Last Call To Back Off, Vlad

President Obama made it clear speaking from the White House this morning that further actions from Russia on taking over Crimea and eastern Ukraine would be met with increasing sanctions.

The United States and European Union announced sanctions including asset freezes and travel bans on officials from Russia and Ukraine after Crimea applied to join Russia on Monday following a controversial weekend referendum.

"We'll continue to make clear to Russia that further provocations will achieve nothing except to further isolate Russia and diminish its place in the world," President Barack Obama said. "The international community will continue to stand together to oppose any violations of Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity, and continued Russia military intervention in Ukraine will only deepen Russia's diplomatic isolation and exact a greater toll on the Russia economy."

The sanctions came after Crimea's Moscow-backed leaders declared an overwhelming 96.7% vote in favor of leaving Ukraine and being annexed by Russia in a vote that Western powers said was illegal. Turnout was 83%.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's parliament has authorized the call-up of some 40,000 military reservists.  Things could get very ugly in Crimea and fast should it devolve into a situation with shooting.  Russian military forces have been moving into Crimea for the last week.  We'll see where this goes and how Russia responds.

The House That Ruth Built

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Irvine's law school, takes to the LA Times to argue that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg needs to retire now in order to get a liberal justice appointed in her place on the Supreme Court.  It's a noble argument and it makes sense:

There likely will be many calls, publicly and privately, for Justice Ginsburg to resign before President Obama leaves the White House to prevent the risk of a Republican being able to appoint her successor. But simply leaving before the next election isn't enough. If Ginsburg waits until 2016 to announce her retirement, there is a real chance that Republicans would delay the confirmation process to block an outgoing president from being able to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court. In fact, the process for confirming nominees for judicial vacancies usually largely shuts down the summer before a presidential election.

Moreover, there is a distinct possibility that Democrats will not keep the Senate in the November 2014 elections. The current Senate has 53 Democrats, two independents who vote with the Democrats and 45 Republicans. But in the November 2014 elections, Republicans have a far greater likelihood of gaining seats in the Senate than the Democrats. One recent study identified nine seats held by Democrats that could be won by Republicans, but only two seats occupied by Republicans that might be taken by Democrats.

But I'm with Steve M on this: If Justice Ginsburg retired tomorrow, the Republicans can and would block her successor for the next three years.  There's no possible way at this point that President Obama would be allowed to appoint anyone to the Court short of a second (and more militant) Scalia, and Democrats would revolt.

It's not happening.  The only way a Democrat gets to appoint another justice is if we get 60 in the Senate.  That may be a prospect somewhere in Hillary's term in 2020 or something.  Justice Ginsburg is just going to have to hold on until then,

Abby Huntsman Is As Useless As Her Father

I'm not sure how Abby Huntsman ended up on MSNBC's The Cycle...scratch that.  I know exactly how she did, spouting her dad's same No Labels nonsense for the Millennials. LA Times econ reporter Michael Hiltzik has her pegged.

Abby Huntsman is really, really upset about Social Security. We know this because the television presenter, a daughter of former GOP Presidential contender Jon Huntsman, went on an extended rant about it Thursday on MSNBC's "The Cycle." The show is aimed at a younger audience of news consumers and Huntsman, 27, is one of the four youthful co-hosts.

She thinks Social Security is going bankrupt, leaving her and her generation with nothing. "This is infuriating," she said, bouncing up and down in her chair like a petulant toddler, "because none of our elected officials seem to care enough to do anything about it."

Unfortunately, almost everything she said about Social Security in the name of making it "sustainable" for her generation was wrong.

Dead wrong.

Huntsman wants to tell it like it is, but she fails due to lack of information. And if her generation believes what she said, it's going to be in deep trouble.

Let's get one thing straight:  Nobody in my generation (the youngest Gen Xers) and younger believes we'll ever see a dime of Social Security.  I still have a minimum of 35 years of work ahead of me.  For those in their early 30's, it's 40, and those in their 20's it's 45 or 50.  I understand the appeal of "after the Boomers drain the system, odds are really good there won't be a lot left for us."

But that's simply not true.

The most dire projections of the program's future say that "doing nothing about it"--no benefit cuts, no tax increases--will leave the program still able to pay 75%-80% of scheduled benefits. Not "nothing at all." And that 75% to 80% would still be much more per month 75 years from now than retirees get today.

By the way, it's also untrue that President Obama's budget plan makes "no mention of entitlement reform. None," as Huntsman claims. His budget proposes a very damaging cutback in Social Security disability, as we documented here, as well as changes to Medicare payment formulas to save money.

Huntsman has stitched her spiel together out of scraps and tatters of misinformation, of a sort we've heard from the older generation for years. They're no more accurate coming out the mouths of a "millennial." But it's tragic to see that what she's learned from her elders is how to mislead her public.

Which is exactly the platform her dad ran on in 2012.  She's just as useless.

StupidiNews, St. Patrick's Day Edition!

• Brewery giant Guinness is the latest beer sponsor to pull out of today's NYC's St. Patrick's Day parade due to LGBTQ groups not being allowed to openly march.
• Crimean officials say that with a near 75% turnout, a whopping 95% of Crimean voters have approved secession from Ukraine to join Russia.
• French billionaire Vincent Bollore is putting his money where his mouth is on green transportation, starting an electric car sharing service in London.
• Toyota management has locked out unionized workers in Bengaluru, India over wage disputes and threats to plant management.
• European Union lawmakers have come to an agreement that smartphone manufacturers will have to come up with a universal mobile charger standard by 2016.

Last Call For Going It Alone

Steve M on the hand-wringing in the Village Media about Millennials not trusting institutions:

Under Obama, millennials can't get jobs and can't pay off student loans, and their parents have been struggling financially for years -- but millennials didn't exactly see their elders thrive even during the supposedly better days of the Bush presidency, when the only way a non-rich person could get an extra sliver of the pie was by tapping into what turned out to be hyperinflated home equity. America's military might was more or less useless under Bush, and it's not much use under Obama. Churches, then and now, were overpoliticized and scandal-plagued. D.C. has been reduced to permanent dysfunction by a cabal of nihilists -- we know they're Republicans, though most millennials probably assume, because they're constantly told this, that "both sides do it."

Maybe millennials think institutions suck because institutions suck.

Guy has a point.  Hell, Chris Hayes wrote an entire book about said point.

Ross Douthat however just thinks we're leaving the door open to fascism because, hey, the Internet.

You don’t have to see a fascist or Communist revival on the horizon (I certainly don’t) to see this argument’s potential relevance for our apparently individualistic future. You only have to look at the place where millennials — and indeed, most of us — are clearly seeking new forms of community today.

That place is the online realm, which offers a fascinating variation on Nisbet’s theme. Like modernity writ large, it promises emancipation and offers new forms of community that transcend the particular and local. But it requires a price, in terms of privacy surrendered, that past tyrannies could have only dreamed of exacting from their subjects.

This surrender could prove to be benign. But it’s still noteworthy that today’s vaguely totalitarian arguments don’t usually come from political demagogues. They come from enthusiasts for the online Panopticon, the uploaded world where everyone will be transparent to everyone else.

That kind of future is far from inevitable. But as Nisbet would argue, and as the rising generation of Americans may yet need to learn, it probably cannot be successfully resisted by individualism alone.

To recap, the Glibertarian is worried that without enough religion and/or government regulation in our lives(!), we'll all become victims of digital totalitarianism because when given the freedom to operate away from the failed institutions that bind us, human nature isn't all about the online utopia, but Orwellian control.  It's almost like we need a certain amount of baseline societal norms in order to operate without becoming alpha male dickweeds.  Call them "rules of the road" even.

Mull on that point for a second.

Well If Karl Rove Thinks So...

Good news, Democrats!  Looks like we might be off the hook in November, because Karl Rove sees the GOP taking back the Senate, and Karl Rove hasn't been right about anything in 6 years.

"With 14 seats in play on the Democratic side and a couple of seats in play potentially on the Republican side, I think it's highly likely that Republicans pick up the majority,” he said on "Fox News Sunday."

Rove identified seven potential pickup opportunities for the GOP in West Virginia, South Dakota and Montana, where Democratic senators are retiring, and in Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana and North Carolina, where Democratic incumbents face serious challenges. The Republicans need a net gain of six seats to retake the Senate.

He dismissed worries that tea party candidates might cost the GOP winnable races, as in 2012, when Republican Senate hopeful Todd Akin's numbers tanked after he said victims of "legitimate rape" rarely become pregnant.

"I think it's going very well. First of all, it's not about beating the tea party candidate, it's about keeping us from having Todd Akins," Rove said, adding, "So we've got to avoid situations like that, and if you take a look at the Republican candidates ... we have a very good cast of characters that are running."

Fourteen Democratic seats aren't "in play" first of all.  The number is really the seven he listed there, and Republicans would have to effectively run the table.  Remember, in 2012 the Democrats were "doomed to lose the Senate" and ended up gaining seats because of how awful their individual Tea Party candidates were.

The simple fact of the matter is if Democrats show up to the polls, we win.  If we stay home like in 2010, the Republicans will.  Period.  Senate races are 100% about turnout.

The Huckster Never Changes

Headlines like "Huckabee: Abortion is a winning issue for GOP" will never change, folks.  Neither will the GOP.

Former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee spoke out against abortion on Wednesday, but he said the issue can help Republicans win elections.

“If we teach the generation coming after us that it’s okay to terminate a human life because it represents a financial hardship or social disruption, what are we telling them?” Huckabee said at a gala put on by Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, according to Politico. Huckabee also reportedly suggested that the same justification that is used to terminate a pregnancy could be applied to end-of-life decisions about the elderly.

Liberal abortionists are going to Death Panel(tm) Grandma!  We got 2014 sewn up for sure!

Huckabee – who has hinted that he may run for president in 2016 and who has shown some promise in polls – urged Republicans to focus on abortion during the midterm elections.

“This is not an issue that we should abandon,” he said, according to the Hill, adding that opposing abortion is a way the GOP can “win elections.”

Actually, the only way the GOP wins elections is if Democrats don't show up to the polls.  But the GOP has that covered, too by going after voting laws in 2012 swing states:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) wants a voter ID law in place in his state “before the next election,” even if his state’s supreme court strikes down the specific voter ID law that he signed in 2011. Walker will also be a candidate for reelection in the next election, so he has a personal stake in whether such a law is in place this November. In 2012, numbers guru Nate Silver estimated that a strict voter ID law could “reduce President Obama’s margin against Mitt Romney by a net of 1.2 percentage points.”

Do that in enough swing states, and suddenly they aren't swing states anymore, but red ones.

Last Call For The Fickle Finger Of Fate

Dana Milbank is convinced that either Millennials are suckers for counting on President Obama, or that President Obama is a sucker for counting on Millennials, he's not quite sure which.

What went wrong? The president and his aides failed to keep his youth movement engaged. But part of the problem also is the inability of the millennial generation to remain attached to a cause. The generation that brought Obama to power is connected online but has no loyalty to institutions — including, it turns out, the Obama White House.

Either way, when everything goes to hell in November, Milbank's got his bases covered on blame.  It's those damn kids, but also That Damn President.

Young voters, after playing a big role in the campaign, became little more than an e-mail list for the White House and Obama’s Organizing for Action group. Then came health-care reform. The millennials, very liberal overall, saw Obama’s plan as too timid; they were disillusioned by his failure to fight for the “public option” of government-run health plans.

This cost Obama the young activists he would need to rally enrollment in Obamacare. Polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that, while the generation looks more favorably on big-government solutions than do older generations, the millennials disapprove of Obamacare in the same proportion as the rest of the population.

Even if Obama had worked harder to keep his youth army engaged, it’s not entirely clear that the effort would have succeeded. As a group, the generation’s attachment is fickle.

We didn't get the public option, so apparently the Millennials have all turned into libertarian dudebros who will back the GOP now.  If they even vote at all, because CRUSHING ENNUI.

The millennials are at least as passionate as earlier generations and more entrepreneurial, but they lack ties to institutions — unions, political parties, churches — because of their online existence. “The organizational structure they’re growing up in is so weak,” Tufts’ Levine tells me. As a result, “there aren’t very many durable institutions that can capitalize on their enthusiasm. They’re being asked to do it themselves, online, and it’s a tall order.”

It's the internet's fault, really.

Running Terrified

The failure earlier this month of Senate Democrats to find even 50 votes for Debo Adegbile's nomination as the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division is apparently only the beginning of their cowardice.  Not only does defending someone accused of murder make you ineligible to serve in the DoJ, now being a doctor with the notion that guns may present a public health risk makes you history's greatest monster, unfit for Surgeon General.

Facing a possible defeat in the Senate, the White House is considering delaying a vote on President Obama’s choice for surgeon general or withdrawing the nomination altogether, an acknowledgment of its fraying relationship with Senate Democrats.

The nominee, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, an internist and political ally of the president’s, has come under criticism from the National Rifle Association, and opposition from the gun-rights group has grown so intense that it has placed Democrats from conservative states, several of whom are up for re-election this year, in a difficult spot.

Senate aides said Friday that as many as 10 Democrats are believed to be considering a vote against Dr. Murthy, who has voiced support for various gun control measures like an assault weapons ban, mandatory safety training and ammunition sales limits.

Nice to know the National Rifle Association runs the Democrats in the Senate and not the vast majority of Americans who support gun control measures who voted for the Democrats in the first place.

Your Night Of Moosed Have TV

In the age of streaming TV, why be a grifter with your own cable TV show, when you can get your own cable TV network?

Fox News contributor and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will be launching her own digital video channel, tentatively called “Rogue TV,” a source familiar with the project told Capital.

The channel will be available through Tapp, the digital video service founded by former CNN chief Jon Klein and former NBC Universal entertainment executive Jeff Gaspin. Subscriptions will cost $10 per month.

Rogue is expected to launch in April or May, and it would be one of the first of the digital channels offered by Tapp.

Palin’s channel will feature video commentaries from the former Republican vice-presidential candidate, discussing current events and political issues.

“Think of it as a video version of her Facebook page,” the source said.

That said, Rogue is also expected to feature footage of Palin and her family in Alaska, much as the 2010 TLC reality series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” did. (TLC’s parent company, Discovery Communications, is an investor in Tapp.)

It will also have advice and guidance from Palin, such as tips for parents and recipes. There are also tentative plans to have subscribers engage in regular video chats with Palin.

All Palin, all day, for just $10 a month.  Why depend on news outlets with journalistic integrity or cable channels with agendas, when you can just stream your own permanent word salad infomercial 24/7?  It's a dream come true for her.  It's the 700 Club for people who own Mossy Oak and Carhartt.  She's going to make millions.

Which of course is the point.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• US officials are warning Americans in Russia to beware of possible violence ahead of Sunday's Crimea referendum to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.
• Tennessee becomes the latest state ordered by a federal judge to recognize out-of-state same-sex marriages under the Fifth Amendment's equal protection clause.
• Analysis of satellite information shows that missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 may have been hijacked thousands of miles off course and ran out of fuel over the Indian Ocean.
• The Obama administration says the United States will hand over control of internet naming domains to a non-governmental organization in 2015.
• Microsoft's Xbox One matched Sony's PlayStation 4 in sales for the first time in February, but still remains well behind Sony's console in US sales.

Last Call For Rainbow-Colored Glasses (Of Beer)

Sam Adams Brewery is making a hell of a statement by pulling out of Boston's Southie St. Patty's Day parade over LGBTQ equality issues:

We have been participating in the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade for nearly a decade and have also supported the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast year after year. We’ve done so because of the rich history of the event and to support veterans who have done so much for this country.

We were hopeful that both sides of this issue would be able to come to an agreement that would allow everyone, regardless of orientation, to participate in the parade. But given the current status of the negotiations, we realize this may not be possible.

We share these sentiments with Mayor Walsh, Congressman Lynch and others and therefore we will not participate in this year’s parade. We will continue to support Senator Linda Dorcena Forry and her St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. We wish her all the best in her historic stewardship of this tradition.

The collapse in negotiations between advocacy group MassEquality and parade sponsor Allied War Veterans Council over allowing gay veterans to march in the parade has now triggered Sam Adams pulling out.  For Boston (and especially Southie) this is a hell of a big deal.

“Mayor Walsh obviously is disappointed that these two parties could not come to an agreement for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day parade,’’ said Lisa Pollack, communications chief for Walsh. He “will always hold out hope that we can find a way for everybody to be included.”

Parade organizer Philip J. Wuschke Jr. did not return calls for comments Wednesday. Lynch also could not be reached for comment. An aide to Lynch did not respond to questions about whether the congressman would march Sunday and continued to strike a hopeful tone.

“Talks regarding the parade are ongoing,” Meghan Aldridge, Lynch’s press secretary, said. “Congressman Lynch remains hopeful that a solution agreeable to all parties involved can be reached in time for Sunday’s parade.”

There's only 36 hours or so left at this point before the parade, and it's looking like Boston's most famous brew isn't going to be at Boston's most famous yearly event.  Looks like I underestimated Mayor Walsh.

Besides, it's 2014.  Get over it, Southie.

Flights Of Fancy

The mystery of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is now getting very, very weird.

Military radar data suggests a Malaysia Airlines jetliner missing for nearly a week was deliberately flown hundreds of miles off course, heightening suspicions of foul play among investigators, sources told Reuters on Friday.

Analysis of the Malaysia data suggests the plane, with 239 people on board, diverted from its intended northeast route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and flew west instead, using airline flight corridors normally employed for routes to the Middle East and Europe, said sources familiar with investigations into the Boeing 777's disappearance.

Two sources said an unidentified aircraft that investigators believe was Flight MH370 was following a route between navigational waypoints when it was last plotted on military radar off the country's northwest coast.

This indicates that it was either being flown by the pilots or someone with knowledge of those waypoints, the sources said.

The last plot on the military radar's tracking suggested the plane was flying toward India's Andaman Islands, a chain of isles between the Andaman Sea and the Bay of Bengal, they said.

Waypoints are geographic locations, worked out by calculating longitude and latitude, that help pilots navigate along established air corridors.

A third source familiar with the investigation said inquiries were focusing increasingly on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight.

People just don't hijack planes anymore, but that appears to be what has happened.  Where the plane was flown to and why, we don't know.  But nobody seems to know where the flight went to, whether it landed safely or if it crashed, or what.  If it went way off course and then crashed without giving off any transponder signal, planet Earth is a pretty big place to lose something.

We'll see.

Vox In A Box

Ezra Klein's new media venture, Vox.com, is getting off the ground soon and he's managed to hire a number of talented people, including Matthew Yglesias, Sarah Kliff, and more.  Unfortunately, as the American Prospect's Gabe Arana points out, his newest hire on the LGBTQ beat is Brandon Ambrosino, arguably one of the worst self-hating gay hacks out there.

The problem with hiring Ambrosino is not that Klein isn't entitled to bring someone on board whose views the gay community finds distasteful. It's that Ambrosino's quick rise to notoriety—and now, his ticket aboard the profession’s hottest new upstart—is an object lesson in the way new media equates click-bait contrarianism with serious thought and gives hacks a platform in the name of ideological balance.

A 23-year-old graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University...

Well that right there explains everything you need to know about Ambrosino, yes?

Ambrosino has earned his name as a journalist—and his coveted spot at Vox Media—by being the gay writer who comes to the defense of gay-rights antagonists. He most recently stirred up a storm by proclaiming, at The New Republic, that homosexuality is a choice and that he has chosen to be gay. Time magazine gave him space to call gays the real bigots for piling on Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson, who had equated homosexuality with bestiality and said gays weren't going to heaven (still, Ambrosino says he wouldn't mind going fishing with the guy). At The Atlantic, Ambrosino threw his hat in the ring for the founder of his alma mater, who blamed September 11 on gays and accused them of trying to "recruit" children; Ambrosino says liberals like Bill Maher have slandered the Moral Majority founder and says, in Falwell's defense, that the guy with the "big fat smile" probably wouldn't have had him stoned to death if he'd known about Ambrosino's sexuality. Ambrosino also defends the views of ex-gay therapists and same-sex marriage opponents, whom he says aren't motivated by bigotry. In The Baltimore Sun, Ambrosino went after the guys in "butt-less chaps and high-heels" at gay-pride marches who earn society's prejudice with their "hypersexual antics": “I think there is a subversive power in living out my gay life in a way that seeks to emphasize the common ground I share with straight communities,” he wrote. “I don't want to participate in an event that seeks to highlight how countercultural I am.” Unsurprisingly, the religious right has been thrilled to find an acolyte among the fallen.

Now, Ambrosino is a known quantity, and Vox knew exactly what they were doing when they hired him.  In Ezra Klein's defense, why should Slate, Salon, BuzzFeed, Politico and HuffPo make all the money off of regularly trolling liberals?  The guy apparently understands exactly how the game works, guys.

In other words, this is how Ezra rolls.  Our"new" liberal media is just as bad as the current bunch of clowns.

StupidiNews!

• A new Senate deal has enough Republican support to restore extended unemployment benefits to millions, but it may already be doomed in the House.
• Colorado law enforcement officials have launched a new campaign to stop people from driving while under the effects of newly legalized marijuana.
• Bank of America is back before a federal judge as the Department of Justice wants the company to pay $2.1 billion in penalties stemming from its Countrywide mortgage unit.
• The Obama administration has lifted the government contracting ban on energy giant BP enforced in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Food supplement maker Soylent is delaying shipments of its product due to shortages in filling the firm's protein needs, but the product should be on its way in April.