Well, One Blairite in the UK Exhibits Self-Reflection and Honesty

Ayesha Hazarika, former senior advisor to Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband and current stand-up comedian, admits that she was wrong about Jeremy Corbyn:

I was in the busy, bustling media hub of ITV News when the exit poll dropped, and the shock was palpable. I was there as a political commentator with the great and the good of the media establishment. The last time we were gathered there we’d been caught out by the Brexit result, and once again we were all in collective shock. We had all overestimated Theresa May and underestimated Jeremy Corbyn.

I fess up to being one of those people. I got it wrong on Corbyn. He ripped up the political rules from the minute he decided to stand for the Labour leadership. I remember him speaking at the very first hustings for Labour MPs, Lords and MEPs. He spoke fluently, and with spirit and passion. I remember quipping that at this rate he would win. He hadn’t even got enough nominations to make it on to the ballot paper at this point. The rest is history.

Many of us thought that if Corbyn faced the electorate he would cost the Labour party seats and wipe us out. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the opposite happened. Labour gained votes, but most importantly looks like it will have gained seats.

………

I applaud Corbyn and his team on a great campaign and a great night. The Labour party exists to win seats and power so we can action the positive change this country is crying out for. Overnight we have made progress but Corbyn must continue to work hard to reach out to all parts of the population, not just those in metropolitan areas, and we must focus on winning more seats not just piling up votes in safe areas.

I urge my fellow Labour colleagues to acknowledge Corbyn’s success and to try to find peace with him. What the past few weeks has shown is that Labour can be an inspiring and powerful force for good. Let’s try and come together and find some settlement. The country needs us to be a strong united party now more than ever.

Of course, for some reason, it's easier for a stand-up comic to admit that they were wrong than it is for a politician, which makes no sense to me. 

History is littered with wreckage politicos who would have succeeded had they simply admitted failure and moved on.

Both a Stopped Clock, and Boris Johnson, Are Right Twice a Day

Boris Johnson, breaking with a decades long policy of abject sycophancy to the House of Saud, has called out the oil rich nation for their antediluvian and violent legacy:

Boris Johnson accused Saudi Arabia of abusing Islam and acting as a puppeteer in proxy wars throughout the Middle East, in remarks that flout a longstanding Foreign Office convention not to criticise the UK’s allies in public.

The foreign secretary told a conference in Rome last week that the behaviour of Saudi Arabia, and also Iran, was a tragedy, adding that there was an absence of visionary leadership in the region that was willing to reach out across the Sunni-Shia divide.

At the event, Johnson said: “There are politicians who are twisting and abusing religion and different strains of the same religion in order to further their own political objectives. That’s one of the biggest political problems in the whole region. And the tragedy for me – and that’s why you have these proxy wars being fought the whole time in that area – is that there is not strong enough leadership in the countries themselves.”

The foreign secretary then identified Saudi Arabia and Iran specifically, saying: “That’s why you’ve got the Saudis, Iran, everybody, moving in, and puppeteering and playing proxy wars.”

Needless to say, the usual suspects, industries dependent on Riyadh and old Middle East "experts", have been squealing about this like stuck pigs.

In the words of Otto Maddox, "F%$# that."

The Least Likely Democrat to Tell the Truth and to not Backtrack About it Is………

That would be Mary Landrieu, who said that part of the hostility against Obama in the South had its roots in racism, that's the truth bit, and now she has refused to apologize for speaking the truth:

Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu made conservative heads explode by stating a truth, that the South has not always been the friendliest place go African-Americans and to women. Landrieu's campaign put out a press release standing by her comments.

This is a level of guts and honesty that I would never have expected of her.

Holy Sh%$, We Are Running out of Gullible Idiots

I understand that all resources are finite, but I never thought that it would apply to human gullibility and stupidity, indicating a continuing fall in trading volume.

His explanation is that we are finally running out of rubes willing to trust Wall Street:

The uptrend bit is easy: volumes, at least until 2009, always went up over time, especially when they were helped along by things like decimalization and high-frequency trading. But what explains the downtrend? It’s not the decreasing number of stocks: that might explain a bit of what’s going on in the US, but it wouldn’t explain the rest of the world.

Instead, I think that what we’re seeing is the slow death of the stock-market investor — the kind of person who subscribes to Barron’s, idolizes Warren Buffett, and thinks of stock-market investing as a do-it-yourself enterprise. During the dot-com bubble, lots of people thought they were really smart when it came to stock-market investing, and then after the dot-com bubble burst, the rise of discount brokerages helped encourage new people to step in to the market and try their luck.

Nowadays, however, the message is sinking in: it’s a rigged game, you can’t win, and you’re better off with a passive strategy.

It is very hard for me to believe, but the idea that Wall Street is finally running out of hard-working, regular folks who are willing to be cheated is not an unreasonable thesis given this data.

How is Hank Paulson Like Bernie Madoff?

Well, Eric Falkenstein has the following take on Bernie Madoff:

Clearly, he understood phone calls are best. People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend's bar mitzvah.

And Felix Salmon, who has one of the sharpest minds in finance, notes a parallel with Hank Paulson in his exchange with Representative Jackie Speier:

Jackie Speier (D-Calif): Do you use email?

Hank Paulson: Do I use email? No, I don’t use it, personally.

JS: You don’t use it personally, or professionally?

HP: Yeah, I just don’t. So I’ve never used it for any business communications. Just never use it.

JS: So while you were secretary of the Treasury you never used email?

HP: No.

JS: How did you communicate with people?

HP: Telephone.

This does not prove that he is a dishonest person, though being a former head of Goldman Sachs certainly implies it, and as someone born in 1946, I understand how this might be a generational thing, but as someone who worked in finance, the value, and risks, of having a clear and incontrovertible copy of his discussions had to be clear to him.

If I were a betting man, I'd go with the fact that he knew that he broke the law regularly, and wanted deniability.

Cheney Lies Through His Teeth Again

And once again, it's the folks at McClatchy who call him on it, and no one else seems to notice.

This time, he's claiming that the Chinese are drilling off the Cuban coast, and using that as a justification for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Well, not true, and not just the Chinese:

Yet no one can prove that the Chinese are drilling anywhere off Cuba's shoreline. The China-Cuba connection is "akin to urban legend," said Sen. Mel Martinez, a Republican from Florida who opposes drilling off the coast of his state but who backs exploration in ANWR.

"China is not drilling in Cuba's Gulf of Mexico waters, period," said Jorge Pinon, an energy fellow with the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami and an expert in oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. Martinez cited Pinon's research when he took to the Senate floor Wednesday to set the record straight.

It's not just Cheney. It's also John Boehner, and George Radanovich.

If a Republican says that the sky is blue, bring a damn unbrella.

What Republican Rule Has Given Us

OK, I'm a member of a by-invitation-only BBS, and one of the members Hoop, wondered why the candidates don't tell the American public the truth about how badly America as a nation has been screwed up by republican policies, he thinks that:

This is an opportunity that comes knocking but once a lifetime.

Yet both Democratic candidates are like deer in the headlights when it comes to outlining an economic picture of the future of the US.

Perhaps they're not the leaders they portend to be.

So I thought about for a bit, and said to myself, "OK, let's see...as an honest leader with vision, here is what an honest candidate with vision would say.

• 20 0f the last 28 years have had Republicans in the White House and their goal has been to bankrupt the country so that we can not take of our poor or needy and so that the ordinary folk live hand to mouth and cannot work together for a better life. They have done this because they and their rich friends and supporters do better when ordinary people are powerless.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have also decided that it is in their interest to keep the American people afraid of external threats, so they are on a constant quest to find and create new enemies to scare us, so we won't review their policies, and so we will spend our money on guns and prisons.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have aggressively created a fear of people who don't look like us and of random criminal violence against us in order to make us waste money on putting more people in prison than any other society in the history of human kind.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have put roadblocks in front of attempts to create meaningful energy independence, because it requires a large military to protect those supply lines.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have created a system of world trade that ignores the rights of the people and makes it secondary to the profits of the banker.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have systematically attempted to replace the public good with the concept of corporate profit in our society.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have mounted an aggressive assault on the standard of living of ordinary Americans through low wage policies.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have masked this drop in standard of living by coming up with even more obscure ways for people to go into debt, (including College debt) so that they create the illusion of well being while being a slave to that debt.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have steadfastly destroyed meaningful attempts to help people get basic medical care.
• And they have succeeded.
• They have attempted to replace a society in which the manufacture of useful items, into one where parasites make money by trading between each other to the detriment of our population and our industrial base
• And they have succeeded.

Because of this, while [insert candidate here] is in office, we sill see:

• Oil leave the dollar standard, and its price going to more than $200/bbl.
• The dollar plummeting against foreign currencies.
• Inflation in the double digits for the foreseeable future.
• Food shortages nationwide, as transportation becomes increasingly expensive.
• Many of the suburbs becoming abandoned ghost towns, because those transportation costs.
• Civil disorder and unrest.
• The collapse of our hideously expensive military under its own weight.
• Your children and your parents dying for want of proper medical care.

At this point I guess that the candidate could say, "I offer you nothing but blood, sweat and tears," and while the historians might like that, the voters certainly would not.

Maybe it should wait for the inauguration, because if you say it before the elections, you will make Barry Goldwater's defeat look like a ride at the kiddie park.

Does Sex Ed Really Work?

Yes, and the mythology that masqurades as knowledge that is abstinence only sex education does not, because children know when you lie to them.

This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.

Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week is Scam to Get Speaking Gigs

David Whororitz admits it in an interview with the George Washington University Hatchet, the Student Newspaper.

"I'm a prominent conservative but no one is inviting me to speak at their campuses," Horowitz said in an interview with The Hatchet. "I had to create an event."

Ummm...No, you are an obnoxious lying fascist clown, who jumped from one extreme to the other, and have since been trying to milk that for all it's worth.

You have less credibility as a speaker than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad^*, who at least believes the crap spewing forth from his mouth.

^*And DAMN you for forcing me look up his name.