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Republicans and Democrats

Friday, July 6, 2012

So true

 

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Don’t mention climate change

Thursday, July 5, 2012

 

Something missing here:

Across a wide stretch of Midwestern farms, sweltering temperatures and a dearth of rain are threatening what was expected to be the nation’s largest corn crop in generations.

Already, some farmers in Illinois and Missouri have given up on parched and stunted fields, mowing them over. National specialists say parts of five corn-growing states, including Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio, are experiencing severe or extreme drought conditions. And in at least nine states, conditions in one-fifth to one-half of cornfields have been deemed poor or very poor, federal authorities reported this week, a notable shift from the high expectations just a month before.

Crop insurance agents and agricultural economists are watching closely, a few comparing the situation with a devastating drought of 1988, when corn yields shriveled significantly, while some farmers have begun alluding, unhappily, to the dust bowl of the 1930s. Far more is at stake in the coming pivotal days: With the brief, delicate phase of pollination imminent in many states, miles and miles of corn will rise or fall on whether rain soon appears and temperatures moderate.

“It all quickly went from ideal to tragic,’’ said Don Duvall, a farmer in Illinois who has already watched two of his cornfields dry up and perish as others remain in peril. For him, it has been a virtually rainless month.

‘‘Every day that passes, more corn will be abandoned,’’ Duvall said. ‘‘But even if it starts raining now, there will not be that bumper crop of corn everyone talked about.’’

(via Boston Globe)

Not word one about climate change. Almost like a conspiracy of silence. It's the most important issue of our times, and therefore the most ignored.

 

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Why I won’t be giving to the DCCC

Thursday, July 5, 2012

 

The phone calls come on a regular basis. So regular in fact, that my wife and I have thought about ditching our land line, on which the bulk of incoming calls are solicitations. When the DCCC calls I tell them I pick and choose my candidates, and I’m not interested in giving to DINOs. Same with the DSC, which seemed to want to send money to Ben Nelson uber alles.

A week or so ago I urged the party to shut out the Congresspersons who sided with the NRA against Eric Holder. Turns out, and this is no surprise, that those very people have gotten a disproportionate share of DCCC funding.

WASHINGTON — The 17 House Democrats who voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal contempt last week have received more than $1.3 million in financial aid from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since the start of 2009, a review of campaign finance records shows. That total constitutes roughly one out of every nine dollars that the committee either spent or earmarked for candidates during that time period.

The aid isn’t atypical for the campaign committee, whose priority is numerical majorities rather than ideological purity.

“The DCCC is a member participation organization that supports Democrats for Congress with the goal of electing a Democratic majority,” said Jesse Ferguson, a spokesperson for the DCCC.

But with anger mounting among the Democrats over the GOP’s treatment of Holder, the money breakdown threatens to re-ignite a long-simmering debate over what type of lawmakers are best suited to fill the party’s ranks. The 17 Democrats who voted to hold Holder in contempt for the invoking of executive privilege in the Operation Fast and Furious investigation did so under pressure from the National Rifle Association. Their votes demonstrate the gun lobby’s continued power within the halls of Congress, while raising the question of why the DCCC lacks that same institutional clout.

In addition, seven of those 17 Democrats have said they either are skipping the party’s convention this summer or remain unsure of their intentions. One member has declined to endorse President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.

“[DCCC Chairman Steve Israel] is spending gargantuan amounts of money and energy on hopeless Blue Dogs … [rather] than working on winnable campaigns for independent-minded, progressive Democrats,” said Howie Klein, the co-founder of Blue America PAC, an organization devoted to promoting progressive candidates. “Those 17 Democrats didn’t just suddenly join [Rep. Darrell] Issa’s witch hunt and stray from the Democratic fold. All 17 — no exceptions — are among the Democrats who vote with [Speaker John] Boehner and [House Majority Leader Eric] Cantor most frequently for the far right’s anti-family agenda.”

The vast majority of the support the DCCC offered these members (approximately 95 percent) came in the form of earmarked donations — money that came from other groups and donors but was solicited by the campaign committee.

“What the DCCC is doing for those candidates is what Act Blue does for other Democrats,” explained a prominent campaign finance lawyer who advises congressional candidates. “They are sending out an email saying, ‘Here are our top 10 target races. Will you give money to those races?’”

Because the DCCC is thereby prioritizing those races, the lawyer continued, it is fair to categorize an earmarked donation as a form of support from the committee. It’s “a conscious decision” to help that candidate.

The extent of that support is disproportionate to the help the DCCC is offering House members and candidates at large. During the same period that the committee funneled $1.3 million to those 17 anti-Holder lawmakers, it sent just over $9.1 million to all House Democratic candidates.

(via The Huffington Post)

At this point, we as a party would be better off if these pseudo-Dems would be replaced by Republicans, yet we shovel money at people who are the first to join forces with Republicans to frustrate progressive initiatives, while ignoring real Democrats struggling to take over Republican districts. In the process they confer a “bi-partisan” legitimacy on Republican extremism that the press just eats up. We'd have a leaner, meaner, more effective party if we got rid of these losers, or whipped them into shape. That assumes, of course, that the Democrats would stop drawing the lesson they always draw when they lose: that they weren’t Republican enough. (In this they agree with the Republicans, in that the Republicans always blame their own losses on not being Republican enough). If the Democrats would learn some other lessons from the Republicans, they might learn that it’s vital to speak with one more or less unified voice. We don’t need Congressmen who won’t support the party’s incumbent president, or Congressmen who will join a political witch hunt against a Democratic Attorney General. We’ll never truly win so long as we have this dead weight in the party. It’s particularly infuriating that the party seems so bent on preserving them, to the exclusion of supporting real Democrats.

 

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Quote of the Day

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

 

A Barclays manager:

“I would sort of express us maybe as not clean clean, but clean in principle.”

(via The New York Times)

 

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True Crime Stories

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

 

There's no police log in the New York Times, or if there is I never noticed, but there is a crime section, which for reasons all too apparent is called the “Business” section. It's chock-a-block with crime news, though the odd thing is that the crimes are being committed in plain sight, the perpetrators are well known, but no one ever seems to get arrested. Take a look at today’s Times. First we have the on-going saga of Barclay's, where we find, much to no one’s surprise, that the chief scumbag there just might have known more than he was letting on about Barclay’s market manipulations.

Robert E. Diamond Jr., the chief executive of Barclays, told employees on Monday that he was “disappointed and angry” about the bank’s past attempts to manipulate key interest rates to bolster its bottom line.

But fresh details about the case show how Mr. Diamond and other senior executives played a role in the questionable actions and failed to prevent them. In 2007 and 2008, Mr. Diamond’s top deputies told employees to report artificially low rates in line with its rivals, deflecting scrutiny about the health of Barclays at the height of the financial crisis, according to several people close to the case.

…

In the fall of 2008, Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England, spoke with Mr. Diamond about the high Libor submissions, according to one of the people close to the case. The conversation prompted Mr. Diamond to relay the central bank’s concerns to his top deputies.

While Mr. Diamond never specifically told anyone to influence Libor, at least one of the deputies acted on the discussion, regulatory records show. After talking with Mr. Diamond, the deputy then instructed employees that the Libor submissions should be lowered to be “within the pack.”

(via The New York Times)

So, Mr. Diamond sayeth, “see you, our rates are too high, would that it were not so” and lo, the rates declineth and it was no longer so, and Mr. Diamond said it was good and Mr. Diamond never thought that mayhaps his minions were goosing the numbers. Henry II couldn't have given a broader hint.

Lest anyone conclude that this particular fraud was penny ante, the fact is that it has a significant impact in what is a $350 trillion (yes, that’s trillion) market.

“Because mortgages, student loans, financial derivatives, and other financial products rely on LIBOR and EURIBOR as reference rates, the manipulation of submissions used to calculate those rates can have significant negative effects on consumers and financial markets worldwide,” said Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer, in a statement.

(via The Street)

Next up, the inevitable JP Morgan Chase, which, faced with the prospect of losses, made money in what is now the old fashioned way, by scamming its clients:

Facing a slump after the financial crisis, JPMorgan Chase turned to ordinary investors to make up for the lost profit.

But as the bank became one of the nation’s largest mutual fund managers, some current and former brokers say it emphasized its sales over clients’ needs.

These financial advisers say they were encouraged, at times, to favor JPMorgan’s own products even when competitors had better-performing or cheaper options. With one crucial offering, the bank exaggerated the returns of what it was selling in marketing materials, according to JPMorgan documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The benefit to JPMorgan is clear. The more money investors plow into the bank’s funds, the more fees it collects for managing them. The aggressive sales push has allowed JPMorgan to buck an industry trend. Amid the market volatility, ordinary investors are leaving stock funds in droves.

(via The New York Times)

Finally, we have the civil libertarians at Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, who are saying they simply can’t be sued for giving bogus opinions, because everyone’s entitled to their opinion, even if they know they’re spreading misinformation.

Documents in a civil suit in federal court appear to threaten a legal defense that credit ratings agencies have long used to fend off liability for misjudging securities that later cost investors vast sums in losses.

For years, the ratings agencies have contended that the grades they assign debt securities are independent opinions and therefore entitled to First Amendment protections, like those afforded journalists. But newly released documents in a class-action case in Federal District Court in Manhattan cast doubt on the independence of the two largest agencies, Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, in their work with a Wall Street firm on a debt deal that went bad as the credit crisis began.

The case, filed in 2008 by a group of 15 institutional investors against Morgan Stanley and the two agencies, involves a British-based debt issuer called Cheyne Finance. Cheyne was a structured investment vehicle, created in 2005, that raised $3.4 billion in short-term debt from investors. The company was meant to profit by purchasing longer-term obligations that generated more in interest than the company paid to its lenders.

But Cheyne collapsed in August 2007 under a load of troubled mortgage securities. The institutions that bought almost $1 billion of its debt, including the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, the fund manager SEI Investments and the Public School Employees’ Retirement System of Pennsylvania, lost much or all of their money.

(via The New York Times)

The first amendment defense strikes me as fairly laughable, and one only available to the rich. Imagine a court even listening to a snake oil salesman say that he was just giving his opinion when he said his noxious brew could cure cancer.

Now, all of these folks have one thing in common. Coming as they do from the upper echelons of the .01%, they will never see the inside of a courtroom, unless it’s to put the screws to some poor bastard who can’t pay his mortgage. But never fear, while the government can see no harm in these cases (at least no criminal harm), it is right on the spot when it comes to the aforesaid snake oil salesmen:

The chief of Full Tilt Poker surrendered to authorities on Monday and pleaded not guilty to charges of illegal gambling and that the online poker operator defrauded its players.

Raymond Bitar,40, had been working at Full Tilt’s Dublin, Ireland, headquarters, and until Monday had not returned to the United States since charges against him were first announced in April 2011.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged 11 people at the three biggest online poker companies: Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars. The U.S. government also seized their Internet domain names.

At a hearing late on Monday in Manhattan federal court, Bitar pleaded not guilty to nine criminal counts, including illegal gambling, money laundering and wire fraud charges.

Online gambling has been illegal in the United States since 2006, the year Bitar moved Full Tilt’s operations to Ireland. Some U.S. lawmakers have talked recently about legalizing Internet gambling and regulating it.

Since unveiling the case, prosecutors have expanded both their civil and criminal charges against Full Tilt. They say it operates as a Ponzi scheme and paid its directors more than $440 million while defrauding players, even after the charges were filed.

(via The New York Times)

These guys, having aimed way too low, are fair game for prosecution. Sure, $440 million is a lot of money to most of us, but it’s nothing in comparison to blowing up the entire international economy, or defrauding investors out of billions of dollars. If you don’t want to go to jail, you have to aim high.

 

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Chris Murphy coming to Drinking Liberally

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

I’m told that Chris Murphy will be coming to our next Drinking Liberally get together. If you’re a regular or semi-regular, don’t miss it. As always, newcomers, provided they’re liberal (or actually, merely not-Republican). are always welcome. Time and Place: Dev’s on Bank, 345 Bank Street, New London, at 6:30 PM.

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Song of Joy

Monday, July 2, 2012

Stuff like this makes me regain my faith in the human race. Helps you forget the Bill O’Reilly’s, Rush Limbaughs, and Mitt Romneys of the world, at least for a while.

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This week in God

Sunday, July 1, 2012

 

This may be a sign of where we’re going, as the definition of “freedom of religion” becomes more and more distorted by the right. It seems that Ling Chai, a former Chinese activist, now Republican Bostonian, is being sued by another former activist, who Chai fired from her human rights organization here in the states for being insufficiently zealous in practicing her religion, or, more accurately, Chai’s conception of what that religion should be.

The employee, Jing Zhang, is a Chinese activist who once spent five years in a Chinese prison for promoting freedom and democracy, according to the suit. In the United States, Zhang had already established her own nonprofit, Women’s Rights in China, in Flushing, N.Y., when she joined forces with Chai to develop programs to prevent forced abortions in China. Then, she alleges, Chai fired her for being insufficiently religious and for declining to engage in “weekly corporate worship.”

Attached to the lawsuit is a March e-mail that purportedly issued Zhang an ultimatum: She could either “seek the will of God in her life on a daily basis through study of God’s word and through prayer” or start looking for a new job.

‘You can discriminate in hiring and firing employees whose roles are at the religious core of your activity.’

That document asked Zhang to agree to statements, including, “I believe that Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and apart from him nobody can receive eternal life and enter the kingdom of God.”

(via The Boston Globe)

Presumably the bishops would applaud. But wait:

Kevin Mintzer, another attorney for Zhang, said All Girls Allowed’s articles of incorporation show it was formed as a human rights organization, not a religious group.

He said that Zhang, a Catholic, never agreed to practice her faith in the same manner as her boss, who is an evangelical Christian.

(via The Boston Globe)

The Catholic Church demands the right to impose its religion on both its employees and on the recipients of non-religious services it provides with government funds (e.g., health care) so is it comfortable with another group demanding that a Catholic act like a fundamentalist? Presumably (if consistency means anything), yes, though I'm sure they’re capable of making some distinction without a difference.

There is literally no endeavor that could not be dressed up as a religiously motivated organization, therefore privileged to hire and fire, grant or withhold employee benefits, or impose arbitrary discipline, using any discriminatory criteria that might suit their purposes. In this particular case, the employer apparently requires more than mere faith; that faith must be expressed in just the right way. No doubt the next step (or is it even a step?) will be firing employees who profess to believe based on an employer’s subjective belief that their professions are insincere, or not of sufficient strength.

In many instances, this amounts to government outsourcing of religious tests it cannot impose directly. The government gives money to religious organizations to provide supposedly secular services (e.g., Catholic Charities) and then, if the Church has its way, steps aside and lets the Church impose its religion on employees and service recipients. The present lineup in the Supreme Court makes this backdoor establishment of religion a distinct possibility.

 

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Friday Night Music-A Teabagger’s Anthem

Friday, June 29, 2012

Or is it lament? Whatever. In light of the recent decision, this seemed like a good pick. Dedicated to our friends on the right. It appears to express their feelings, at least in the refrain.

I couldn't find a decent video of this from the late, great, Ray Charles, but this version by John Mayer and John Scofield is quite good.

 

 

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Cut them loose

Thursday, June 28, 2012

17 Democrats voted to hold Eric Holder in contempt. They preferred to take orders from the NRA than stand with their party. There are some things that, even for Democrats, should be beyond the pale. They should be cut loose. Not a dime from the DNC or the DCCC. Let them get their money from the NRA, as if that group would go out of its way to protect Democrats. The Republicans are scum, but they would never allow something like this within the party, and in that instance, they'd be right.

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