been outlawed, and all anti-Hitler meetings were under violent attack. The last free election, lost badly by the Nazis, was in December 1932.
The conclusion:
I think the Brit ruling class — though perhaps not the subset political class — is smart enough to hear footsteps. I don’t think our own elites are. “Crime makes you stupid,” as they used to say on Homicide.
Two minutes of hate:
The Clinton Foundation was next on the list of evildoers. But to condemn more than three names, we would need THREE minutes of hate. :-0
How about Com[a]cast? Uh I mean, Goldman Sachs? Uh I mean, Google? Uh I mean, Boeing? Uh I mean, Monsanto? Uh I mean, General Motors? Uh I mean, DuPont? Uh I mean, AT&T? Uh I mean, Time Warner? Uh I mean, ConAgra? Uh I mean….
Now your talkin a whole hour’s worth of hate, right there ….!!
Why do you hate the savvy and smart jahb creators and America?
(tongue firmly in cheek)
She’s only naming and shaming those who make the Democrat Party look bad in the news. The rest are engaged in the business of making the Democrat Party look good.
And the entertainment continues…
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-morganstanley-massachusetts-idUSKCN1231KD
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-reaches-4-million-settlement-wells-fargo-dealer-services-illegally
And going back just a few more days:
https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2016/nr-occ-2016-119.html
Gee, I wonder if any of these fines will cut into their donations to the Clinton Foundation?
Regarding her ‘talk’ to be given today in Ohio?
Hey, maybe she’ll tell them to “Stop that”, as she said she stated to big banks during one of the early debates she was in with Bernie when he asked if she’d come down on TBTJ banks?
I’d say pass the popcorn, but now that I’m going on Medicare at 65, I’ve lost any dental coverage so must be careful of those kernels…
What a WONDERFUL antidote!
This Is the Backup Career For More and More U.S. Workers Fortune. The “gig economy” is now being rebranded as the “platform economy.”
sharecropping 2.0 would be closer to the mark
I fucking hate the IT analogy …… :'(
Well, a gallows is a platform, innit?
Only if the ‘gig’ is up ….. for our betters !! ;’)
Ouch!
“Gig’ is like an Anglo-Saxon word, while ‘platform’ is more like a Norman word.
One is basement while the other is first floor.
Re: Guillotine Watch.
North of San Francisco, signs saying “New York out of Marin” are appearing on lamp posts and the back of road signs.
Also, “Trash a Telsa Today” has been written in various places, along with the abbreviation “T3.”
Since the car is a symbol, it is attacked. For people who can easily afford repainting, it’s probably a welcome respite from worrying about physical assault, like the people who are building bunkers in L.A.
Someone who thinks like me for Hillary.
She drives a brand new Mercedes SUV with the paper dealer logo in the license plate holder. She has mounted the rightward pointing Hillary arrow on the back window because it won’t hurt the finish when its removed after Hillary becomes the first woman president, something that she looks forward to and raves about to her friends at the Pilates class she goes to.
Her husband has a Tesla, black of course, washed and waxed every other day it seems from the look of it. Like his car, his shoes are shiny, sort of faux boots with laces, but made of glove leather.
Her pants are tattered with lots of little slices made by small hands somewhere in Asia no doubt. His shirt is blue and yellow checks, a pattern that shows cleanliness and the quantity of starch on it.
He’s talking about closing one of his stores in Santa Monica and discounting the merch because it just doesn’t make sense to keep supporting the employees and the lease is almost up.
It bothers her that she has to be at home to let Maria in and keep an eye on her while the house gets dusted and polished every week. She’d much rather be checking out new galleries in the city with her sorority sisters. Running errands and watching Maria is tiring and by the late afternoon of Wednesday, she’s “corked” a funny Midwestern expression that she uses for “tired.” After a quick nap, she gets ready to go eat at their favorite Italian restaurant. “Ciao Bello!” and a kiss kiss on each cheek with the owner, then their favorite table and whatever bottle of wine he recommends to highly evolved people like them.
Lambert: Perv. Bill Clinton has joined in bashing Obamacare. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/03/bill-clinton-calls-obamacare-crazy-system-while-campaigning-in-michigan.html
FOX out of Daily Caller? Not sure about that one. Got a complete transcript?
There are a few websites that have transcripts of those segments, Bing and Google lists them, so you can pick your preference in terms of who you are familiar with.
I’ve not been able to find even video of the whole speeches. http://abcnews.go.com/ ABC news only has clips which don’t show the two segments shown by the above link. Make of it what one will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpciJcyG_tY
More context, but it’s not the whole speach.
James Carden rebukes the Obama administration for suspending the talks with Russia. And not a single word about Russian-Syrian bombing of the Aleppo hospitals. This guy amazes me))