Last Call For Moosing The Point

"Treating Muslim kids like human beings" is something that professional loser Sarah Palin won't stand for in her little myopic view of America.

In a winding Friday night post, Palin aired her suspicions that the “obstinate-answering” boy was really up to no good and Irving police and school officials have been wrongly maligned in the “reactionary-slash-biased media!” The case hasgenerated outrage amid the belief that Mohamed was arrested due to anti-Muslim bias and not any genuine threat posed.

“Yep, believing that’s a clock in a school pencil box is like believing Barack Obama is ruling over the most transparent administration in history. Right. That’s a clock, and I’m the Queen of England,” Palin opined. Throughout the post, she spelled Mohamed’s name “Muhammad,” which is the spelling commonly used in the English-speaking world for the prophet of Islam.

“Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun,” Palin rambled. “Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school’s lot later that day. Kids humiliated and intimidated for innocent actions like those real examples are often marked the rest of their lives and made to feel really rotten. Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade “clock” that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told “if you see something, say something!”) gets invited to the White House.”

She then criticized President Obama, who invited Mohamed to the White House in response to the outcry, for taking advantage of the situation.

“By the way, President Obama’s practice of jumping in cases prematurely to interject himself as the cool savior, wanting so badly to attach himself to the issue-of-the-day, got old years ago,” she wrote.

Palin then urged fans to compare Mohamed’s clock enclosed in a pencil box to what she thought was a much more innocent-looking pink pencil box at her own home.

First of all, Palin really is a hateful person. It's no wonder she's angry all the time, she's not even bright enough to figure out what a digital clock looks like.  Again, want to thank John McCain and 55 million American voters for almost putting this woman in our government as Vice President.

Second of all, that silly pop tart gun story is tragically stupid and Palin is far from the only wingnut screaming that it's unfair that this kid didn't get invited to the White House too.  But that's not the issue, is it?  It's a nice deflection though from the real issue: a 14-year old was interrogated by the cops without a lawyer, and people didn't exactly line up to attack John Welch for his pop tart gun, unlike Palin and loads of right wing idiots who are convinced that Mohamed Ahmed didn't really build a clock at all or in fact had to have been making an actual bomb.

In other words, people upset that Ahmed is going to the White House are even more upset that Muslims aren't being rounded up and put in camps anyway.  You kind of lose your moral high ground over that.  When the response is to make this child and his family a target that must be exterminated by the right, well...

You tell me who's the good guy here.

Breaking The Banks Again

Looks like the math geniuses in the world of finance have found yet another part of our system rigged by the megabanks to make huge profits, but this time it's the federal government being defrauded here as US treasuries markets are the target.

The same analytical technique that uncovered cheating in currency markets and the Libor rates benchmark -- resulting in about $20 billion of fines -- suggests the dealers who control the U.S. Treasury market rigged bond auctions for years, according to a lawsuit.

The analysis was part of a 115-page lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court on Aug. 26 by Quinn Emmanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP and other law firms. The plaintiffs built their case against the 22 primary dealers who serve as the backbone of Treasury trading -- including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley -- using data from Rosa Abrantes-Metz, an adjunct associate professor at New York University who has provided expert testimony in rigging cases.

Her conclusion: More than two-thirds of a certain type of Treasury auction appear to have been rigged. She found issues with other auctions, too.

Investment firms buy US treasuries from these authorized "primary dealers".  With 22 of them, they are supposed to compete against each other and keep the economy healthy during these regular treasury auctions of US debt.  Guess what?  They didn't compete.

The U.S. Treasury initially sells securities to the primary dealers who in turn sell them to clients, creating a secondary market for trading. Sometimes, after auctioning off debt, the government later issues an identical batch of securities -- known as reissued Treasuries.

When the second set of Treasuries is issued, their prices and yields can be compared with the identical securities already trading in the secondary market. If there are pricing differences, that could be evidence of a problem. According to the plaintiffs, 69 percent of the auctions of reissued Treasuries from 2009 to 2015 appear to have been rigged, artificially boosting yields by 0.91 basis points.

The plaintiffs said there’s evidence of cheating from at least 2007 through earlier this year, when press reports revealed the Justice Department investigation into the auction process.

“These analyses reveal a consistent pattern: Treasury auction yields were artificially high (and prices correspondingly low),” according to the complaint. “Defendants then turned around and sold the Treasuries at higher prices (and correspondingly lower yields) in the secondary markets, reaping substantial profits.”

And yes, there's a corresponding Justice Department investigation into this as well, since the real victim here is the US taxpayer.

Perhaps we should be putting bankers in jail.  A lot of them.  Finally.

Live By Your Ignorant Political Supporters...

...die by them.

President Obama’s top spokesman slammed Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Friday for failing to condemn a supporter who claimed Obama is a Muslim who was born abroad.

“Is anybody really surprised this happened at a Donald Trump rally?” White House press secretary Josh Earnest asked reporters. “I don’t think anybody who has been paying attention to Republican politics are really surprised.” 

Earnest painted the incident as an indictment of the entire Republican Party, which he suggested is plagued by supporters with racist views.

He said it was a shame that Trump failed to challenge offensive views of his supporters, as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) famously did at a rally during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Earnest blasted other Republicans for declining to take on Trump, saying “they are looking for those same votes."

It's about time somebody called the GOP out on their 50-state Southern Strategy of dog-whistle racism, and even better it was somebody in the White House, doing it very, very publicly, in front of the brain-dead WH press corps so that even they had to take notice.

During a rally in New Hampshire on Thursday, Trump declined to address claims by multiple supporters who called Obama a Muslim.

“We have a problem in this country, it’s called Muslims. We know our current president is one — you know he’s not even an American. But anyway, we have training camps growing where they want to kill us. That’s my question, when can we get rid of them?”

Trump responded: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things, a lot of people are saying bad things are happening, we’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”

In the past, Trump has questioned whether Obama was born in the U.S.

Republicans are trying to use this as an attack on Trump, but the reality is every one of the Republicans running for Obama's job has either publicly questioned the President's faith as a Christian, his birthright as an American citizen, or in Trump's case, both.

And he's not alone in these racist attacks, either.

Good for the White House on this.

Taking Heat From All Over

Another three months of weather data, another global temperature record, and the more important global climate change issues become.

June through August of this year was the hottest summer in recorded weather history, federal scientists said Thursday. 

Surface temperatures around the globe were 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit above their average for those months throughout the 20th century, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said. 

Last summer held the previous record, and 2015 beat it by 0.2 degrees, NOAA reported. The records go back to 1880. 

August also set a temperature record, as did the period from January from August.
This year alone has seen month after month of NOAA records, which scientists are attributing to climate change. 

It’s making it more and more likely that 2015 will set a new record as the hottest year on record, NOAA said. 

“The historical data suggest it would take a remarkable and abrupt reversal in the NOAAGlobalTemp time series over the remainder of the year to upend 2015’s drive toward record-breaking status,” scientists wrote in a Thursday blog post accompanying the latest data.

But it's all a massive hoax, because it's a huge conspiracy to make people care about not burning the planet down, and Pope Francis is in on it.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) announced on Thursday that he will boycott Pope Francis' address to Congress since the pontiff may discuss climate change during the speech. 

Gosar, a Catholic, said he would prefer that the pope address the "persecution of Christians" and religious freedom, rather than focus on the environment. 

"Many believed, like I did, that this was an opportunity for the Pope to be one of the world’s great religious advocates and address the current intolerance of religious freedom," Gosar wrote in an op-ed in TownHall. "Media reports indicate His Holiness instead intends to focus the brunt of his speech on climate change -- a climate that has been changing since first created in Genesis."

The congressman suggested that the pope's speech would be too liberal for his taste.
"More troubling is the fact that this climate change talk has adopted all of the socialist talking points, wrapped false science and ideology into 'climate justice' and is being presented to guilt people into leftist policies. If the Pope stuck to standard Christian theology, I would be the first in line," Gosar said. "But when the Pope chooses to act and talk like a leftist politician, then he can expect to be treated like one." 

"If the Pope wants to devote his life to fighting climate change then he can do so in his personal time. But to promote questionable science as Catholic dogma is ridiculous," Gosar continued.

So now this Pope, being liberal on this issue, the now another in a long line of enemies to the GOP that must be destroyed.

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

After they get done wrecking the planet, I guess.

Last Call For CinciRenty

The Census Bureau has found that home ownership in the Greater Cincinnati area is down sharply from 2010, with two-thirds of people living here now renting.

In the 15-county Cincinnati region, homeownership decreased 5.4 percent from 2010 and 2014. Hamilton County saw a 7.2 percent decline while Butler County saw a drop of 4.2 percent. In Northern Kentucky, results were down as well: Boone and Campbell counties had drops of 4.2 percent and 2.8 percent respectively, while Kenton County had a 7.1 percent decline in homeownership. Data was not available for the other 10 counties in the metro area. 

“Homeownership among some groups of the population has lost its appeal,” said Shaun Bond, director of the University of Cincinnati’s Real Estate Center. “People had negative experiences during the foreclosure crisis. There’s also a view among people, even if they didn’t lose a home, that homeownership isn’t worth the effort.” 

The decrease in homeownership is a trend seen nationwide. Homeownership decreased 3.5 percent nationally between 2010 and 2014, the Census estimates show. 

The new homeownship numbers are part of the 2014 American Community Survey one-year estimates, which were released Thursday. The ongoing survey by the U.S. Census Bureau samples around 3.5 million addresses each year and collects data on a wide range of demographic, social, economic and housing characteristics. Then, the Census Bureau publishes annual estimates for small geographic areas and population groups. 

The new estimates show that nearly two of every three Cincinnati residents (or 64.1 percent) were renters in 2014, up from 57.6 percent in 2010. 

Bond said the the decrease of homeownership in the city can be credited to two factors: The city is lagging in recovering from the Great Recession, and there is a change in lifestyle preferences among homebuyers and renters. 

“For many people, renting makes a lot of sense,” he said. “There are younger people who are developing their career, people who have to move for work, or people who don’t want to own a home. It’s a growth of renters by choice. It’s not because they can’t afford a house.”

The first factor is definitely a problem, and part of the reason why black households in Cincinnati are doing so terribly.  The second factor is due to the new normal in job seeking.  People don't buy houses if they don't think they'll be working for the same company in five years, and spoilers, the majority of American workers won't be with our current employer five years from now, if we're even employed by a company at all.

So yes, I see home ownership dropping even further in the future.  Who will be able to afford a 30-year mortgage when you may have to change jobs and change states every three to five years?

That's where the next housing bubble and collapse is going to start, and I think we're seeing it starting to happen now.

A Bunch Of Boobs In Springfield

Bon The Geek has asked me to pass on this article about Springfield, Missouri's ridiculous new city indecent exposure ordinance, and how it's likely not going to survive a legal challenge.

Springfield’s new indecent exposure ordinance went into effect the moment the votes were cast. Almost as quickly, opponents of the new law are looking for ways to fight back. 

Jessica Lawson, who has been one of the organizers of the recent Free the Nipple rallies, said she was in contact Monday with someone from the American Civil Liberties Union. 

“They just reached out to me today,” she said. “We’re still discussing options with what we’re going to do.” 

Lawson posted a response from the ACLU on her group’s Facebook page: 

“We would be interested in talking to you and others about a potential legal challenge to the new ordinance,” it says. 

While protesters plan their next steps, people on both sides of the issue are reacting to Monday’s 5-4 vote.

And the ordinance is just appallingly stupid, designed to shut down Free The Nipple and Slut Walk rallies in town rather than raise awareness about rape and sexual assault.

We'll have more on this silliness on this weekend's Podcast Versus The Stupid.

Ay, Carly, Con't

Carly Fiorina supposedly "won" Wednesday night's CNN debate, which is a bit like being named Best Orc in Mordor.  Her answers to questions included things like this:

Each candidate was asked who he or she would put on the $10 bill. President Obama's administration announced that a woman would appear on the $10 bill, currently the note of Alexander Hamilton. 

"I wouldn't change the $10 bill or the $20 bill. I think honestly it's a gesture. Don't think it helps to change our history. What I would think is we ought to recognize that women are not a special interest group," Fiorina said. "Women are the majority of this nation. We are half the potential of this nation. And this nation will be better off when every woman has the opportunity to live the life she chooses."

That's a nice sentiment.  Too bad that Fiorina wants to take a number of choices away from women involving their own bodies, their careers, and their families, and has to lie about it in order to try to get there, as Vox's Sarah Kliff points out.

Carly Fiorina defended her remarks about Planned Parenthood Thursday morning on Good Morning America. 

"There's a lot of commentary about these tapes being doctored," Fiorina said in an interview with George Stephanolous. "In fact,that's what the mainstream media keeps talking about is the tapes and their origin. Rest assured, I have seen the images I talked about last night. Rest assure, human lives are being harvested."

Except that's not the case.

There are two Planned Parenthood sting videos that were shot inside Planned Parenthood clinics (other videos exist, taped at conferences and lunch meetings). One was taped in Louisiana and the other in Colorado. And in both videos, Planned Parenthood employees do work with the fetal tissue, showing the pro-life advocates posing as tissue buyers the different parts of the body. 

But the things Fiorina describes — the legs kicking, the intact "fully formed fetus," the heart beating, the remarks about having to "harvest its brain" — are pure fiction.

It's very interesting how Fiorina talks about women being half the potential in this country, and in a field of 15 candidates, she's the only woman.

StupidiNews!

• Pakistani Taliban forces attacked an air base, resulting in 29 dead, including 16 Pakistani soldiers and airmen.
• Nevada's state water agency has approved a $45 million deal that would provide surplus water for Southern California now, with the option to buy it back later.
• The final Senate Republican move to block the international nuclear deal with Iran has failed a vote, meaning the deal will go forward as a major victory for the Obama administration.
• Greek voters will go to the polls on Sunday to decide a replacement government for outgoing PM Alexis Tsipras, but final predictions are too close to call.
• American Airlines has resumed service after a computer glitch Thursday knocked out hundreds of American flights out of Chicago, Dallas, and Miami flight hubs.

Last Call For Meet The New Boss

A military coup d'etat today in the West African nation of Burkina Faso leaves the question of planned October elections very much up in the air.

Presidential guard officers in Burkina Faso have seized power in a coup, with reports of more than 10 deaths amid protests in the capital, Ouagadougou. 

A close ally of former President Blaise Compaore has been named the country's new leader, state television reports. 

French President Francois Hollande condemned the coup in the former French colony. 

Those killed were shot dead by presidential guard forces in the capital, a civil society group said. 

The claim by the influential Balai Citoyen group could not be independently verified.
Other reports said protesters had been assaulted and detained. 

The coup leaders have imposed a night-time curfew across the West African state, and have ordered the closure of land and air borders, AFP news agency reports. 

The headquarters of Mr Compaore's Congress for Democracy and Progress (CDP) party were ransacked in Ouagadougou as news of the coup spread, it adds. 

Mr Hollande called for the immediate release of interim President Michel Kafando and Prime Minister Isaac Zida, who were detained at a cabinet meeting in the president palace on Wednesday. 

Their transitional authority was due to hand power to a new government after elections on 11 October.

The Presidential Guard was Compaore's brute squad of about 1,300 soldiers, and fearing that a newly elected President would disband the unit, the Guard took over.   It's an ugly mess for sure, and a major blow to democracy, but again, there's not much anyone can really do about it.

Needless to say, after twenty years of Compaore's nasty rule, it looks like the new boss is the same as the old boss.

The Daily Struggle Of Planned Parenthood

Considering all the idiocy surrounding these Planned Parenthood attack videos, it's nice to see the media actually go to a Planned Parenthood clinic and see what they actually do, which is provide basic health services to women who need them, as they do in Akron.

This clinic sees nearly 7,100 patients a year, most of them young and poor. The clinicians administer 3,400 pregnancy tests, write 2,900 prescriptions for birth control and provide 13,200 screenings for sexually transmitted infections to the women and men walking into a boxy building between a restaurant-supply store and a used-car dealership. Inside the clinicians’ office, a ­pamphlet on the wall reads “Bomb Threat Checklist.”

Like nearly half of Planned Parenthood’s facilities nationwide, Akron doesn’t perform abortions. Three of the organization’s 27 centers in Ohio do; the nearest is in Bedford Heights, where protesters regularly picket. When pregnancy tests come back as unwanted positives, those patients are referred to Bedford Heights, 26 miles away. 

That referral had now become enough of a metaphorical tie to the organization’s more controversial mission that one patient had come in and said, angrily, “I saw those videos,” and one employee’s husband found himself defending his wife’s profession to colleagues who had never before shown an interest. Earlier that morning, at the weekly staff meeting, Stephanie Kight, the Ohio state director, told the workers that a large antiabortion demonstration was announced for the coming weekend in front of the clinic. 

“I don’t think we should wear our uniforms that day,” said Har­riet Schaefer, the clinic director. “To be safe.” 

“We’ll get back to you with a security briefing — parking and whatnot,” Kight told the staff, and she moved to the next part of the meeting, a presentation by education manager Constance Dunlap about the stigma of working for an organization that performs abortions. 

Employees should think about the risks of disclosing their workplace, Dunlap said. They also should think about the emotional risks of not telling people. Dunlap said that her own parents did not know where she works. They are in their 80s and devout Baptists. 

“My dad thinks I’m a teacher,” she said, and the meeting ended and it was time to open the clinic.

Here is what they do, day in, day out.  Help women get basic health services because there aren't any other Medicaid providers that will take new patients in Akron, and the local non-profit clinic has a six-week waiting list.

And this is what Republicans are going to shut down the government over, so they can make that a three-month waiting list instead.

But there's no War on Women.

Bureaucratic Clock Watchers

The intersection of the era of zero tolerance lockdown schools and rampant red state Islamophobia is an ugly, ugly place.

Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday. 

Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case. 

So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in handcuffs to juvenile detention. His clock now sits in an evidence room. Police say they may yet charge him with making a hoax bomb — though they acknowledge he told everyone who would listen that it’s a clock. 

In the meantime, Ahmed’s been suspended, his father is upset and the Council on American-Islamic Relations is once again eyeing claims of Islamophobia in Irving.

America is a great country, it just happens to have some truly awful people living there.  Some of them, unfortunately, are in positions of considerable authority and influence.

Ahmed’s clock was hardly his most elaborate creation. He said he threw it together in about 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday: a circuit board and power supply wired to a digital display, all strapped inside a case with a tiger hologram on the front. 

He showed it to his engineering teacher first thing Monday morning and didn’t get quite the reaction he’d hoped for. 

“He was like, ‘That’s really nice,’” Ahmed said. “‘I would advise you not to show any other teachers.’” 

He kept the clock inside his school bag in English class, but the teacher complained when the alarm beeped in the middle of a lesson. Ahmed brought his invention up to show her afterward. 

“She was like, it looks like a bomb,” he said. 

“I told her, ‘It doesn’t look like a bomb to me.’” 

The teacher kept the clock. When the principal and a police officer pulled Ahmed out of sixth period, he suspected he wouldn’t get it back. 

They led Ahmed into a room where four other police officers waited. He said an officer he’d never seen before leaned back in his chair and remarked: “Yup. That’s who I thought it was.” 

Because of course it was.

However, sometimes these stories have a happier ending.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes had a pleasant surprise for Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Muslim teenager who was arrested at his high school in Irving, Texas after officials determined his homemade clock could be a “hoax bomb.” 

Hayes brought in astrophysicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who works for the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the Department of Physics and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mohamed has described as his “dream school.” 

“I just want to say, you are my ideal student,” Prescod-Weinstein told the teen. “A creative, independent thinker like you is the kind of person who should be becoming a physicist. As a theoretical physicist, I would love it if you took an interest in the mathematical side, although you’re clearly very adept with your hands and at building things.” 

She then extended an invitation for Mohamed to visit MIT and get a tour of the Kavli Institute and the school’s Center for Theoretical Physics. She added that her former advisors at Harvard also wanted him to take a tour of their astrophysics facility. 

“You are the kind of student we want at places like MIT and Harvard,” she said. 

Hayes then asked his young guest if he would take the school up on the invitation. 

“That’s a fact right there,” Mohamed said.

Indeed, young Ahmed received invitations to check out everything from Facebook and Reddit's HQ to NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to yes, even the White House.

America, this time you did it right.

StupidiNews!

• At least five are reported dead after a magnitude 8.3 earthquake rocked Chile late Wednesday night, officials say up to 1 million people were evacuated from affected areas.
• Missouri Republicans were unable to override Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of a measure that would have ended union shops and cut dues.
• At least 5,000 Syrian migrants have entered Croatia looking for help and a path to Germany as neighboring Serbia's border with Hungary remains closed by Hungary's military.
• A nearly $275 billion deal to create the world's largest brewery giant faces anti-trust regulators in the US, where the combined market share of AB InBev and SABMiller would be 58%.
• A major cybersecurity firm is accusing Russia's government of being behind a seven-year campaign of malware against other governments with software known as "the Dukes".

Texas Secession Two-Step

Meanwhile, the right-wing nullification/secession train rolls on down the tracks towards 1861.

Texas already seceded once — in 1861, by popular vote in a statewide election. 

But the Texas Nationalist Movement wants a repeat a century and a half later, and thinks the March GOP primary is the place to start. 

The Nederland-based Texas independence group is circulating a petition aimed at getting a non-binding vote onto the GOP primary ballot over whether “the state of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.” 

Their goal? 75,000 signatures from registered voters by Dec. 1 — more than the 66,894 the Texas Secretary of State’s office says the group needs to get the language on the ballot. 

Even if the Texas Nationalist Movement gets enough signatures, such a vote would be little more than symbolic. Academics agree that Texas cannot secede from the United States, and point to a post-Civil War Supreme Court ruling, Texas v. White, as evidence. 

But that hasn’t stopped the Republican Party of Texas from rolling its eyes at the secessionists. Texas GOP communications director Aaron Whitehead said the Republican party certainly doesn’t welcome outside groups trying to doctor the party ballot. 

“Historically the executive committee of the Republican Party has chosen what goes on this,” Whitehead said, “and it’s party preference that it stays that way.”

Really?  You've got Republican presidential candidates like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum openly calling for revolt against Supreme Court rulings they don't like, GOP Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell openly calling for states to simply ignore EPA rules on power plants, and House Republicans led by John Boehner openly suing the Obama administration over the implementation of Obamacare.

Republicans are calling for nullification of the federal government on several fronts.  Why is secession suddenly out of bounds for you?  These guys are simply taking existing Republican rhetoric and turning it into action.

“The end game for us is to have a binding referendum on Texas independence, much like the people of Scotland had in November of last year,” Patrick Miller, the president of the Texas Nationalist Movement, told the Tribune.

When you talk constantly about taking "your" country back, this is what you get.

The Walkering Dead, Con't

Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker (currently polling around two percent in the primaries) is going all in on destroying America's unions in order to save his collapsing campaign.

Seeking to revitalize his presidential campaign, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Monday fired a new shot at labor by proposing to prevent federal workers from collectively bargaining, create a national right-to-work law and eliminate the National Labor Relations Board. 

In a plan released by his campaign, Walker also called for requiring all unions to hold periodic votes so workers could decide whether they should continue to exist. If elected, he also would cancel President Barack Obama's Labor Day order that federal contractors provide paid sick leaveand work to end policies requiring some salaried workers in the private sector to receive overtime — saying in some cases they should get time off instead. 

"We must take on the big-government union bosses in Washington — just like I took them on in Wisconsin," the GOP governor said at a town hall meeting on the shop floor of construction equipment maker Xtreme Manufacturing. 

"Federal employees should work for the taxpayers — not the other way around."

At on point during his speech in Vegas he called collective bargaining itself an "expensive entitlement".  Walker's ideas are pretty bonkers, but hey, this is the 2016 GOP primary we're talking about here.

The real problem is how blithely the article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dismisses Walker's radical destruction of unions as ever passing.

Many of Walker's ideas — such as dissolving the labor relations board and establishing a federal right-to-work law — would require changes to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Such changes have little chance of becoming law, said Joseph E. Slater, a labor professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio. 

The last major change to the act was in 1959. When Democrats had large majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, they tried to make the law more favorable to unions but couldn't get their changes passed. Walker's ideas would likely pass only if Republicans controlled the U.S. House and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate — and even then it would be difficult, Slater said. 

"It's really just red meat for the base," Slater said. "None of that's going to actually happen. I'm not certain you could get even 60 Republicans (in the Senate) to vote for that."

It's cute that people still think that whatever red wave that would sweep any Republican into power in 2016, wouldn't keep the House and Senate in GOP hands, and that Republicans wouldn't dare eliminate the filibuster and merrily turn back 80 years of laws.

That would be almost amusing if it wasn't so amazingly tragic.

StupidiNews!

• Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is blaming the West for the country's civil war and refugee crisis, claiming the problem has been solely caused by countries supporting Syrian rebels.
• The week-long Seattle Teachers' Union strike has ended with a tentative contract giving teachers and support staff a 10% raise, but also a 20-minute longer school day.
• After months in exile, Yemen's government has returned to Aden as Saudi-backed forces have succeeded in driving out Houthi rebels earlier this summer.
• Hewlett-Packard will cut up to 33,000 additional jobs as the PC maker will split into two separate companies serving enterprise and consumer customers. 
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that after years of resisting, the company is working on a "dislike" button for posts where users want to express sadness or empathy.