Month: September 2014

by digby

Yay:

Even animals need guardian angels. 

And lucky for White Boy, a dog who was stranded in the Hillsborough River in Tampa, Florida, a manatee was standing by, keeping the pup company until a local police officer could help rescue him from the water. While neighbors in Seminole Heights heard the dog struggling Friday evening, they did not realize what had happened until they saw him in the water the following morning, according to Good Morning America, and called the Tampa Police Department. 

His pleas for help, however, attracted the attention of a large manatee — a species that is naturally curious — and likely swam over to investigate, rescuing officer Randy Lopez told ABC News. White Boy couldn’t make it over the cement sea wall on his own, so the manatee watched over him until Lopez was able to set up an extension ladder and bring him back to dry land. 

“You don’t see that every day, and it’s a great reminder… the importance of kindness,” the department wrote in their Facebook post alongside the photo.

Yes it is.  Click over to see pictures of the doggie reunited with his happy family.

.

Containing Ebola is worse than communism

by digby

It’s been a helluva day for wingnut quotes. One of the best we’ve seen in ages. But this one from Laura Ingraham has to take the cake:

“Is this the American military mission to assist in the fight against Ebola? Again if we are really serious about Ebola being a threat to the United States of America, we have to shut down our border because you never know who could come across–probably not people with Ebola, but who knows. We gotta be much tougher on who we allow to come into this country legally on planes…”

“The military is just another tool in his arsenal to level the playing field, right? I mean, in other words, Africa really deserves more of America’s money because we’re people of privilege. We’re people of great privilege, so we should do what we can, we the American taxpayers, to transfer wealth over to Africa. It’s his father’s rage against colonialism, as Dinesh D’Souza wrote about, and maybe this is a way to continue to atone for that… If a few American military personnel have to be exposed to the Ebola virus to carry out this redistribution of the privileged’s wealth, then so be it.”

She’s been very upset about this Ebola mission from the beginning. (She even pretended not to know what a virus was when he first announced it.) But then she’s pretty much in a state of permanent high dudgeon about showing any form of basic human decency toward the rest of the human race. (Even Americans had better either be Allen West or Ward and June Cleaver.) It’s pathological. Unfortunately, she happens to speak for a fair number of our fellow countrymen.

.

Schmaht as a whip: Part XXIV

by digby

I wonder if I run for PRESIDENT, will the haters and losers vote for me knowing that I will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN? I say they will!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 26, 2014

whatevah …

Well, at least they aren’t plotting a coup.

by digby

… yet:

“[L]et me reassure you on this. A lot of us are talking to the generals behind the scenes, saying, ‘Hey, if you disagree with the policy that the White House has given you, let’s have a resignation,’” [GOP congressman] Lamborn said Tuesday, adding that if generals resigned en masse in protest of President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, they would “go out in a blaze of glory.”

That’s very reassuring. Those of you who just watched The Roosevelts are familiar with the fact that he overruled his generals’ desire to forget about going after Germany first and concentrate on the Pacific. The Generals complied. And in that case the fate of the world really did depend upon making the right decision.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they would never do it. And they could plot a coup as well. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

In case you were wondering, Lamborn voted for the Syrian funding and in his recent questioning of Secretary Hagel was just mainly concerned that the president wasn’t leaving every, single last military option on the table. He ended his comments by saying he would continue to support everything the president is doing. Seriously.

Just don’t call it a crusade

by digby

Here Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins and American Family Association’s Sandy Rios chatting about stuff on the radio at the Values Voters Summit:

Perkins: “Faith is a very strong component in a lot of lives of those who serve in our nation’s military… And you know, the counter to that, of course, the Islamic movement, one of their goals, their top of the charts goal, is to express themselves as a religious movement, a movement dedicated to Allah.

Rios: “They don’t hide it, they call his name when they murder, so we are opposing a movement that honors a god of death, really. So this is no time to be shy about who it is that we serve.”

Perkins: “Right, we’re 180 degrees from those that are pushing the Islamic religion, ISIS and others. Contrary to what the president says, they are Islamic and they are pushing that religion, which is the total opposite of Christianity.”

If there’s one thing you can say about Christianity, they’ve never pushed their religion …

Meanwhile, we have this at the same gathering:

When Rios asked [Retired General Jerry] Boykin if he felt “a powerful movement” toward Christianity in Israel, Boykin responded that he did, but “the movement is more powerful among the Arabs,” which he saw as a good sign for ultimately converting Jews.

“There are more Arabs that are citizens of Israel that are coming to Christ, coming to faith, than there are Jews,” he said. “But eventually those Jews are going to figure out these Arabs are worshipping a Jew, and that’s going to stop a lot of them in their tracks and they are going to try to figure this out, and I believe it’s going to usher in a revival when they do.”

Rand Paul was there trying to reconcile libertarianism with social conservatism. He hates war. He reverse life. He thinks it’s ok if you love your neighbor but it isn’t absolutely necessary. But people should probably love those who are close to them:

Each of us today must examine what is important in your life. For me, it can be summed up in a dedication from my book that I wrote, and this dedication was for my wife.

What are the important things? Scratch my head, silence enough to hear my watch tick. Time, have I time to even consider what are the important things? Even when I sit still, I sit still in a hurry. But beyond, between and above all else, you, the girl, my wife, my love, can and do complete all syllogisms my circular brain can create. For me, you are the important things.

For us, as a nation, as a people, we need to decide what are the important things. They’re not all in politics. They’re not all here in present that we can fully understand them.

I think there is crisis in our country. It’s not just a fiscal crisis. I think it’s a moral crisis. I think it’s a spiritual crisis. (Cheers, applause.)

Somehow I don’t think he’s got the message down quite yet.

This guy does:

.

Understatement of the day

by digby

This one by Ed Kilgore:

I am quite certain terrorist threats exist and are thwarted nearly every day. But it’s not 100% clear IS has made the “homeland” significantly more dangerous.

He’s talking about this piece by Paul Waldman that is very much worth reading. Waldman points out the absurdity of this latest fear of Americans going to Syria to get “training” from ISIS so they can come back here and kill us all in our beds. As if they have to go to Syria to learn how to do that. It’s not like it’s hard to learn how to use a weapons, build a bomb or any other form of violence here in the peaceful US of A. Hell, you could even join the Army and get some real first world super-power training.

Moreover, the idea that having an American passport is especially valued is also absurd. Unless we close the borders completely, foreigners can still come here. And yes, there’s always the chance that one of them could be a terrorist.

I also can’t get past the fact that we’ve just spent more than a decade developing a massive “Homeland Security” operation to the tune of trillions of dollars. If they have the capacity to store all my cat pictures and bookmarked recipes, I’m going to guess they’re pretty proficient at tracking expats who’ve gotten special terrorist training. If they aren’t maybe someone should ask them why.

Kilgore says this, which I think its important:

Every now and then it’s probably healthy for us non-experts to ask some questions about the memes surrounding military actions.

Indeed it is, especially when we’re in the midst of a full court press to justify military intervention and the media is hyping threats like they’re the new fall line-up. They are so deep into the bubble that they don’t even seem to realize that they’re not making any sense.

.

How to become a Real Housewife of Galt’s Gulch


by digby

I wrote about the American Dream today over at Salon.  You’ll need to click to get a gist of the whole thing but this little piece of it is probably the most entertaining:

Oddly, that same poll shows that far more Republicans than Democrats believe the American dream is still operative, 55 percent to 32 percent. If you wonder why that is, perhaps it’s because many Republicans have a completely different definition of the American dream. They don’t see it as a middle-class goal at all, much of it made possible by the promise of a decent education and secure retirement, guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. No, they believe that the American dream is getting filthy rich. It’s not much different than winning the lottery or getting a slot on the Real Housewives of Galt’s Gulch.

Here’s a good example of how Republicans explain it to the rubes, in a piece called “In Defense of the Wealthy and the American Dream”:

The United States has 422 billionaires, nearly four times that of 2nd place China. We have a 15.3 trillion dollar economy. We have a standard of living that is the envy of the world. Why? 

We have the American Dream and other countries don’t. This American Dream exists because we are free to pursue unlimited prosperity. What fuels the desire to pursue the American Dream is the right to keep the wealth you produce. Property rights are fundamental to the existence of the American Dream and to the continued success of our nation. It was intentional. Our founding fathers built a nation around individual liberty and individual property rights. Without these rights, there would be no 422 billionaires, no 15.3 trillion dollar economy, no high standard of living. These rights are the very foundation of America. Liberty and the right to keep your property (wealth) have, for generations, separated America from the rest of the world. It is the reason America has been considered by so many around the world as “the land of opportunity”.

He calls these 422 billionaires the “American Dream Achievers.” And if you too want to be an American Dream Achiever you must agree not to tax them or regulate their businesses or in any other way try to reduce the wealth inequality we know is causing virtually everyone else to stagnate economically. But have no fear, you can totally do it! Why, if you just work hard you can be the 423rd billionaire — out of 313 million Americans!

read on …

.

Once they get their egg the golden goose can be served for lunch for all they care

by digby

Bloomberg View’s Michael Lewis kindly dispensed some advice to young Wall Streeters earlier this week on how to navigate that boulevard of broken dreams. It’s interesting in many ways, but I think this gets to the nub of it:

You may think you are going to work for Credit Suisse or Barclays, and will there join a team of professionals committed to the success of your bank, but you will soon realize that your employer is mostly just a shell for the individual ambitions of the people who inhabit it. The primary relationship of most people in big finance is not to their employer but to their market. This simple fact resolves many great Wall Street mysteries. An outsider looking in on the big Wall Street banks in late 2008, for instance, might ask, “How could all these incredibly smart and self-interested people have come together and created collective suicide?” More recently the same outsider might wonder, “Why would a trader rig Libor, or foreign exchange rates, or the company’s dark pool, when the rewards for the firm are so trivial compared with the cost, if he is caught? Why, for that matter, wouldn’t some Wall Street bank set out to rat out the bad actors in their market, and set itself as the honest broker?”

The answer is that the people who work inside the big Wall Street firms have no serious stake in the long-term fates of their firms. If the place blows up they can always do what they are doing at some other firm — so long as they have maintained their stature in their market. The quickest way to lose that stature is to alienate the other people in it. When you see others in your market doing stuff at the expense of the broader society, your first reaction, at least early in your career, might be to call them out, but your considered reaction will be to keep mum about it. And when you see people making money in your market off some broken piece of internal machinery — say, gameable ratings companies, or riggable stock exchanges, or manipulable benchmarks — you will feel pressure not to fix the problem, but to exploit it.

Then read this piece by ProPublica. You just won’t believe it:

Segarra appeared to be exactly what Beim ordered. Passionate and direct, schooled in the Ivy League and at the Sorbonne, she was a lawyer with more than 13 years of experience in compliance – the specialty of helping banks satisfy rules and regulations. The New York Fed placed her inside one of the biggest and, at the time, most controversial banks in the country, Goldman Sachs.

It did not go well. She was fired after only seven months.

As ProPublica reported last year, Segarra sued the New York Fed and her bosses, claiming she was retaliated against for refusing to back down from a negative finding about Goldman Sachs. A judge threw out the case this year without ruling on the merits, saying the facts didn’t fit the statute under which she sued.

At the bottom of a document filed in the case, however, her lawyer disclosed a stunning fact: Segarra had made a series of audio recordings while at the New York Fed. Worried about what she was witnessing, Segarra wanted a record in case events were disputed. So she had purchased a tiny recorder at the Spy Store and began capturing what took place at Goldman and with her bosses.

Segarra ultimately recorded about 46 hours of meetings and conversations with her colleagues. Many of these events document key moments leading to her firing. But against the backdrop of the Beim report, they also offer an intimate study of the New York Fed’s culture at a pivotal moment in its effort to become a more forceful financial supervisor. Fed deliberations, confidential by regulation, rarely become public.

The recordings make clear that some of the cultural obstacles Beim outlined in his report persisted almost three years after he handed his report to Dudley. They portray a New York Fed that is at times reluctant to push hard against Goldman and struggling to define its authority while integrating Segarra and a new corps of expert examiners into a reorganized supervisory scheme.

The incentives in our financial system are built for individuals getting rich at the expense of the Average Joe — and the system itself. It’s a miracle that 2007 is the worst we’ve seen since the Great Depression.

.

Applying Monsanto’s tactics to educating children

by Tom Sullivan

The GSV manifesto declares, “we believe the opportunity to build numerous multi-billion dollar education enterprises is finally real.”

Venture capitalist, Eric Hippeau, believes the “education market is ripe for disruption.”

Writing for the Nation Investigative Fund, Lee Fang details how venture capitalists and firms such as K12 Inc. view it as their mission to disrupt traditional public schools through vouchers applied to private schools, expanded charter schools, and the “next breakthrough in education technology.”

[D]espite wave after wave of negative press, K12 Inc. figures as a solid investment opportunity to many. Baird Equity Research, in a giddy note to investors this year about the potential growth of K12 Inc., noted, “capturing just two million (3.5%) of the addressable market yields a market opportunity of approximately $12 billion … Over the next three years, we believe that the company is capable of 7%+ organic revenue growth with modest margin expansion.” How will it achieve this growth? According to Baird, K12 Inc.’s “competency in lobbying in new states” is “another key point of differentiation.” The analyst note describes “K12’s success in working closely with state policymakers and school districts to enable the expansion of virtual schools into new states or districts” as a key asset. “The company has years of experience in successfully lobbying to get legislation passed to allow virtual schools to operate,” Baird concludes.

In the process, they also educate children. It’s there in the footnotes in 6-point type.

Look, there are friends who happily send their kids to small, community-based, parent-organized charter schools that provide them with a quality education. These aren’t them. Lobbyists and campaign donations from would-be “multi-billion dollar education enterprises” will make mincemeat of those schools the way Walmart kills off mom-and-pop stores. But in the scheme of things, they’re small potatoes. Privatizing public education itself is the breakthrough the Walmarts of the education industry seek.

Next year, the market size of K-12 education is projected to be $788.7 billion. And currently, much of that money is spent in the public sector. “It’s really the last honeypot for Wall Street,” says Donald Cohen, the executive director of In the Public Interest, a think tank that tracks the privatization of roads, prisons, schools and other parts of the economy.

Investors call that steady, recession-proof, government-guaranteed stream of public tax dollars “the Big Enchilada,” as Jonathan Kozol wrote in Harpers before the market crash.

Standing in their way? “Unions, public school bureaucracies, and parents,” says Hippeau. Because it sure isn’t neoliberals in the Obama administration. It’s hiring education industry veterans to oversee applying to educating our children Monsanto’s tactic of using its GM crops to crowd out competing seed sources.

As I wrote awhile back,

From this perspective, it’s bad enough that states are not providing education on at least a not-for-profit basis. But it’s far worse than that. They’re giving it away! That’s a mortal sin. A crime against capitalism. The worst kind of creeping socialism. Hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent every year in a nonprofit community effort to educate a nation’s children, and the moguls are not skimming off the top. The horror.

Chart ‘O the Day

by digby

Interesting. And perhaps good news. It would appear that at least somebody out there is having his or her consciousness raised. But you have to feel a bit breathless when you look at those numbers for Republicans. They’ve improved over the past year but good God.

Kevin Drum has an idea about why they are such outliers and I think he’s right:

I want to play partisan hack today and just focus on the far left bar, which shows that Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to think that blacks don’t get a fair shake from the criminal justice system. At first glance, you might figure that’s just demographics at work. Republicans are heavily white and old, and those two groups are the ones least likely to think blacks are treated unfairly.

But take another look. The mere fact of being Republican makes you less likely than even whites and seniors to believe blacks don’t get fair treatment. Why? Call it the Fox News effect. If you’re exposed day after day to Fox and Drudge and Limbaugh, it means you’re being overwhelmed with the message that blacks are dangerous, blacks are thuggish, and blacks are forever whining about wanting special treatment. This message is so overwhelming that even after Ferguson, Republicans are far less likely than any other group to acknowledge the simple fact that blacks might occasionally get treated a little roughly by cops and DAs.

I read somewhere today that Ferguson cops are wearing bracelets that say “I am Darren Wilson.”

sigh.