Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The revolution will be supervised.

“They all knew.”

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Archives for 2014

Umwhut

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Up front, I want to plead guilty to third hand blogging a rumor that started in the Daily Mail. There is really no excuse and I’ll post a new picture of Max at the end to make up for it. In defense of the rumor it seems like good advice for Cheney and his administration to stay within the United States and its territorial waters at least until the whole concept of international jurisdiction for crimes against humanity blows over. When even John fucking Yoo, John “child’s testicles” Yoo, tries to get some distance from the torture report then you know these guys should think twice about vacationing in the civilized world*.

But all that said I find it a little crazy that dubya would back out of a charity gala in Switzerland and for that reason. Sure, I get that times have changed. You cannot just bury that laundered fortune in an anonymous Swiss account until the statute of limitations expires, and the Swiss have in general opened up lately to the world community. Some have even taken a serious look at getting out from under the shame of what they facilitated in WWII. But even when the law technically allows it arresting a former American head of state adds up to a reckless, ballsy act that I would not seriously expect even from the more activist scandanavians. I can see George Tenet or even Don Rumsfeld getting escorted from Heathrow or CDG by armed smurfs. Europe might open protracted and ultimately fruitless negotiations to arrest Cheney if he chose to spend a month in the French riviera being pelted with fruit walking about in public. But Bush? In Switzerland? Honestly, I would love that to be true as much as anyone but I suspect the charity took stock of the latest news and quietly rescinded their invitation.

Max.

(*) By which I mean countries that don’t torture.

***Update***

Looks like the Mail just re-reported an item from 2011. No link because it’s the freaking Mail but they updated with a correction. Again, I bet that the charity in question just got some local pushback and canceled the invite.

***Update 2***

Crooks & Liars, to which I did link, got the year wrong and made the correction. I am a lazy blogger.

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Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic, and Reloading

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The extra-curricular activities kids have these days…

 

 A teenager has been charged with a felony after bringing a cache of weapons to his Saluda, Virginia high school on Friday.

Police arrested Middlesex High School student Austin Martin after a K9 unit detected something in his car. Inside, officers found four loaded guns, several knives and more than 600 rounds of ammunition, some of which did not fit any of the weapons found in the car.

Martin, 18, was charged with possessing firearms on school property and released on a $1,500 bond.

Good thing he wasn’t a 12-year old black kid, or someone might have gotten killed.  Of course, he gets a $1,500 bond.  I’m sure it was just a misunderstanding, and he’s not a danger to anyone.  Certainly not like Tamir Rice and his plastic toy gun was, right?

Look, in all seriousness the police did their jobs in this case.  Nobody was hurt and Austin Martin will face a court of law over these weapons.  Police officers by and large discharge their duties daily without having to resort to violence.

But bad cops kill, and they get away with it.  And you’ll have a hard time convincing me that the entire system is anything but stacked against young black kids when you have police union reps on TV explaining that yes, that 12-year old child had to die and his death was justified when Austin Martin will most likely be home for the holidays out on bond, and Tamir is going to be in a box in the cold Ohio ground.

So yeah, maybe it’s not fair to equate the two situations in a sense, but I don’t care.  Level your criticisms at me, whatever.  I’m sick of seeing this happen where armed white guys get arrested, and unarmed black guys get shot or choked to death or beaten to death.

I’m far from the only one too.

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Step into Christmas

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I know a lot of people complain about Christmas songs, which just goes to prove the age old maxim that haters gonna hate.

So I’ll be doing several Christmas song-related threads over the next week.

First off, best Christmas song ever and worst Christmas song ever. This is among those that you can hear on the radio sometimes.

Best: “Sleigh Ride” by the Ronettes. No contest, right? The “Be My Baby” of Christmas songs.

A few weeks ago I tweeted this but no one could tell it was a joke — emoji sad face.

Worst: Tie between “Carol of the Bells” as performed by Tran-Siberian Orchestra and “Wonderful Christmastime” by Paul McCartney.

My sister used to do tech support for a company that had one particularly annoying and difficult customer. He turned out to be a teen-ager who maintained a blog where he talked about his love for Tran-Siberian Orchestra and how his parents just couldn’t understand it.

How about a couple more categories:

Best recent (last 20 years) new Christmas song that got radio play: “Go Where I Send Thee” done by Natalie Merchant.

Surprising Christmas song fact: The Killers do a Christmas song every year.

Best song you think of as a Christmas song that isn’t really a Christmas song: “Caravan” by Van Morrison.

What are your best and worst in these categories and whatever other categories you want to make up.

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First derivative beats comparative analysis

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Commenter Fair Economist raises a possible point of political hope for PPACA in that states that implement PPACA even with the Supreme Court fucking with them are doing well, and states that are actively monkey-wrenching PPACA are doing poorly.

They got away with the comparisons in 2014, but if 2016 involves a comparison to other states doing much better *and* their own states having done better with Exchange subsidies

I was in a twitter conversation with Sheldon Weisgrau who is a technical expert and ACA advocate in Kansas where he brought up the same general point:

I think messaging is fundamentally a magical talisman. A good message may move a point or two of public opinion in a reasonably short time frame (a year or less) if it is an opposed message with some elite signalmakers pushing back against the message. It is not a panacea. Most people don’t make complex multi-variate comparisons across time and space as an operative part of their voting calculus. Instead they rely on far simper heuristics of “how am I doing, how are my friends/family doing, and do I feel secure…” That last phrase “feel secure” basically contains a massive error term as it could include quite a bit of non-economic uncertainty/fear/comfort etc. Finally, we as a species fear loss far more than we prize gains.

We know for modeling purposes that the American voting public has an extreme recency bias in voting in presidential elections. People assess what the ecnomomic situation is two to three quarters before the election, anchor their impressions there and vote from that basis. A quick up-wards pop in the 4th quarter of the previous year and the 1st quarter of the election year is an amazing aid to an incumbent, and a pair of snowmagedeons as well as an inventory reduction could be political diseaster greater than the American public seeing a candidate ask for and enjoy fancy mustard. A standard Federal Reserve recession at the start of a first term is probably a President’s campaign manager’s best friend as there would be a very high probability of a rapid V-shape recovery in the second half of the first term.

We saw it this election cycle. Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser has been running a very long series of posts on the economic performance of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Minnesota has embraced standard Keynesian economics and Obamacare. Wisconsin has had a public policy of attempting to become the Mississippi of the North — low wage, low service, low tax, low education. Minnesota on employment, growth and government budget projections has massively outperformed Wisconsin in the past four years. Wisconsin has consistently lagged the national averages while Minnesota has consistently met or beat national averages.

Yet both states handily re-elected their incumbenet governors despite vastly different policy regimes producing clear differences in results.

Good messaging helps, but it won’t help much. Comparative performance helps, but it does not help much; if comparative economic performance was a major determinant of political affiliation, the South would have moved rapidly away from reactionary white power at some point in the past three hundred years. Absolute performance is the determinant — are things better but not are things as good as they could be, but is the first derivative positive?

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Happy Hanukkah!

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The Festival of Lights actually starts at sunset this evening, so you still have time to stock up on candles, potato pancakes, and donuts (two of my favorite things to eat, but not in the same bite).

And this happened last week, but I saved you the cookies…

***********
Apart from frying stuff and/or setting things on fire, what’s on the agenda for the day?

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Au Revoir, #OccupyHongKong

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The PRC tanks never rolled in, but eventually the street-clearing trucks did. According to the Washington Post, “Evidence has emerged that authorities have drawn up a blacklist of those involved in the protests, with several young people denied entry into mainland China in recent weeks.” There are rumors that “Beijing has permanently transferred large numbers of security and intelligence specialists to Hong Kong to keep a much closer eye on the Chinese Communist Party’s many critics.” The protestors made it to the website (though not the cover) of the Rolling Stone. And “leading Hong Kong businesswoman & member of the city’s Executive Council… who is also a board member at the prominent bank HSBC” Laura Cha earned brief international noteriety with a bizarre historical analogy: “American slaves were liberated in 1861 but did not get voting rights until 107 years later,” she was quoted as saying by the Standard newspaper. “So why can’t Hong Kong wait for a while?”

Louisa Lim, in the New Yorker, “Scenes from Occupy Hong Kong’s Last Stand“:

… “We don’t want this to be over,” Theresia Hui, a business consultant in her forties, said. She was distributing free bookmarks stamped with motifs of the Umbrella Movement, as the protests have come to be known—a reference to the umbrellas deployed by students to shield themselves from teargas. For her, the tent city, brimming with collaborative creativity, had been a transformative experience. When university students began boycotting classes at the end of September, she decided to stay neutral. Then police fired teargas at protesters, and she experienced a political awakening. “I was white, and then I became dark yellow, even golden yellow,” she says, referring to the color adopted by the Umbrella Movement. “The government made me this way. They pushed me to become deep yellow.” The use of teargas and the subsequent violence in late September has resulted in plummeting public satisfaction with Hong Kong’s police force—once lauded as Asia’s finest. They are now ranked below China’s People’s Liberation Army in popularity.

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Ted Cruz Will Be As Dangerous As He’s Allowed to Be

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santa cruz morin
(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)

We finally have a Surgeon General again, despite the NRA’s best efforts. Per the NYTimes:

… In a vote early in the evening, Vivek Murthy, a doctor specializing in internal medicine, was approved by 51 to 43.

The confirmation was one of the last acts of business for the Democratic-controlled Senate. Had it not occurred, the nomination would have died, leaving the president without a permanent top doctor, possibly even for the remainder of his two years in office.”..

And the person being held most responsible, by his fellow Repubs, for this #ammosexualfail? None other than Tailgunner Ted…

Warning, Politico — “Ted Cruz Does It Again“:

… Cruz, along with Utah Sen. Mike Lee, took to the floor Friday night to demand Republicans stop President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration and scuttled a bipartisan agreement to push back votes until Monday, effectively forcing the Senate to return for a rare weekend session and cast a marathon series of procedural votes…

On Saturday, GOP senator after GOP senator teed off on Cruz, arguing that his strategy had blindsided the caucus, forced them to return to Washington and even strengthened Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s ability to exploit the Senate rules and push through 24 of Obama’s stalled nominees. Several senators had to abruptly change plans, including Ayotte, who had to race back to Washington and missed the ballet with her daughter, and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, who had to cancel his official trip to Iraq and Turkey this weekend.

On the floor, angry GOP senators pressed Cruz over whether he was fundraising off of his tactics, sources said, and Maine Sen. Susan Collins ripped him in a private conversation. Several Republicans were discussing whether to mount a protest vote against Cruz: Unite in opposition to his point-of-order challenging the constitutionality of the spending bill’s funding of Obama’s immigration move.

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