Dear America

Another one of these this week.  Man, it's getting to be silly season out here.

"Boy, liberals sure are delusional kooks over this inequality crap.  Why can't they just accept that life isn't fair, we're not created equal by any stretch of the imagination, and that the haves will beat the have-nots every time?"

--Thomas Sowell, National Review Online

Bonus Verbatim Stupid(tm): 

The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

This coming from people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and that all the scientific evidence otherwise was planted to test the faithless, that evolution is a horrific myth that must be challenged, that man-made global warming is a massive hoax designed to sell Tesla cars, that President Obama was born in Kenya, and that the scam of science itself is the primary function of academia the world over.

But the real world doesn't fit the left's preconceptions.  Sure, that's the problem.  This guy is projecting like a lighthouse hooked up to a nuclear reactor, methinks.

StupidiNews!

• UN inspectors continue to look for evidence of last week's reported Syrian chemical weapons attack as the US weighs intervention options, and Russia strongly protests US involvement.
• A judge has approved a $20 million Facebook settlement with users and privacy advocates over using "likes" as product endorsements.
• The US Treasury Department predicts that the federal government will run up against the debt ceiling's borrowing limit by the middle of October.
• Pharmaceutical giant Amgen will buy Onyx Pharmaceuticals in a $10.4 billion deal that will give Amgen access to Onyx's promising stable of new cancer-fighting drugs.
• Pressure from the NFL has sacked a ESPN/PBS joint documentary on concussions in pro football, but PBS plans to finish the film itself.

Last Call For Ben's Helicopter

The race to replace outgoing Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke continues to roll on, and while the "Anyone But Larry Summers" crew has strong contenders in Janet Yellen (who would be the first female Fed chief) and Roger Ferguson (who would be the first black Fed chairman) WaPo's Neil Irwin argues that the newest dark horse after this weekend's Jackson Hole conference is Bank of Israel head Stan Fischer.

The short version: He is an outstanding academic economist; he was the No. 2 official at the IMF; and he did a virtuoso job leading the Bank of Israel until earlier this year, making him the central banker to one of the nation’s closest allies. Whether you’re looking for academic brilliance, crisis management or central banking experience, Fischer’s resume is sterling.

He is deeply respected, even beloved, in the community of central bankers, an intellectual leader among the group of men and women who guide the world economy. In fact, he was a mentor to many of them. As it happens, he was thesis adviser to both current Fed chair Ben Bernanke and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi. In the symposium Saturday, Fischer raised a typically thoughtful point about capital flows to emerging markets, posing a question to the panelists who had just presented a paper.

And hey, I'm all for Not Larry Summers.  But Fischer? 

The reason Fischer is not viewed as a front-runner for the Fed chairmanship is that he is viewed as a foreigner. He was born in Zambia and raised overseas before becoming a U.S. citizen in 1976. More politically tricky is that he was a high public official of another country for the last several years while serving as governor of the Bank of Israel.

But Fischer has been an American citizen for a generation and maintained his U.S. citizenship while serving overseas.  And the politics around Israel are unique. Would Republicans really lead a charge against confirmation for Bibi Netanyahu’s top economic adviser?

They should, but not a one would.  And while this guy may not be Larry Summers, "Bibi's economic guy" is not a plus in my book.

Presidential Power Principles In Syria

Jeffrey Goldberg argues that UN Ambassador Samantha Power's award-winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, is the map for the coming US intervention in Syria.

I pulled the book off the shelf last night, and was reminded that it is brilliant, a carefully written, deeply researched indictment of American indifference in the face of atrocity. And I realized that the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria must be driving Power mad with frustration -- frustration, of course, with Bashar al-Assad's killer regime and frustration with the international community (so-called), in particular the Russians, who will do almost anything to protect the regime from censure, but also frustration with those in the administration who have spent the past two years looking for ways to distance the U.S. from the horror.

One caveat: The 100,000 dead in Syria do not count -- at least not yet -- as victims of genocide, as the word is traditionally understood, although I think a careful analysis of the civil war shows that Assad’s minority Alawite regime has directed its criminal violence almost exclusively against members of Syria’s Sunni Muslim population.

So I have a sense that Power would believe that the following statement, which she made in her book’s concluding chapter, would apply to Syria: “When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, it has a duty to act.”

Power is right here.  The problem is that applied to Syria, the United States doesn't have the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk.  We never did.  The Syrian military is substantial.  This would not be another ho-hum air power act like in Libya or even a shock and awe, six-week special like in Iraq in 1990.  It would be an actual war, and an ugly one.  Bush and Cheney put us into a pair of decade-long wars that cost us trillions.  President Obama wisely has kept us out of a third Middle Eastern war by comparison.  There's not going to be a couple of air strikes, and then the game's over, folks.

We're talking a guaranteed quagmire, if not a huge regional conflict, with the UK, France, and us on one side and quite possibly Russia and China on the other.  That's not one of those good things.

In her conclusion, Power asks, “Why does the United States stand so idly by?” in the face of mass killing. And she explains the traditional behavior of Western leaders when confronted with proof of large-scale atrocities: “Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter. States that murder and torment their own citizens target citizens elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable.”

Her argument for intervention in cases of large-scale violence against civilians is not motivated merely by moral interests: “Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats.” Two years of Western inaction in Syria, of course, have helped turn what began as a nonviolent citizens’ rebellion into an al-Qaeda-dominated campaign of anti-regime violence.

And no, Syria is not a good neighbor.  But unless we're willing to remove Assad and the Syrian military from power permanently, which will require a lengthy ground invasion, anything we do will not be enough.

Dear America

"I'm going to talk about race and say that the black reaction to the tragic murders of white people Chris Lane and Delbert Belton not warranting national demonstrations like Trayvon Martin's death proves that those same savage, riot-prone black people who are always talking about race are the real source of America's race problem.  Right, Obama?"

--Kathleen Parker, Washington Post

Bonus Verbatim Stupid:

We do know this much for certain: Had the races been reversed, the usual suspects would have had much to say. White teens beat up an elderly black veteran and leave him for dead? White teens shoot a talented black athlete visiting from another country?

Riots.

Because all we black folk are?  Barely contained, quasi-human Whitey-seeking time bombs set off by the mere appearance of racism, just waiting to detonate in your neighborhood, your schools, your churches, your workplaces, and your block parties with fruit salad.  That's why we need stand your ground laws, so shooting one of us in self-defense because you're terrified isn't a criminal act.  It's better for everyone that way.

At least in the twisted, awful funhouse that is Kathleen Parker's personal, paranoid hell of a mind.  Jesus, how does the woman walk outside without macing everyone darker than John Boehner and peeing herself in sheer terror?

And just for the record, this is pretty much the most blatantly awful, race-baiting piece of nonsense I think the Washington Post has ever has the misfortune of printing.  It's that bad.

StupidiNews!

• The massive Rim Wildfire in California has reached Yosemite and has burned through a total of 144,000 acres as firefighters try to protect the historic national park.
• LA's porn industry has all but stopped cold after an actress tested positive for HIV.
• Tens of thousands descended on Washington DC to mark the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's march on the National Mall on Saturday.
• Michigan GOP Gov. Rick Snyder wants to cut Detroit's financial woes by putting city employees on the state's health insurance exchange, but his own party is blocking the move.
• China plans to take its national space program to the moon, but it's unclear what effect that would have on NASA or Russia's cosmonauts, or a new world space race.

Last Call For Cory Booker's Doormat

Three observations on Steve Lonegan, the Republican running to lose spectacularly to Cory Booker in October's special election in NJ:

1)  Steve Lonegan is an idiot, has no chance in hell, and will lose by 20 points.

New Jersey Senate candidate Steve Lonegan (R) told MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki on Saturday that single mothers don’t need to rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, because his mother raised a family by working hard and building a successful career following the death of her husband.

“We never had to have SNAP, when I was a kid,” Lonegan said during an appearance on Up with Steve Kornacki. “Ok, so, this thing that every single mother is the poster child for the welfare state is nonsense… I know a lot of single moms go out to work and do very, very well for themselves.”

2)   Why is Up with Steve Kornacki giving Lonegan a platform anyway?

3)  I'm hoping the answer to number 2 there is "to show people Steve Lonegan is an idiot and has no chance in hell, he's going to lose by 20 points."  I'm not so sure about Kornacki's motives.

4) This is the 15,000th post on ZVTS.  Damn I write a lot.

Ham, Turtle, And Rand For Dinosaur's Steve's Breakfast

Every now and again Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear reminds me he's actually a proud Democrat in a state full of bitter Republicans, and he ate Sens. Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell's lunch at Thursday's Farm Bureau breakfast at the KY State Fair as he defended Obamacare in front of the both of them.

The governor compared health insurance to "the safety net of crop insurance" and said farmers need both. He said 640,000 Kentuckians—15 percent of the state—don't have health insurance and "trust me, you know many of those 640,000 people. You're friends with them. You're probably related to them. Some may be your sons and daughters. You go to church with them. Shop with them. Help them harvest their fields. Sit in the stands with them as you watch your kids play football or basketball or ride a horse in competition. Heck, you may even be one of them."

Beshear went on to say that "it's no fun" hoping and praying you don't get sick, or choosing whether to pay for food or medicine. He also said Kentucky is at or near the top of the charts on bad-health indicators, including heart disease, diabetes, cancer deaths, and preventable hospitalizations. He said all that affects everything from productivity and school attendance to health costs and the state's image.

"We've ranked that bad for a long, long time," he said. "The Affordable Care Act is our historic opportunity to address this weakness and to change the course of the future of the commonwealth. We're going to make insurance available for the very first time in our history to every single citizen of the commonwealth of Kentucky."

About half the audience burst into applause at that point while the other half sat on their hands. But he wasn't done. He cited a study that showed the law would inject about $15.6 billion into the Kentucky economy over eight years, create 17,000 new jobs, and generate $802 million for the state budget.

"It's amazing to me how people who are pouring time and money and energy into trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act sure haven't put that kind of energy into trying to improve the health of Kentuckians. And think of the decades that they have had to make some kind of difference," Beshear finished pointedly.

Those are frankly two of the best arguments for Obamacare that I've heard, the third being "Expanding Medicare sure is a lot cheaper than taxpayers swallowing the cost of indigent emergency room care."  Jason Cherkis reminds us that if people don't know it's Obamacare, they love it.  Even here in Kentucky.

A middle-aged man in a red golf shirt shuffles up to a small folding table with gold trim, in a booth adorned with a flotilla of helium balloons, where government workers at the Kentucky State Fair are hawking the virtues of Kynect, the state’s health benefit exchange established by Obamacare.

The man is impressed. "This beats Obamacare I hope," he mutters to one of the workers.

“Do I burst his bubble?” wonders Reina Diaz-Dempsey, overseeing the operation. She doesn't. If he signs up, it's a win-win, whether he knows he's been ensnared by Obamacare or not.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare -- totals 974 pages, and in the popular imagination is several times longer. How the complex law unfolds could very well determine the winner of Kentucky's high-stakes 2014 Senate race pitting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) against Democratic upstart Alison Lundergan Grimes -- and along with it control of the upper chamber.

But Diaz-Dempsey has managed to distill it all down to three sentences.

We are Kynect -- part of the new health care law.

Do you know anyone who doesn’t have health insurance?

You may qualify for Medicaid or a tax credit based on your income.

And people love Kynect.  It's not Obamacare, you see.  Regardless, it's good seeing Beshear stand up for Obamacare.  My question is does Alison Lundergan Grimes have the courage to do the same?

Your Stopped Clock Is Right Twice A Day Alert

With the Obama administration discussing intervention options in Syria today, we see a SCIRTAD alert issued for one "Cap'n" Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

On one side, we have a hereditary dictatorship that has a track record of genocidal attacks on its own people.  On the other side, we have an aggregation of impotent secularists and radical Sunni Islamists with a track record of mass-murder attack on civilians.  The question isn’t which would use chemical weapons to further their cause, it’s which wouldn’t, and the answer is neither.  Unless we start bombing everyone, it’s difficult to see why we’d want to intervene at all, except to grab or neutralize whatever stores of chemical weapons we can find.

There are no good guys in Syria's civil war, folks.  The Assad regime is horrific, and the rebels are killers as well.  If there's an ultimate big bad itself, it's Syria's military.  With the death toll above six figures and at least that many fleeing as refugees, it's good to remember that "intervening" in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't exactly go well, and in Libya we traded Qaddafi for an unstable cease fire that probably won't last the year.

And yet odds are very good we'll be in Syria very soon. 

Hanoi Jane And The Butler

Oh bitter old douchebags here in Kentucky, you're the reason Elizabethtown can't have nice things.

A Kentucky theater owner has banned the number one movie in America, The Butler, from his theater because he says that actress Jane Fonda is "an enemy of the United States of America."

Movie Palace and Showtime Cinemas owner Ike Boutwell told The News-Enterprise that he was not interested any of the $25 million that Lee Daniel's film about an African-American butler who served eight United States presidents had made during its opening weekend because Fonda had brought disgrace to the screen with her portrayal of former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

"I was a military flight instructor during the Vietnam War, taught hundreds of pilots to fly, many of whom Ms. Fonda clapped and cheered as they were shot down and killed," the retired Marine explained. "That's treason, right in our Constitution... aid and comfort to the enemy."

Boutwell said that it would be a "terrible dishonorment on my part to give money to a woman" such as Fonda.

He added that it would be "throwing gas on the fire" to support a "person of treason" as she portrayed a "patriotic lady" like Nancy Reagan.

"I'm a former Marine, I've got a long memory," Boutwell pointed out. "I just -- I cannot give up to the enemy, and Ms. Fonda, as far as I'm concerned, is an enemy of the United States of America. That's exactly how I feel about it."

Well, at least the guy's not saying "I'm not going to show this movie with black people in it" or anything.  That would be really ludicrous, right?

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan has been found guilty by a military jury on all 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder.
• Options President Obama is considering taking against Syria in a Saturday meeting with cabinet officials may reportedly include the use of cruise missiles.
• Congress will honor the four victims of the 1963 Birmingham bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church with the Congressional Gold Medal.
• The UK will begin the IPO of the Royal Mail service next month, with hopes of raising $4.7 billion by taking ownership public.
• Tesla Motors grabbed 12 percent of the luxury car market in California in the first half of 2013, outpacing Volvo, Cadillac, Land Rover, and more.

Last Call For The Last Train To Cobbsville

And it's leaving Racist Station, you can be there at 4:30, but I'd get a reservation.

A man living in North Dakota plans to turn his small town into a bastion of white supremacists, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“I didn’t have a clue who the guy was until he showed up. All I know is he bought that house sight unseen, $5,000 cash, and had no idea what it looked like, where it was, other than he knew the directions to get to Leith,” Mayor Ryan Schock told the Hatewatch blog.

Craig Paul Cobb, 61, has been buying up abandoned property in Leith, a town of only 19 people. He has invited other white supremacists to live on his properties and help take over the city.

In a post last year on the Vanguard News Network forum, Cobb said anyone who lives on his property would be required to fly a “racialist banner” — such as a Nazi flag — 24-hours a day. They would also be required to try to “import more responsible radical hard core [white nationalists]” and become a legal resident of the state so they could vote in local elections. He plans to rename the city “Cobbsville.”

“Imagine strolling over to your neighbors to discuss world politics with nearly all like-minded volk. Imagine the international publicity and usefulness to our cause! For starters, we could declare a Mexican illegal invaders and Israeli Mossad/IDF spies no-go zone. If leftist journalists or antis come and try to make trouble, they just might break one of our local ordinances and would have to be arrested by our town constable. See?” he wrote.

Cobb has even built a concrete prison, where he plans to “lock up recalcitrant journalists and lefty commies who violate the codes or peace of the community.”

Sounds like a happening town for all your extremely Aryan, goosestepping buddies who need somewhere to hang their SS hats after a long day of hating everyone who's not them.  Perhaps someone should inform Chief Justice Roberts that Craig Paul Cobb here didn't get the memo that racism in America was over when the court's conservatives struck down Section 4 of the no longer necessary Voting Rights Act.

The plan to turn Leigh into a white supremacist paradise has the town’s only black resident understandably worried.

“The more the word gets out, the better chance that we can move him out. People are welcome if they’re here to improve our community, but they’re here to bring hate,” Bobby Harper told The Bismarck Tribune.

Yeah, I'd be understandably worried too.

Professor Obama's Higher Education Plan

President Obama yesterday unveiled his plan for containing college costs, and as Ezra Klein notes, it's applying Obamacare's "bend the cost curve down" theory to college tuition inflation.

The core of President Obama’s plan to cut higher-ed costs is “pay-for-performance.” The idea is to use federal financial aid to move colleges away from the current pay-for-enrollment model and toward a model in which they make more money if they graduate more students, hold tuition costs down, etc. (This is, in a sense, bringing the cost-control theories of Obamacare to the higher-ed sector.)

So how does it work?

The fact sheet is pretty clear on this: “Before the 2015 school year, the Department of Education will develop a new ratings system to help students compare the value offered by colleges and encourage colleges to improve.” Look ma! No Congress!

Linking the new ratings system to financial aid does require congressional action. But it doesn’t come till much later. “The President will seek legislation allocating financial aid based upon these college ratings by 2018, once the ratings system is well established,” the fact sheet continues. That’s two years after the end of Obama’s second term. That means that even if Obama did get legislation passed to link aid to performance, the law could be altered or undone by the next president before it even went into effect.

So what Obama is really promising to get done in his second term is to create the infrastructure necessary for a pay-for-performance system: the definition of performance and the routine collection of the underlying data. He doesn’t need Congress for that. When that’s are done, Obama can try to get legislation passed through Congress to tie them to financial aid by 2018. But even if he fails, he will have set the next president up to finish the job, as the technically hardest and most time-consuming task will be complete.

Seems like a good plan to me, especially when the big losers in the plan are those profiting off of college loans.  Going to a pay-for-performance, "Race To The Top" program approach puts the responsibility on colleges, universities, grad schools and trade school to turn out people who actually graduate, not drop out.

Naturally, Republicans are going to trash the plan.  And as usual, they've got nothing better.

A High Stakes Game Of Texas Hold 'Em

Texas GOP Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst apparently has a no problem with Texas Hold 'Em...especially when the person being "held" is his niece, in Collins County, for shoplifting.  He's got no problem going all in when it comes to throwing his weight around.

Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst (R) reportedly called 911 when a relative was in jail and tried to use his influence to convince officials to release her. According to CBS Dallas-Ft. Worth, Dewhurst made the call on August 3, four hours after his niece was arrested for shoplifting at an Allen, TX Kroger grocery store.

“This is David Dewhurst, the Lieutenant Governor of the State of Texas, and I want to talk to your senior officer who is there at your department right now,” Dewhurst said at the beginning of the call.

When the Republican got a police sergeant on the phone, he proceeded to insist that his niece, Ellen Bevers, is “the sweetest person in the world,” and that she should be released as quickly as possible.

“What I would like to do is if you would explain to me, sergeant, what I would need to do to arrange for getting her out of jail this evening,” he said. “You can proceed with whatever you think is proper.”

Allen police say they handled the case just as they would any other case of a relative calling about an inmate. The sergeant on duty explained that Bevers was charged with a Class B misdemeanor and would be transferred to the Collin County Sheriff’s Office for arraignment.

Yeah, you're a precinct sarge, and the Lieutenant Governor calls YOU up and says he wants to get his niece out of the pokey ASAP for a shoplifting charge.  Whatever YOU think is proper.  The cops played it by the book, apparently.

A spokesperson for the Allen Police Department, Sgt. John Felty, said that neither his department nor the lieutenant governor did anything wrong, “He didn’t threaten anybody. He didn’t demand anything. He didn’t ask for anything that was above and beyond what a normal citizen would.”

Dewhurst’s office released a statement that said, “David acted as a concerned family member in an attempt to acquire information on how to post bail for his niece while reiterating multiple times in the full conversation that law-enforcement follow their normal protocols and procedures.”

Sure.  Except this "normal citizen" asking for "normal procedures" happens to be the Lieutenant Governor of Texas.  Maybe what Dewhurst did was legal,but it sure as hell wasn't moral.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama acknowledged "an accelerated time frame" for decisions involving a US response to events in both Syria and Egypt this week.
• Texas is losing the battle with a rapidly growing feral pig population in the state, with damage now being reported as far north as suburban Dallas/Fort Worth.
• House Republicans have scheduled a hearing on climate change in order to grill over a dozen executive agency heads on implementing President Obama's announced June agenda.
• New planning documents show the Pentagon may fire more than 6,000 civilian contractors if additional sequestration cuts take effect in 2014.
• After hundreds of users reported GPS and touchscreen issues with the 2013 version of Google's Nexus 7 tablet, a new update this week is expected to fix the issue.