It Appears that we are Having a Spot of Rain

Lots of wind too.

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What an Unbelievably Transparent Cop-Out

This is why, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, she is likely to get beaten by Donald Trump:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton again refused to release transcripts of her paid speeches to big banks, telling a CNN town hall audience Tuesday night that she will only release her transcripts if her Republican opponents release theirs.

“Earlier tonight, I asked Senator Sanders: Will you give your transcripts of speeches?” said host Chris Cuomo. “He said he doesn’t have the bank speeches. If he can find any of the speeches that he did give for money, he will gladly give the transcripts up. So: Will you agree to release these transcripts? They have become an issue.”

Clinton replied: “Sure, if everybody does it, and that includes the Republicans.”

She continued: “Because we know they have given a lot of speeches.” She then went on to offer a defense of her Wall Street regulatory plan.

And she asked: “Why is there one standard for me, and not for everybody else?”

Because you are claiming that you are not in Wall Street's pocket, and the Republicans are in Wall Street's pockets as an article of faith?

Because you have made a specific claim that you told them to "Cut it out"?

Because you got over a half a million dollars for your speeches?

Because that answer makes you look like a whiny self-entitled jerk.

Because you are f%$#ing running for f%$#ing President of the f%$#ing United f%$#ing States?

Even if you believe Hillary Clinton's argument that she is likely to be more successful at getting things through Congress, which means that you have to ignore the fact that Bernie did more in the House and Senate than she did, this means that she is pretty damn near hopeless as a candidate.

She is the Martha Coakley of Presidential campaigns.

Letting her get the nomination likely to make Donald Trump President.

Headline of the Day

Hillary Clinton's Latest Attack on Bernie Sanders Sounds a Lot Like Mitt Romney:

Fresh off a vindicating win in Saturday's Nevada caucuses, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton found herself embroiled in a controversy over remarks denigrating rival Bernie Sanders' policy proposals as "free everything" — an attack, critics charge, that echoes Republican talking points.

The former secretary of state actually delivered the jab on Thursday, as polls showed her locked in a tight contest with Sanders in the Silver State. But the remarks didn't receive widespread attention until late this weekend, after Clinton defeated Sanders by more than 5 percentage points.

Speaking at a campaign rally, Clinton said, "I'm not just making speeches and not just promising free this and free that and free everything." The line was widely interpreted as a dig at Sanders' proposals for tuition-free public college and a single-payer, Medicare-for-All health system.

A familiar refrain? For many listeners, Clinton's remarks evoked memories of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush, both patrician Republicans who came under fire for comments suggesting that Democrats sought to curry favor with voters by offering free benefits.

I think that there is a lot more of the "Hillary Rodham Goldwater Girl" from 1964 in her than I had previously realized.

Depraved Heart Murder

The Governor of Michigan can now be shown to have studiously ignored the outbreak of Legionnaires Disease in Flint, Michigan:

It was the Fourth of July, a warm summer night in 2014, but Tim Monahan was shivering in a thick blanket as he watched fireworks from his front yard here. By the next afternoon his temperature had shot to 104.6, and doctors at the hospital he had checked into puzzled over what was wrong.

Two days later, they had an answer: Legionnaires’ disease, a virulent form of pneumonia caused by a type of bacteria that can multiply in water systems. Mr. Monahan, now 58, was given antibiotics and eventually recovered, but his case turned out to be at the leading edge of a Legionnaires’ outbreak that sickened at least 87 people in the Flint region, killing nine of them, from June 2014 through October 2015.

State officials still say they cannot conclusively link the outbreak to Flint’s contaminated water supply, partly because sputum cultures were not collected from patients. But the possibility of a link was raised in internal government emails as early as October 2014, and state officials did not inform the public of the outbreak until last month.

The Legionnaires’ cases started popping up as Flint residents were complaining about the foul-smelling, discolored water flowing into their homes after the city switched to a new water source, the Flint River, in April 2014. Soon they were reporting rashes and stomach ailments, and whistle-blowers eventually pointed to alarming levels of lead in the water supply and in children’s blood.

An examination of government emails, and interviews with people who survived Legionnaires’ and relatives of those who died, shows the government response to the Legionnaires’ outbreak followed the same pattern that prevailed throughout the Flint water crisis: a failure to act swiftly to address a dangerous problem or warn the public.

Even as more residents became critically ill with Legionnaires’ disease, and some died, the officials remained mired in jurisdictional battles, according to emails released by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and the health department in Genesee County, which includes Flint. Some at the state level seemed more concerned about following bureaucratic protocol, and not raising public alarm, than protecting residents.

People were dying, and they knew it, and they deliberately did nothing.

It's depraved heart murder.

A Nice Piece on Realpolitik

This explains why London Mayor Boris Johnson, aka "Copper Bottomed, Double Dealing Hypocritical Little Sh%$," has come out in favor of the UK leaving the EU.

It's really simple: He wants to be Prime Minister, the Tories are the most Euroskeptic of the mainstream parties, and his two most prominent rivals have pledged to oppose a Brexit.

His supporting Britain leaving the European Union is a rather savvy political move, given the realities of Tory politics:

Like all successful gamblers, Boris Johnson knows how to play the hand he is dealt, clearly calculating the odds of success. The London mayor’s decision to break with David Cameron to become a figurehead of the Leave side in the forthcoming EU referendum is the product of untold hours of calculation.

When Boris tells us that the referendum presents us with “a once in a lifetime chance”, we should believe him. If he has made the right calculations, Boris could become the next British Prime Minister. Let’s have a look at what those calculations might have been.

………

So what about Boris’ chances of becoming leader of the Conservative Party? Here it is clear that opting for Leave has drastically shortened the odds to 1/3.

One of the interesting consequences of the Labour Party’s current problems is that David Cameron’s status as an electoral asset – more popular in the country than the party he leads – is less important than usual. Without meaningful opposition, backbench MPs are less reliant on their leader to keep hold of their seats. This makes Cameron more vulnerable to a leadership challenge after the referendum, regardless of the outcome, and he may well resign if the public votes to leave.

In any leadership battle, the bookies have Boris, chancellor George Osborne, and home secretary Theresa May as the current favourites. Both Osborne and May have come out in favour of Remain. Coming out in support of Cameron’s position would have won Boris some short-lived praise for statesman-like behaviour and negation of personal ambition but it would have failed to differentiate Brand Boris from its competitors.

If he had done this and the Great British Public voted Remain, the majority of the plaudits would go to Cameron and the political capital would probably flow to Cameron’s preferred successor Osborne. Conversely, whatever the result of the referendum, Boris coming out in favour of Leave places him at the helm of the increasingly dominant faction in the Tory party and well placed to win the subsequent leadership election.

Tell David it was only politics. I always liked him.

Truth be told, I am rather surprised that Johnson either has the facilities, or the people with the facilities, to run this scenario.

My impression has always been an inbred prat who was perhaps one drink away from actually drooling.

I stand corrected.

Flies in 2018. Bankruptcy in 2019

Terrafugia has announced that its flying car will take flight by 2018.

There is a long history of flying cars (or roadable planes), and it never makes it to the mass market:

When will we finally pilot our own flying cars? It’s a question that’s haunted anyone who grew up watching sci-fi classics, and one American company claims they’re coming sooner than you’d think. Terrafugia is building the first-ever unmanned prototype of its TF-X flying car. They claim the vehicle will be ready for testing in 2018 and available for purchase by 2025.

The TF-X hybrid electric flying car looks mostly like a high-tech 4-seat sedan, except it’s equipped with fold-out wings that have twin electric motors on each side. These motors, powered by a 300 horsepower engine, can assume a horizontal position for flight and a vertical position for takeoff and landing. After using propellers to rise into the air (eliminating the need for any kind of runway), the vehicle would be capable of cruising at 200 mph for up to 500 miles.

There would be no need for a driver to have a pilot’s license, given that the car will be semi-autonomous. The driver can simply input the destination and allow the car to steer itself. The vehicle operator will, of course, have final say over whether the car should land in a particular area, and can abort landing at any time if the area seems unsafe.

This has been in the works for a long time, and I am sure that the most of the tech will work as promised.

After all there have been a dozen or so flying cars over the years.

They've just never made the leap from prototype to product.

This is Actually Not a Bad Thing

It appears that much of Clinton's victory margin was delivered by Harry Reid's political organization:

I’d like to congratulate the winner of the Nevada Democratic caucuses: Harry Reid.

What’s that, you say? The Senate Democratic leader wasn’t running? What am I talking about?

Last Saturday may well have been the day that altered the course of the Democratic presidential race — when Hillary Clinton blunted Bernie Sanders’ campaign. After she was forced to work as hard as she ever has for a week (with a little help from a lot of friends), she was sling-shotted with new momentum into South Carolina's primary this Saturday and Super Tuesday on March 1. Nevada could indeed prove to be the contest that saved Clinton’s campaign.

But the caucuses, which Clinton won by about 5 percentage points, also cemented Prince Harry as a man Machiavelli would have bowed to, a man with one eye who still sees the field better and is still more dangerous, effective and cunning than any pol the state (the country?) has ever seen. Clinton might not have won Nevada if Reid had not interceded last week, when the man feigning neutrality saw what everyone in the Democratic elite saw: Sanders erasing a once mountainous lead and on the verge of perhaps winning Nevada and rendering inoperative the “Hillary is more electable” argument.

The story of the Nevada caucuses is that a lame-duck senator and a self-neutered union conspired to revive the Clinton campaign in a remarkable bit of backroom maneuvering that helped Madame Secretary crush Sanders in Clark County, the key to winning almost any statewide election. Combined with a Clinton machine, erected last spring and looking invincible, that suddenly had to scrape the rust off its gears and turn out her voters, Caucus Day also was a remarkable story of an indomitable candidate, her nonpareil Nevada staff and a ragtag but committed Sanders operation that made them sweat.

Politically, Clinton is not a great campaigner, but playing this sort of insider game is her mutant super power..

I'm pretty sure that Hillary had to ask for this help, and knowing when to ask for help is a valuable skill.

I would rather that Sanders had won the caucus, but this is a smart move.

H/t DownWithTyranny!

The Stupidest Argument This Side of a Republican Debate

Jim Clyburn (D-SC) has just come up with the stupidest argument against Bernie Sanders plan for free tuition for college students that I have ever heard:

Days after endorsing Hillary Clinton, Rep. Jim Clyburn has a specific and sharp critique of her opponent: Bernie Sanders’ education plan would threaten the existence of smaller, private historically black colleges, Clyburn told BuzzFeed News in an interview.

The third-ranking Democrat in the House is one of the fiercest and most prominent champions for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in politics.

………

The next Democratic primary contest is here, where Clyburn is immensely popular. He said he will speak on Clinton’s behalf at Union Baptist Church in Charleston on Sunday — and also to Clinton herself to map out a game plan about whether the two will campaign together in South Carolina before the Feb. 27 primary.

But on Saturday he told BuzzFeed News in a telephone interview that while he acknowledged Sanders’ campaign is gaining traction with college-aged students in South Carolina, the education plan they’re attracted to doesn’t protect institutions like nearby Claflin University, which is private.

“You’ve got to think about the consequences of things,” Clyburn said. “[If] you start handing out two years of free college at public institutions are you ready for all the black, private HBCUs to close down? That’s what’s going to happen,” Clyburn said.

“Tougaloo College in Misssissippi will be closed if you can go to Jackson State for free,” he said.

Let me get this straight: You want college students, specifically black college students, to start their lives Enslaved by crushing debt because it might inconvenience some institutions that he has a sentimental attachment to.

This is without a doubt the stupidest thing that I've heard all week, and given that it's an elections year, that is a mind boggling concept.

Given that Donald Trump is leading the Republican field, it being the stupidest thing that I have heard all week is a complete mind f%$#.

So Not a Surprise

Transparency International is a NGO whose mission is to name and shame corruption.

The state Delaware was just named one of the most corrupt organizations on earth:

Normally, when one of our 50 states gets singled out by an international body of some consequence, you would hope it would be good news and something that the locals would brag about. But that’s not likely to be the case with Delaware’s recognition by Transparency International this month as one of the world’s best examples of “grand corruption.” The dubious distinction comes in recognition of the state’s laissez faire corporate registration system, which critics say provides corporations, fraudsters and wealthy individuals secrecy and asset protection that puts it on a footing with notorious tax havens like the Cayman Islands.

Transparency International’s selection of the top nine “grand corruption” winners was based on both internal deliberations by the non-governmental organization, most famous for its global ranking of the world’s nations for corruption, and the votes of 170,000 people around the world. Other “winners” include Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, enmeshed in an octopus like $2 billion dollar scandal that has shaken the sitting government; as well as FIFA, former leaders of the Ukraine, Panama and Tunisia, and Lebanon’s entire political system.

In the statement announcing the “dirty nine,” Transparency International said all the nominees were central to an “abuse of high level power that benefits the few at the expense of the many, and causes serious and widespread harm to individuals and society” in a way “that often goes unpunished” yet “concerns millions of victims around the world.”

Delaware’s over the top pro-business Chancery Court, its statutory trust provisions, non-existent taxes, as well as its extremely user friendly limited-liability-corporation registration process, has drawn in more than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies and over half of America’s publicly traded companies. Back in 2012, the New York Times reported that Delaware had more registered corporations than it had residents, roughly one million compared to fewer than 900,000 people.

………

Worth noting: Delaware’s functioning as America’s home-away-from-home sanctuary for all business, big and small, brings in $1.1 billion dollars a year in revenue to the state coffers, roughly a quarter of the state’s annual budget.

“This is Delaware’s industry,” says William Black, professor of Economics and the Law at the University of Missouri and Kentucky. “They sell corporate leaders protection from compliance from fiduciary obligations and the provisions of law like anti-money laundering statutes.”

Boosters of Delaware say that the major reason businesses choose Delaware is their business savvy Chancery Court, which has been sorting out commercial equity issues since the 1790s and today has jurisdiction over suits in which the massive universe of Delaware entities are named as defendants.

Black — who as a federal bank regulator blew the whistle on the role of Congress in the Keating 5 (McCain, Glenn et al) savings and loan scandal — says Delaware’s Chancery Court is at the heart of the problem, noting it has enforced trusts between parties in a way that “allows you to eliminate the fiduciary duty of standard of care for shareholders and eviscerates the fiduciary duty of loyalty through their court decisions.”

I am not sure how the US can engage in sanctions against one of its own states, but if Delaware were a foreign nation, sanctions would be well justified.

I Did Not Expect This from The Boston Globe

It's not the editorial board, but they just published an OP/ED calling out our incoherent and contradictory and ineffective policy in Syria:

Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why.

For three years, violent militants have run Aleppo. Their rule began with a wave of repression. They posted notices warning residents: “Don’t send your children to school. If you do, we will get the backpack and you will get the coffin.” Then they destroyed factories, hoping that unemployed workers would have no recourse other than to become fighters. They trucked looted machinery to Turkey and sold it.

This month, people in Aleppo have finally seen glimmers of hope. The Syrian army and its allies have been pushing militants out of the city. Last week they reclaimed the main power plant. Regular electricity may soon be restored. The militants’ hold on the city could be ending.

Militants, true to form, are wreaking havoc as they are pushed out of the city by Russian and Syrian Army forces. “Turkish-Saudi backed ‘moderate rebels’ showered the residential neighborhoods of Aleppo with unguided rockets and gas jars,” one Aleppo resident wrote on social media. The Beirut-based analyst Marwa Osma asked, “The Syrian Arab Army, which is led by President Bashar Assad, is the only force on the ground, along with their allies, who are fighting ISIS — so you want to weaken the only system that is fighting ISIS?”

This does not fit with Washington’s narrative. As a result, much of the American press is reporting the opposite of what is actually happening. Many news reports suggest that Aleppo has been a “liberated zone” for three years but is now being pulled back into misery.

………

Washington-based reporters tell us that one potent force in Syria, al-Nusra, is made up of “rebels” or “moderates,” not that it is the local al-Qaeda franchise. Saudi Arabia is portrayed as aiding freedom fighters when in fact it is a prime sponsor of ISIS. Turkey has for years been running a “rat line” for foreign fighters wanting to join terror groups in Syria, but because the United States wants to stay on Turkey’s good side, we hear little about it. Nor are we often reminded that although we want to support the secular and battle-hardened Kurds, Turkey wants to kill them. Everything Russia and Iran do in Syria is described as negative and destabilizing, simply because it is they who are doing it — and because that is the official line in Washington.

………

Politicians may be forgiven for distorting their past actions. Governments may also be excused for promoting whatever narrative they believe best suits them. Journalism, however, is supposed to remain apart from the power elite and its inbred mendacity. In this crisis it has failed miserably.

Americans are said to be ignorant of the world. We are, but so are people in other countries. If people in Bhutan or Bolivia misunderstand Syria, however, that has no real effect. Our ignorance is more dangerous, because we act on it. The United States has the power to decree the death of nations. It can do so with popular support because many Americans — and many journalists — are content with the official story. In Syria, it is: “Fight Assad, Russia, and Iran! Join with our Turkish, Saudi, and Kurdish friends to support peace!” This is appallingly distant from reality. It is also likely to prolong the war and condemn more Syrians to suffering and death.

This is the sort of thing I would expect to see in the Guardian or the BBC, not in a major US paper with a closet full of Pulitzers.

Our incoherent policies, and our "allies" who work for terrorists are generally terra incognita for our mainstream media.

Baltimore's Man From Teach for America

With the rather hapless Stephanie Rawlings Blake not running for reelection as Mayor of Baltimore, it it is a bit of a free for all, with pretty much everyone, including her larcenous (she was convicted and served time) predecessor.

Needless to say, there is much opportunity for mischief, and it appears that the hedge funds first choice for pillaging the public school system, Teach for America, has a candidate in the race:

For those who’ve never paid much attention, Teach For America sounds like a benevolent and benign idea: recruit bright college grads, give them some teacher-training and place them in some of the nation’s neediest schools for a two-year commitment to teach kids.

The reality behind TFA’s sunny exterior is somewhat more sinister. Education policy experts today consider the nonprofit founded by Wendy Kopp in 1990 to be at the vanguard of the school privatization movement. TFA is also a media juggernaut in its own right, known for deploying a sophisticated public relations arsenal to advance an agenda focused on crushing teachers’ unions and privatizing public school systems. TFA's funders, including the Waltons, Bill and Melinda Gates and top Fortune 500 corporations, all have plenty to gain from the commodification of public goods and the destruction of public service unions, and its 11,000 corps members provide a valuable service to that end.
………

When Mckesson announced his campaign for mayor of Baltimore this month, his name topped the list of trending topics on Twitter for several hours. Even without outlining a strategy to defeat better-known, more entrenched candidates, Mckesson received nearly $130,000 in online donations, met with President Barack Obama (who said Mckesson and associates “were better organizers than I was”), and secured his status as one of the country’s most closely watched political outsiders. Headlines appeared across national media, from Slate to the Guardian to the Washington Post, with the progressive online magazine Truthdig proclaiming Mckesson "Truthdigger of the Week."

With his candidacy for a city whose public schools are a key target of the education reform movement, the time seems right to scrutinize Mckesson’s relationship with Teach for America more closely. His high-profile appearance at the TFA gala only days after filing his last-minute bid to enter the race was only the latest collaboration with the organization spearheading a sustained attack on teacher's unions and traditional public schools.

………

As Mckesson rose to prominence, TFA was there to provide promotion through its powerful PR apparatus.

Mckesson had no connection to Ferguson when he first arrived on Aug. 16, 2014, according to an interview he gave Huffington Post later the same year. But it didn’t take him long to connect with another protester named Brittany Packnett, with whom he began working the same day. The fact that Packnett is executive director of TFA’s St. Louis chapter likely contributed to their immediate rapport.

At the time, Mckesson was senior director of human capital for Minneapolis Public Schools. He says he commuted to Ferguson on weekends before eventually quitting his job to protest full-time.

A Twitter search query produces a clear timeline of Mckesson's subsequent transition from human resources manager to social justice talent, aided by promotion from Teach For America. It begins with a post to TFA’s official blog, in which Mckesson pontificates on his activities in Ferguson. TFA tweeted a link to that post on Aug. 21, 2014, at which point Mckesson would have been in the besieged midwestern town for five days.

………

I reached Mckesson by phone soon after he announced his candidacy for mayor. When I asked him how he funded all of his travel despite not having a job, he initially replied, “I don’t have an answer to that. There’s an answer in the New York Times article.”

After being informed that the Times offered no such answer, Mckesson stated, “You know, people ask me this, and I haven’t even had to answer this. I, you know, me and you don’t have a relationship. You know, you’re a reporter to me, you know—I’ve answered it many times. I will put that on my list of things and try to double back with you.” Several hours later, Mckesson texted me the link to a Tweet from last spring claiming that his excursions were funded by unnamed “family and friends.”

………

Mckesson the ruthless administrator is a difficult characterization to reconcile with Mckesson the protester, as he’s typically portrayed in print, nor does it come through in his television appearances. But commentary from some activists who have encountered him on the ground in Ferguson and Baltimore suggests that the public image he’s cultivated is a media fiction.

Baltimore activist Duane Davis, in a tweet addressed to DeRay, says, “[W]e crossed paths. On more than one occasion....you never engaged in conversation. [Y]ou were more focused on media attention.”

In a February 15 interview with Jared Ball on Real News Network, Hands Up United Coalition co-founder Taureen Russell offered a withering assessment of Mckesson’s alleged role as a protest organizer. “I never worked with DeRay. I’m really hard-pressed to find any local people who have worked with DeRay. All the local people that I know worked with DeRay...work with the establishment,” he said. “So when I hear him go on Colbert and Colbert is saying he’s organized protests in Ferguson...I don’t know an action or a protest that he was a part of.”

Russell is a founder of the organization that initiated the protests in Ferguson against the police killing of Michael Brown and the acquittal of the officer who gunned him down. He told Ball he was relieved that Mckesson had moved on to politics because “it makes my job [as a grassroots organizer] a little easier.”

Addressing Baltimore, Russell said of Mckesson: “He’s a proponent for charter schools. He’s not typically a fan of public schools. So the educational issue comes up. His policy, to be honest, most people see as a neoliberal kind of policy. And we know his policy comes from Teach For America.”
………

Mckesson’s political platform, which he has begun rolling out on the DeRay For Mayor website, seems modeled in part on those who have forced corporate education reforms under big-city mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg. Both of those mayors have justified unilateral takeovers of the public school districts in their respective cities using teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores, which have consistently been debunked as unreliable measures of academic performance.

The language in his section on education is typical of school privatization advocates, according to Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, a professor of education at California State University at Sacremento who has written extensively about Teach For America on his website, Cloaking Inequity.

………

The lack of transparency in the DeRay For Mayor campaign means the public will have to wait until March to identify all the contributors to its six-figure finances. But if history is any indicator, we can expect it to include many of the same financial interests that have waged assaults on public school teachers and students across the country. It remains to be seen if Teach For America and one of its most famous cadres will finally be held to account for their privatization agenda, before it begins to take hold in Baltimore.

Yes, I know that this sounds tin-foil hat, until one looks at the history of the charter school movement.

There is a lot of  money to made from sucking the marrow from pub lic education, and when there is a lot of money to be made, people work very hard to make it.

It's basic economics, or to quote Willie Sutton, "Because that's where the money is."

Wall Street is hip deep in privatizing education, and leveraging politics to create ill gotten gains is their "A" game.

Headline of the Day

Boris Is a Copper Bottomed, Double Dealing Hypocritical Little Sh%$. The Press Will Destroy Him

—Jerry Hayes, who appears to be a bit put off by the fact that Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has come out in favor of a Brexit.

(%$ mine)

Say what you will about the British, but the land of Shakespeare has not lost its facility for venom .

The classic Scorsese movie is Taxi Driver, not Uber Driver.

I dunno, maybe it's a 20-teens thing that a wannabee Travis Bickle is now driving Uber:

The man accused of killing six people and injuring two more in a Saturday evening shooting rampage in Kalamazoo, Michigan, was an Uber driver who picked up and dropped off passengers between shootings, a source with knowledge of the investigation told CNN.

The source, who is not authorized to speak to media, said investigators believe Jason Brian Dalton was even looking for fares after the final shooting of a nearly seven-hour killing rampage.

It could be that this guy is just nuts.

It could be that Uber's abuse of its drivers drove him mad.

It could be that a he has a history of issues that would not have allowed him to get a hack license.

I'm not sure, but I saw the Scorsese reference.

Very Funny, New Yorker

The associated art with this article on populism in the presidential campaign.

If you do not see it, then you haven't seen the internet meme "Goatse".

If you haven't seen the internet meme "Goatse", for the love of God, do not Google it!

That which is seen cannot be unseen.

It's One Thing to Get Called out by Politifact, But to Get Outed by Snopes?

No chanting here

Delores Huerta, a civil rights activist and campaigner for Hillary Clinton, claimed that her efforts to translate at a caucus in Nevada were shouted down by Sanders supporters chanting "English only".

Snopes.com, the urban myth busting site for the internet, Finds these claims to be false, which is unsurprising. Huerta made similar discredited claims against Obama in 2008:

Claim: Supporters of Bernie Sanders shouted "English only" at civil rights activist Dolores Huerta during one Nevada caucus event, ostensibly objecting to a translation of remarks into Spanish.

False

Origin: On 20 February 2016, the Nevada Democratic caucuses ended in a victory for Hillary Clinton.  Not long after that, actress America Ferrera tweeted that  that supporters of Bernie Sanders shouted "English only!" at longtime civil rights activist Dolores Huerta (who had apparently offered to translate from English to Spanish at an event at Harrah's casino on the Las Vegas strip), objecting to a translation of remarks from English to Spanish:

………

Origin: On 20 February 2016, the Nevada Democratic caucuses ended in a victory for Hillary Clinton. Not long after that, actress America Ferrera tweeted that that supporters of Bernie Sanders shouted "English only!" at longtime civil rights activist Dolores Huerta (who had apparently offered to translate from English to Spanish at an event at Harrah's casino on the Las Vegas strip), objecting to a translation of remarks from English to Spanish:

………

Huerta initially didn't specify how she identified the chanters as Sanders supporters. We spoke to Erin Cruz, who was present at the rally with a nurses' union to support Sanders:

@AmericaFerrera @DoloresHuerta
The moderator said English only not anyone from the Bernie camp @SusanSarandon @rebeccab311

— Erin Cruz (@neuroticnurse75) February 20, 2016

Cruz told us she was accompanied by ten other nurses and actors Susan Sarandon and Gaby Hoffman. Cruz said she was unaware of any recording during the disputed chanting:

………

As Sarandon correctly stated, the segment in dispute started around the 53:30 mark, when parties called for a Spanish-language translator. As she indicated, at 55:18 the caucus moderator (not Sanders' supporters) simply stated that the inability to locate a neutral translator meant the caucus would continue in "English only." At no point did any Sanders supporters appear to have refused a translator based on the fact that translation was objectionable to them; nor was "English only" used in a pejorative fashion. The term was invoked a single time, during the moderator's assertion that no suitable translator was located to provide Spanish-language translations:

Between Madeline Allbright claimin that women Bernie supporters are going to hell, Gloria Steinem claiming that women Bernie supporters are in it for the Bernie Boys, and now this, it appears that Hillary's supporters may be a bigger problem for her than Bernie's supporters.

There Were Some Elections Tonight

Quick take:  Trump wins decisively in South Carolina, Hillary Clinton wins and under-performs in Nevada, and Jeb(!) bows to the inevitable, and drops out of the race.

I'm not sure what it all means, though I think that two guys named Guido and Nunzio will be having words with Jeb(!) about the $150,000,000.00+ that he spent, and how they might get their vig.

That Company Foreclosing You May Not Hold the Mortgage, Part MCMLXXVI

The California Supreme court just ruled for a plaintiff who claimed that the company that foreclosed on her never held the mortgage:

The California Supreme Court on Thursday ruled unanimously in favor of a fraudulently foreclosed-upon homeowner in a case that should serve as a wake-up call to state and federal prosecutors that mortgage companies continue to use false documents to evict homeowners on a daily basis.

“A homeowner who has been foreclosed on by one with no right to do so has suffered an injurious invasion of his or her legal rights at the foreclosing entity’s hands,” the justices wrote.

………

In this case, Tsvetana Yvanova purchased a $483,000 mortgage in 2006 from New Century, a company that went bankrupt in 2007. Four years later, in December 2011, New Century somehow transferred the mortgage to a trust, from which thousands of pooled mortgages had created mortgage-backed securities. But by law, the mortgages placed in that pool had to be put in it by January 27, 2007.

The eventual trustee, Western Progressive, foreclosed on Yvanova and sold her house at auction in September 2012. Yvanova later argued that her foreclosure was illegal because a bankrupt company (New Century) could not have transferred the deed of trust, and because the trust had closed to new loans four years before the transfer was executed. Therefore, the assignment document was false, and the foreclosure void.

A state appeals court ruled that Yvanova lacked the ability to challenge the defective assignment, because she was not a direct party to the transfer of ownership. But the state Supreme Court rejected that analysis.

“We conclude, to the contrary,” the ruling states, that “an allegation that the assignment was void… will support an action for wrongful foreclosure.”

The 33-page ruling is narrow – the court did not rule on the validity of the assignment itself in the case, nor did it allow state homeowners to pre-emptively challenge threatened foreclosures on these issues. But it did establish that borrowers have a chance to receive compensation for a wrongful foreclosure if they find it to have been executed with false documents.

………

California Attorney General Kamala Harris filed an amicus brief last April supporting Yvanova’s right to challenge her foreclosure. But Harris, like every other state and federal law enforcement official in the country, has not stepped in to prevent the continuing flood of false documents submitted to courts.

The 2012 National Mortgage Settlement with the five largest mortgage companies (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally Bank) included language committing the firms to end the production of false documents. But they continue to be used on a daily basis to evict homeowners. The foreclosure in the Yvanova case occurred in September 2012, seven months after the completion of the National Mortgage Settlement.

Despite promises from the banks and the mortgage servicers, mortgages and their progress through the financial system continues to be resemble nothing more than Captain Benjamin Willard meandering up stream in his pursuit of Colonel Kurtz in the movie Apocalypse Now.

Our own heart of darkness.

Understanding the Trump Voter

In 2004, Mark Ames wrote about the "Spite Voter", and it is the best explanation of the Trump appeal.

Here is a sample paragraph:

Spite voting is not just an American problem; it’s a flaw in democracies everywhere. When I lived in Kosovo in the late summer of 2000, I asked my Serb friends there if they thought Milosevic was going to win the upcoming Serbian presidential elections. Most were pessimistic. They told me of friends, young people even, who voted for Milosevic “just out of spite.” The Serbian spite voters believed that if the opposition got their way and Serbia became as tame and civilized as Luxembourg, all those college-educated Otpor protestors and pro-Western intellectuals would simply take the privileges enjoyed by Milosevic’s cronies for themselves. They didn’t want caste-based happiness and its accompanying propaganda, so they voted for Milosevic precisely because he was wrong, because he was a vote against hope. Under Milosevic, nearly every Serb was f%$#ed equally, and that suited some people, particularly some Serbian males, just fine. But if you’re a failure under two completely different regimes, then the inescapable conclusion would be that it’s your own damn fault. Better to keep the villain in, and the young ambitious go-getters out.

(%$# mine)

Read the rest.  It's long, but well worth reading.

Have I Said before That Our Policies in Syria Are Completely Incoherent?

We are now in a situation where our Pentagon supported rebels are at war with out CIA supported rebels:

American proxies are now at war with each other in Syria.

Officials with Syrian rebel battalions that receive covert backing from one arm of the U.S. government told BuzzFeed News that they recently began fighting rival rebels supported by another arm of the U.S. government.

The infighting between American proxies is the latest setback for the Obama administration’s Syria policy and lays bare its contradictions as violence in the country gets worse.

The confusion is playing out on the battlefield — with the U.S. effectively engaged in a proxy war with itself. “It’s very strange, and I cannot understand it,” said Ahmed Othman, the commander of the U.S.-backed rebel battalion Furqa al-Sultan Murad, who said he had come under attack from U.S.-backed Kurdish militants in Aleppo this week.

Furqa al-Sultan Murad receives weapons from the U.S. and its allies as part of a covert program, overseen by the CIA, that aids rebel groups struggling to overthrow the government of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, according to rebel officials and analysts tracking the conflict.

The Kurdish militants, on the other hand, receive weapons and support from the Pentagon as part of U.S. efforts to fight ISIS. Known as the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, they are the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy against the extremists in Syria and coordinate regularly with U.S. airstrikes.

Yet as Assad and his Russian allies have routed rebels around Aleppo in recent weeks — rolling back Islamist factions and moderate U.S. allies alike, as aid groups warn of a humanitarian catastrophe — the YPG has seized the opportunity to take ground from these groups, too.

And now we also have the Turks demanding that the US cease aiding the Kurds, who are arguably the most effective opposition to ISIS:

The U.S. said it won’t break off ties to a Kurdish militia that’s fighting Islamic State in Syria, rebuffing the demands of NATO member Turkey, which blames the group for a bombing in the capital Ankara this week.

Turkey says Wednesday’s attack on a military bus, which killed 28 people, was carried out by the PKK and its Syrian affiliates. The U.S. agrees with Turkey that the PKK, which has been fighting for autonomy in Turkey’s Kurdish regions for three decades, is a terrorist group. But the status of the Kurdish fighters in Syria has been straining ties between the NATO allies, as their interests there diverge after more than five years of war.

The U.S. says defeating Islamic State, also known as Daesh, is the overwhelming priority. Turkey has signed up for that goal, but it’s also trying to prop up rebels in northwest Syria fighting against President Bashar al-Assad, whose Russian-backed army threatens to encircle them. The Syrian Kurds are in position to cut off vital supply lines to Aleppo, where the opposition groups are holed up, and their territorial gains may also set an example for Kurds seeking autonomy inside Turkey.

So, we are fighting ISIS, as are the Kurds, and we are allies with Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who have supported ISIS, and oppose the Kurds.

And now Ankara and Riyadh are looking to mount a ground war to "put down ISIS" but is really intend to create a fundamentalist Sunni regime and put down the Kurds.

Confused enough yet?

Deep Thought

Link

Lad I don't know where you've been but I see you won first prize.

I Can Haz Prosecushuns?

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has released more of his emails, and it is pretty clear that he knew that he was poisoning the people of Flint, and he did not care:

Gov. Syder released 1.02 GB of emails in pdf form from various departments in his administration. However, none of them are pre-2014, a time period when many of the decisions regarding Flint’s move to the Flint River as its temporary source of drinking water were being made. Still, there is a LOT of new information in these emails and much of today’s news round-up comes from analysis of them by various news outlets. If you have a burning desire to plow through the gigabyte and change of files, here are the links to all of them:

………

In late March 2013, a full year before Flint switched to the Flint River as the source for its drinking water under the order of its Emergency Manager and with sign-off by their boss State Treasurer Andy Dillon, DEQ officials warned them about the potential for problems. In an email sent on March 26th, Stephen Busch, a staffer in the drinking water division of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) informed his superiors about problems they could anticipate making the switch. That email was then forwarded up the food chain to Treasurer Dillon. Here’s are some of the warning flags he raised:

………

Mike Glasgow, Flint’s laboratory and water quality supervisor at the time of the switch to the Flint River made it very clear in an email to DEQ officials that the city’s water treatment plant was not going to be ready to treat river water in time for the conversion from water obtained from the Detroit Water and Sewerage (DWSD). However, his superiors were blowing him off:

………

On September 30th, Gov. Snyder finally acknowledged what nearly everyone else already knew: Flint had a problem with poisoned water and his administration had made mistakes, including not properly treating the water to prevent corrosion. However, it took until November 4th for his administration to finally authorize the installation of the corrosion control equipment:

………

Between Gov. Snyder’s admission and the approval of the corrosion control equipment, DEQ director Dan Wyant, a man with no background in water treatment or water regulations, assured the public that corrosion control had been in place the whole time. By the time he got around to approving the equipment, Flint had already switched back to DWSD water (that is already treated with phosphate for corrosion control.)

All of this happened, by the way, months after the EPA had been pushing them to begin phosphate treatment back in August:

The original docs are at the link along with some damning quote.

I want to see some prosecutions for depraved heart murder.

They knew that they were putting people's lives at risk, and they did not care.

I Would Not Expect This from Him

Neel "Cash and Carry" Kashkari, current president of the Minneapolis Bank of the Federal Reserve and former minion of Goldman "Vampire Squid" Sach, has called for a breakup of the big banks and utility style management of essential financial institutions:

What does one make of it when someone whose career has been based on having powerful friends and contacts at the top levels of the financial services industry appears to be acting as a traitor to his class? In this case, the apparent turncoat is one Neel Kashkari, ex Goldman, ex Treasury, ex Pimco employee, now the new President of the Minneapolis Fed, who in his first speech in his new job, said all sorts of unpleasant truths: the financial crisis imposed huge costs on society as a whole, Dodd Frank didn’t go far enough, the authorities won’t be willing to risk using untested new powers in a financial meltdown and will bail out banks again. He also argued that the financial system was now stable enough to make (by implication overdue) transformative changes to end the “too big to fail” problem, such as breaking up banks and regulating them like utilities. Kashkari plans to come up with a comprehensive plan by year end and is seeking public input, including having expert discussions that will be webcast.

………

This is the guts of Kashkari’s speech:

Now is the right time for Congress to consider going further than Dodd-Frank with bold, transformational solutions to solve this problem once and for all. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis is launching a major initiative to develop an actionable plan to end TBTF, and we will deliver our plan to the public by the end of the year. Ultimately Congress must decide whether such a transformational restructuring of our financial system is justified in order to mitigate the ongoing risks posed by large banks.

………

I believe we must seriously consider bolder, transformational options. Some other Federal Reserve policymakers have noted the potential benefits to considering more transformational measures.6 I believe we must begin this work now and give serious consideration to a range of options, including the following:

• Breaking up large banks into smaller, less connected, less important entities.
• Turning large banks into public utilities by forcing them to hold so much capital that they virtually can’t fail (with regulation akin to that of a nuclear power plant).
• Taxing leverage throughout the financial system to reduce systemic risks wherever they lie.

My guess is that this is an attempt to generate some perceived gravitas as a tactic to be used in bureaucratic, though much like Bernie Sanders, I find this a positive development. (Hillary Clinton is on record as not a big fan of breaking up the big banks)

The House of Saud Surrenders………

Russia and Saudi Arabil have cut a deal to limit the supply of oil.

Unfortunately, the ball is still rolling downhill:

Several top OPEC producers made headlines with Russia on Tuesday, revealing that a secret meeting between their respective energy ministers led to a deal to “freeze” production in an effort to boost oil prices.

The agreement is monumental in the sense that OPEC and Russia are poised to agree to cooperate, the first OPEC and non-OPEC deal in 15 years. At the same time, the deal is a half-measure and will likely be inadequate to substantially rescue oil prices from their rock bottom lows.

………

The real problem for this deal, though, is with Iran, who is unlikely to sign on to a production freeze when its output is still close to sanctions-era levels. With substantial gains in production expected for this year, the deal would be harder to swallow than it would for other OPEC members. Saudi Arabia would be willing to freeze its output if it meant burdening its rival Iran. As a result, Iran’s acquiescence is an open question. "We have not yet reached our level of pre-sanctions production. So when we get there, we will be on an equal level, then we can talk," a senior source told Reuters, pouring cold water on the deal. Venezuelan officials believe they can bring Iran on board, but that remains to be seen.

In short, despite Tuesday’s announcement, implementing the deal will be trickier than it sounds.

The current low oil prices are largely an artifact of a Saudi decision to overproduce in an attempt to drive more expensive fracked oil off the market.

Unfortunately for them, with interest rates being near zero, the frackers can still make payments on their loans, and now we have any number of oil producer nations who continue to overproduce because they are too dependent on oil revenues.

It's a vicious circle.

Today's Must Read

In The Grauniad,^* Thomas Frank makes the obvious point about Hillary Clinton.

Specifically, he notes that Hillary is not a corrupt thrall of the malefactors of wealth, she is a malefactor of wealth herself:

Stunned by the rise of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton has been at pains to assure the Democratic rank and file that she too understands their concerns; that just like her rival, she is capable of denouncing wealthy interests, of promising to break up big banks and even of hinting that she might prosecute powerful financiers.

After her landslide defeat in New Hampshire last week, she conceded that “the way too many things were going just wasn’t right”. There was a difference between her and the senator from Vermont, however: she was the candidate who would get things done, who could “actually make the changes that make your lives better”.

………

These are noble sentiments. Unfortunately, what voters are rejecting is not Hillary the Capable; it is the party whose leadership faction she represents as well as the direction in which our modern Democrats have been travelling for decades.

………

Among the legions of the respectable at the time, Bill Clinton’s many reversals of Democratic tradition were thought to establish him as a figure of great historic significance. A telling example of this once-common view can be found in an admiring 1996 book by the then Guardian journalist Martin Walker, who asserted that the president’s few failings were “in the end balanced and even outweighed by his part in finally sinking the untenable old consensus of the New Deal, and the crafting of a new one”.

That Clintonian consensus, which slouches on in the bank bailouts and trade deals of recent years, is what deserves to be on the table in 2016, under the bright lights of public scrutiny at last. As we slide ever deeper into the abyss of inequality, it is beginning to dawn on us that sinking the New Deal consensus wasn’t the best idea after all.

Unfortunately, focusing on the money being mustered behind Hillary Clinton by various lobbyists and Wall Street figures misses this point. The problem with establishment Democrats is not that they have been bribed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the rest; it’s that many years ago they determined to supplant the GOP as the party of Wall Street – and also to bid for the favor the tech industry, and big pharma, and the telecoms, and the affluent professionals who toil in such places.

………

In truth, our affluent, establishment Democrats can no more be budged from their core dogmas – that education is the solution to all problems, that professionals deserve to lead, that the downfall of the working class is the inevitable price we pay for globalization – than creationists can be wooed away from the tenets of “intelligent design”. The dogmas are simply too essential to their identity. Changing what the Democratic party stands for may ultimately require nothing less than what a certain Vermonter is calling a “political revolution”.

Notwithstanding her prodigious abilities and accomplishment, Hillary Clinton is part of a package with Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was not just a member of the (not thankfully defunct) right wing Democratic Leadership Council, he is one of its founders.

It's not that they are bought and paid for by people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, it's that they ARE the people like corrupt former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and unlike, for instance, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, they are not willing to separate themselves from those people.

^*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It's nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, "The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad."

AFL-CIO Declines to Endorse Clinton

For a while, at least:

In a win for Bernie Sanders, the AFL-CIO is delaying making it's endorsement in the surprisingly close Democratic presidential primary.

………

"Following recent discussion at the AFL-CIO’s Executive Committee meeting and subsequent conversations with many of you, I have concluded that there is broad consensus for the AFL-CIO to remain neutral in the presidential primaries for the time being and refrain from endorsing any candidate at this moment," Trumka said in the email.

Oh to be a fly on the wall for that Executive Committee meeting.

My guess is that committee did not want to deal with a pissed off rank and file, particularly when they want to energize them in the general election.

Also, I think that they are beginning to doubt her inevitability.

The NSA's Whiz Bang is Short on the Whiz, and Long on the Bang

The NSA has a metadata analysis program in South Asia that it used to make up a kill list. It is rather unironically called called SKYNET.

Analysis of the results now indicates that it doesn't work, but drone based terror continues to rain down on innocent civilians:

In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullsh%$." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as "extremists," the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of "20070108" on one of the SKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.

In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that "scientifically unsound" algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.

(%$ mine)

This is why our roving army of flying killing machines is such a bad idea:  If most of the people you kill are innocent, they will have relatives looking to avenge their cowardly assassination.

It's basic human nature.

America's Finest News Source

Obama Compiles Shortlist Of Gay, Transsexual Abortion Doctors To Replace Scalia

Brilliant!

Mount St. Mary's Update: This Is What Happens When You Trust a Finance Guy

William Agee, former CEO of Bendix is a man of many failures, but his destruction of Morrison Knudson is particularly instructive on the skill set of finance types:

………

Mr. Agee further estranged insiders by quietly moving the CEO's office to his Pebble Beach estate, and worse, scoffing at the company's engineer-oriented culture. "You construction guys have been trying to run the company for 75 years," Keith Price, who headed Morrison Knudsen's MK Ferguson unit until he retired in April 1991, recalls Mr. Agee telling him. "Now I'm going to show you how the financial guys do it."

The November letter pointed out just how the financial guy did his numbers. Using numbers available from earnings reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the letter writers pointed out that the percentage of the company's pretax income from nonoperating sources such as asset sales and interest for the five years ending 1993 averaged 43%. In other words, Mr. Agee was sweetening profit reports by selling Morrison off piece by piece, and investing Morrison's cash.

Meanwhile, lease obligations had rocketed. During the five years ended 1993, they had jumped, to $266 million at the end of 1993 from $38 million at the end of 1988. (To shore up cash, Mr. Agee had begun selling assets, such as equipment, and leasing them back, Morrison executives say.)

This is how finance works.  Find out a loophole, and use it to benefit personally, the future be damned.

At Mount St. Mary's, Simon Newman, the recently appointed college President, a hedge fund type, decided to try to expel 5% of the freshman class to create the illusion that the retention rates.

When people complained, he fired them including a tenured professor with no due process.

We are now seeing the push back, with the faculty calling for his resignation by a vote of 87 to 3, which he promptly ignored.

Additionally, the alumni are freaking out, and the The Washington Post condemned the behavior of the President and the Board of Directors in no uncertain terms:

Mr. Newman has only himself to blame for the mess at “the Mount,” as the university is known, despite his and the board of trustees’ despicable efforts to deflect fault to what they regard as a cabal of infidels among the faculty and alumni. It was Mr. Newman who, in a conversation with professors, said that struggling freshmen should be culled in order to improve Mount St. Mary’s student retention rate, which affects its standing in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities.

(Emphasis mine)

When I first posted about this, I jokingly suggested that Newman's plan was to burn down the university for the insurance money.

More and more, it seems like my joke is reality.

Yes

Booman asks the following about the incoherence Conservative ideology which has been limned by the current Republican contest, "Has it always been more a matter of tribalism and a team mentality?"

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

H/t Atrios.

John Oliver Eviscerates Vote Fraud Claims

He comes back from vacation, and he does a deep dive into the mythical voter impersonation problem:



This is some serious whup ass that he unleashes on the new Jim Crow.

This Business Will Get out of Control. It Will Get out of Control and We'll Be Lucky to Live through It.

Syria, looks to be going to be going completely pear shaped.

With advances by the Syrian government and by the Kurdish YPG threatening to cut off Turkey's Islamist proxies in Syria, Ankara is shelling the Kurds, attacking what are (for now, at least) US Allies:

France's foreign ministry has urged Turkey to end its assault on Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

In a statement (in French) it said it was "worried about the continued worsening of the situation".

On Saturday, Turkey began shelling the militia, which it says is linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

The fighters, the YPG militia based in Syria, have rejected Turkey's demand to leave areas it has seized, saying Islamists would return if it left.

Turkey's assault is a new thread in an already-complex conflict that has drawn in competing regional powers.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu insisted on Sunday that Turkey "will not permit the [Kurdish militia] to carry out aggressive acts".

"Our security forces gave the necessary response and will continue to do so," Mr Davutoglu said.

Syria has also condemned the Turkish action as a violation of its sovereignty and asked the UN Security Council to intervene.

What's more, the Turkey machinations in Syria, along with its heavy handed suppression of the Kurds in south east Anatolia has led to a renewed insurgency inside Turkey:

It was midday on a Thursday at the end of December when Rozerin Çukur left her home, supposedly to pick up class notes from a friend. She never returned.

Rozerin wandered through the narrow streets of Sur, the tangled old town neighborhood in Diyarbakir, a city of one million in southeastern Turkey. An attractive 17-year-old, Rozerin was wearing her school uniform and carrying a book and a pen in her bag.

"Just a few hours later," her father says, "my daughter was inside the war." She supposedly joined the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), a group supported by the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and which since September has been fighting against the Turkish army in the streets of Diyarbakir, using Kalashnikovs and booby traps.

Rozerin was killed by a single shot to the head. Since January 8, her dead body has been lying in the sealed-off old town of Diyarbakir. Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the city's ancient heart has also long been the hub of Kurdish resistance. Rozerin's parents are holding a vigil in a community center in the city together with dozens of other parents whose children have been killed in the most recent civil war in southeastern Turkey. The parents say they only want one thing: to be able to provide a decent burial for their children. But the Turkish state, they say, has made it impossible to recover their children's bodies.

State officials view the dead young men and women as terrorists -- as violent members of the PKK. Parents say they have been told that they can enter the old town in small groups, but that Turkish officials are demanding that they remove the weapons from the hands of the dead. And the parents do not want to touch the weapons. "The soldiers," they fear, "would shoot immediately."

………

The state is using extreme force against the PKK. Indeed, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently announced that he intended to annihilate the fighting force and promised to continue the battle "until the area is cleansed of all terrorists." There is no "Kurdish question," he said, just a "terror problem."

Bitter house-to-house fighting of the kind seen in Diyarbakir is also taking place in other surrounding cities. The PKK focused its earlier attacks primarily on military targets and police stations. But since the state has laid siege to the cities, the radical Kurdish youth movement YDG-H has taken up the fight there as well.

Until recently, the YDG-H was seen as a collection of disillusioned youth who defended themselves from state violence with rocks and Molotov cocktails. But now that the government has set its sights on ridding the cities of PKK sympathizers, the group has armed and organized itself with the PKK's help. They are now fighting on the frontlines while experienced PKK fighters are hiding in the Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan.

After nearly 50 years of the "Kurdish problem" Turkey seemed to have come to an accommodation with the Kurds in the late 1990s, and now Erdogan has blown it all up.

And now the Turks and house of Saud are threatening to invade Syria:

The Turkish military has hit Kurdish and Syrian regime targets as Ankara considered a ground assault with Saudi troops, further complicating efforts to end the war just days after the US and Russia agreed on a “cessation of hostilities” in Syria within a week.

………

In an interview with AFP released on Friday, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad said he “doesn’t rule out” that Turkey and Saudi Arabia would intervene militarily in Syria, but said his armed forces “will certainly confront it”.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey both staunchly support rebels seeking to oust Assad, and see his overthrow as essential for ending Syria’s five-year civil war that has cost more than 260,000 lives.

They fear the west is losing its appetite to overthrow him on the assumption he is “the lesser of two evils” compared with Isis.

Neither the House of Saud nor Turkey are our allies in Syria.

Riyadh is interesting in extending repressive Sunni hegemony in Syria, and Turkey is interested in reassembling a a sphere of influence in the area of the former Ottoman Empire.

The technical term for the governments in Ankara and Saudi Arabia is f%$#ing nuts.

We should not be on their side in any way shape, or form.

This is Brilliant Politics

Rather unsurprisingly, Bobby Jindal has left the finances of the state of Louisiana in a mess.

His successor, Democrat John Bel Edwards realized that the state needs to raise taxes to fix the mess that he inherited.

He has come up with a new way to sell revenue measures, he's holding the LSU Football program hostage:

Louisiana’s new Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards is pushing for new tax increases to help address the severe budget deficit left behind by former Governor Bobby Jindal. The problem: Voters in Louisiana are allergic to the very word tax.

Edwards took his case to the public in a televised address on Thursday night, warning that inaction on his proposed increases could jeopardize the holiest of all institutions: LSU football.

The state’s higher education commissioner warned this week that unless the legislature acts to provide funding for the public university system, it will have to suspend some classes for the spring semester and give students grades of “incomplete.” Because of NCAA rules, no athlete may compete for his or her team with an “incomplete” on their transcript, meaning that LSU’s football players will be ineligible come the fall semester.

 Nice to know someone who understands his electorate, and is willing to use this effectively.

Trump Goes There

In the last Republican Presidential debate, Donald Trump noted that George W. Bush was President on 911, and that he lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction:

Jeb Bush’s campaign thinks George W. Bush is its not-so-secret weapon in next Saturday’s pivotal primary. Donald Trump couldn’t care less.

Holding a 20-point lead in the state over his nearest rival with a week to go, Trump blasted the former president for the national security record his brother’s campaign plans to tout, blaming him during a GOP debate Saturday night not just for the Iraq War but also for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign. Remember that," Trump said to the former Florida governor, prompting a long, contentious back-and-forth.

………

In fact, Trump has blamed George W. Bush for 9/11 many times before, just never on a debate stage before a television audience of millions. It started when moderator John Dickerson asked him about a past statement in which he suggested that the 43rd president should have been impeached for lying about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction in order to justify going to war.

While this position may not be popular with mainstream Republicans, with a 20 point lead in South Carolina, I don't think that this will hurt his campaign.

Your Moment of Daily Tyranny

The NYPD wants to make the most transparently corrupt tool of abusive police officers a felony:

On Wednesday, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton urged state legislators to consider increasing the penalty for resisting arrest from a misdemeanor to a felony. The change, he argued, would help New Yorkers "get around this idea that you can resist arrest. You can't." It would also give cops an easy way to turn victims of their own worst impulses into the worst class of criminal.

In theory, a resisting arrest charge allows the state to further punish suspects who endanger the safety of police officers as they're being apprehended; in practice, it gives tautological justification to cops who enjoy roughing people up. Why did you use force against that suspect, officer? Because she was resisting arrest. How do I know you're telling the truth? Because I charged her with it, sir.

………

Anticipating criticism, Bratton told the assembled lawmakers that he already had a plan to curb abuse: the department would use its CompStat arrest-tracking system to monitor officers who make lots of resisting charges that are eventually dropped, leaving oversight of the NYPD to the NYPD itself.

Making resisting arrest a felony, which makes it far more likely that people will cop a plea, because the prospect of years in prison, which means that uncovering police misconduct becomes even less likely.

This proposal is an unalloyed evil, which is literally a blue print for a police state.

This is the Best Troll in the History of the Internet

Wading into the sh%$ storm that is the successor of the death of legal hack Anton Scalia, Charlie Pierce has a suggestion for Barack Obama, Anita Hill:

I am all-in for total chaos on this whole Supreme Court thing.

If the Republicans are going to invent a new constitutional tradition on the fly, I say the Republic is best served by making them choke on it. Already, Steve M. is pointing out the shitstorm that would break if the president were to nominate Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Mountaineer Mike Tomasky has an interesting suggestion regarding a brilliant young jurist who also would put the GOP deeper in the ha'penny place as regards Hispanic voters. Good. All good. But let me suggest a name as well.

Anita Hill.

I am, as I said, all in for chaos, and this would be the all-timer.

This is quite literally the finest troll I have ever seen.

Mr. Pierce, you are a god among men, and I am not worthy.

The obvious point here is that this brings up Clarence Thomas' sexual harassment of numerous women that he worked with:

Professor Hill is a widely respected scholar of the law. She would be a fine addition to any court in the land. Also, she would make the Republicans eat their own faces, one at a time. Imagine the hearings. The Republicans would have no choice but to bring up the whole Clarence Thomas matter again. Although perhaps, this time, the other women who allegedly were harassed by Mr. Justice Thomas would not be intimidated out of testifying, and the Democratic senators would not be intimidated out of calling them. (Sorry, Joe Biden. That was a bad day for you.) This would be Your Show Of Shows.

This would be so epic.

Obama needs to nominate her.

Not "Flawed", "Fraud"

Morgan Stanley sold worthless bonds, and made a lot of money doing so, and when they got caught, they made what appears to be another "No Declaration of Wrongdoing (DOJ press release) settlement over this, the New York Times described it as Morgan Stanley to Pay $3.2 Billion Over Flawed Mortgage Bonds.

As former S&L crisis investigator notes, these bonds were not flawed, they were fraud.

Throw some banksters in gaol, please.