StupidiNews!

• A 33-minute blackout in the Superdome, a record 109-yard touchdown return, and a Destiny's Child reunion highlighted a Baltimore Ravens win over the San Francisco 49ers, 34-31 in Super Bowl XLVII.
• In an interview aired by CBS before the game, President Obama confirmed that he would like to see the Boy Scouts of America end its ban on gays in the organization.
• Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villiaragosa is denying rumors he has been tapped as President Obama's new Transportation Secretary, saying he will stay on as mayor through his term ending June 30.
• California heiress Lynsi Torres is now America's youngest female billionaire, having inherited sole ownership of the west coast's In-N-Out Burger chain on her recent 30th birthday.
• After 20 years, Sony will make the last Minidisc in March, putting an end to the audio format that found a niche among journalists and music fans alike.

Last Call

My junior senator, folks.  Making hard-working Kentuckians proud by ripping them off.  Via The Political Carnival:

Sen. Rand Paul this week introduced the National Right to Work Act, S. 204, which seeks to preserve and protect the free choice of individual employees to form, join, or assist labor organizations, or to refrain from such activities.

“Every American worker deserves the right to freedom of association – and I am concerned that the 26 states that allow forced union membership and dues infringes on these workers’ rights,” Sen. Paul said. “Right to work laws ensure that all Americans are given the choice to refrain from joining or paying dues to a union as a condition for employment. Nearly 80 percent of all Americans support the principles and so I have introduced a national Right to Work Act that will require all states to give their workers the freedom to choose.”

If you think the real problem with unemployment is that union workers are making too much money, and that there needs to be a national bill to destroy unions across the country, then Rand Paul's the senator for you, right?

This is exactly the opposite to everything we are taught to believe in the democratic process.  We can have all the debate we want but in the end, the majority rules.  Now they are taking the minority and placing them ahead of the majority.

This coming from the Senate GOP in the minority, always using the filibuster to prevent majority rule.   Hysterical.

A Bunch Of Split Ends

The Great Conserva-schism in the GOP continues as the money men in the corporate wing of the party have figured out that the teabagger wing cost them the Senate in 2012 (not to mention the presidential primary that pushed Mitt Romney so far to the right he lost.)  Now the billionaires are fighting back against the notion that the GOP doesn't have to moderate any of its positions, and they're planning on dragging the teabaggers kicking and screaming towards irrelevance with the mother of all super-PACs.

The biggest donors in the Republican Party are financing a new group to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s efforts to win control of the Senate.

The group, the Conservative Victory Project, is intended to counter other organizations that have helped defeat establishment Republican candidates over the last two election cycles. It is the most robust attempt yet by Republicans to impose a new sense of discipline on the party, particularly in primary races. 

“There is a broad concern about having blown a significant number of races because the wrong candidates were selected,” said Steven J. Law, the president of American Crossroads, the “super PAC” creating the new project. “We don’t view ourselves as being in the incumbent protection business, but we want to pick the most conservative candidate who can win.” 

The effort would put a new twist on the Republican-vs.-Republican warfare that has consumed the party’s primary races in recent years. In effect, the establishment is taking steps to fight back against Tea Party groups and other conservative organizations that have wielded significant influence in backing candidates who ultimately lost seats to Democrats in the general election. 

The GOP money guys figured they had bought the Senate fair and square thanks to Citizens United, and they only lost because they ran across candidates so awful, not even the billions they raised could get them the win.  The Democrats also had plenty of ammunition to make their big money count, too -- enough to actually gain seats in a Senate they should have lost.

But the race for the Senate in 2014 is already underway, and this time the money guys aren't going to let the Tea Party pick the candidates.  Tom Harkin's seat in Iowa presents the first opportunity for the CVP to play the "win at all costs" game:

As Republicans rebuild from losing the White House race and seats in the House and Senate last year, party leaders and strategists are placing a heightened focus on taking control of the Senate next year. Republicans must pick up six seats to win a majority. 

Representative Steve King, a six-term Iowa Republican, could be among the earliest targets of the Conservative Victory Project. He said he had not decided whether he would run for the Senate, but the leaders of the project in Washington are not waiting to try to steer him away from the race. 

The group’s plans, which were outlined for the first time last week in an interview with Mr. Law, call for hard-edge campaign tactics, including television advertising, against candidates whom party leaders see as unelectable and a drag on the efforts to win the Senate. Mr. Law cited Iowa as an example and said Republicans could no longer be squeamish about intervening in primary fights. 

“We’re concerned about Steve King’s Todd Akin problem,” Mr. Law said. “This is an example of candidate discipline and how it would play in a general election. All of the things he’s said are going to be hung around his neck.”

I've long been predicting open war in the GOP party structure.  The Conservative Victory Project versus the Tea Party means that war is happening in real time.  Pull up a chair, it's going to get interesting.

The Kroog Versus The Austerians

Paul Krugman once again brings up the fact that every country that has tried austerity to get out of the Great Recession is still back in recession six years later.

At one level this is kind of funny: austerity policies have been applied all across Europe, yet the best example of success the austerians can come up with is a nation with fewer inhabitants than, say, Brooklyn. Still, the International Monetary Fund recently issued two new reports on the Latvian economy, and they really help put this story into perspective. 

To be fair to the Latvians, they do have something to be proud of. After experiencing a Great-Depression-level slump, their economy has experienced two years of solid growth and falling unemployment. Despite that growth, however, they have only regained part of the lost ground in terms of either output or employment — and the unemployment rate is still 14 percent. If this is the austerians’ idea of an economic miracle, they truly are the children of a lesser god. 

Oh, and if we’re going to invoke the experience of small nations as evidence about what economic policies work, let’s not forget the true economic miracle that is Iceland — a nation that was at ground zero of the financial crisis, but which, thanks to its embrace of unorthodox policies, has almost fully recovered. 

So what do we learn from the rather pathetic search for austerity success stories? We learn that the doctrine that has dominated elite economic discourse for the past three years is wrong on all fronts. Not only have we been ruled by fear of nonexistent threats, we’ve been promised rewards that haven’t arrived and never will. It’s time to put the deficit obsession aside and get back to dealing with the real problem — namely, unacceptably high unemployment. 

But Republicans block every jobs bill that comes up, because we must cut everything or else we'll go bankrupt.  Republicans never cared about the bankrupt part, only the cutting.  That was the goal, to give an excuse to jettison the real "children of a lesser god"...those of us in the 99%.

Last Call

A very interesting story in Nebraska shaping up this weekend as the state's Republican lieutenant governor, Rick Sheehy, the hand-picked successor to the state's current GOP governor, has abruptly announced his resignation after the Omaha World-Herald discovered he was making inappropriate phone calls to women on his state cell phone.

Lt. Gov. Rick Sheehy resigned his post abruptly Saturday after questions were raised by The World-Herald about improper cell phone calls to four women, other than his wife, during the past four years.

An investigation by The World-Herald discovered that Sheehy made about 2,000 late-night telephone calls to the women on his state-issued cell phone, many of them long conversations held in the wee hours of the night.

READ: Lt. Gov. Rick Sheehy's resignation letter

Gov. Dave Heineman announced the resignation at a 10 a.m. press conference.

"I've got a knot in my stomach. I'm deeply disappointed. He's done a lot of good things for the state, but that trust was broken, and he's resigned," Heineman said.

He said he would begin the process of filling the post Monday.

Even better, Sheehy's wife Colleen filed for divorce in July after a 28-year marriage.   The Omaha World-Herald started asking questions, and bang: another GOP hypocrite gets taken down by his own stupidity.  But here's the thing: calling women who aren't your wife on the state cell phone isn't worth resigning over, and frankly being a Republican in Nebraska right now means he still would have won in 2014 after two years had passed on the story.

There's something more to this story.  Something big.  Stay tuned.

America's Newest Political Rorschach

The White House released this photo of the President shooting skeet at Camp David last year:

 

What you see here is of course, dependent on your point of view. Steve M:

I don't hunt. Why? Because I grew up in a large city (Boston) and live in another large city (New York). Barack Obama grew up mostly in Honolulu. He's lived since then in places such as New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Of course he doesn't spend a lot of time shooting.

Gun lovers want us to understand and respect their culture. Hey, why don't you guys try understanding and respecting ours? If you say we shouldn't have contempt for your enjoyment of hunting and target shooting, well, fine, I accept that -- but you need to drop the contempt for those of us who didn't grow up with those recreations, and never developed a fondness for them. It just wasn't part of our culture, and that's OK.

The contempt isn't for non-gun culture.  It's for this President specifically.  There is nothing this President could do to convince tens of millions of Americans that this picture is real, which is why the White House did this.  They are trolling the racist haters, they are trolling the Village, and I for one can't stop laughing at how utterly stupid both groups are.

What really, really, REALLY pisses them off is the fact this President outsmarted them yet again.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• This Groundhog's Day, Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog has not seen his shadow, predicting an early spring.
• Iranian state television has unveiled the country's newest jet fighter, the F-313, on the 34th anniversary of the 1979 revolution.
• President Obama awarded 23 scientists medals at a White House ceremony on Friday, honoring a good year for US researchers.
• The Dow Jones closed above the 14,000 mark for the first time in five years on better than expected jobs news.
• Twitter caught a massive hacking attempt that affected nearly a quarter of a million accounts, calling the attack "sophisticated".

Last Call

Republicans say they will indefinitely block Rob Cordray and any nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau until the President agrees to strip the agency of any actual oversight powers, mainly because consumers don't matter to Republicans, only banks do.

Silly consumers.  Adam Serwer:

Senate Republicans want three big changes before they'll stop blocking Cordray. First, they want the CPFB to be by Congress rather than the Federal Reserve. Subjecting the bureau to the congressional appropriations process would compromise its political independence. Second, Republicans want the range of financial institutions the bureau has authority to regulate narrowed. This would leave unsupervised some of the problematic institutions the bureau was created to regulate. Finally, the GOP is demanding that other bank regulators—the same ones who failed to prevent the 2008 financial meltdown—be allowed to chaperone the CFPB by "verifying" that its rules "would not harm the safety and soundness of banks." This would let regulators who turned a blind eye to exploitative practices in the past because they were profitable tell the CFPB what to do—and the more different regulators have to approve of a rule, the more convoluted and less effective it is likely to be.

Blocking Cordray could leave the CPFB without most of its powers to regulate the very financial institutions whose practices helped lead the country into near-economic collapse in 2008. That's just how Republicans want it. Having failed to prevent the financial regulation law from being passed, they are now seeking to nullify it through procedural extortion. 

Either way, the GOP figures, the agency is effectively shut down until Republicans can kill it.   They don't want anyone protecting the people from the banks, they want the banks protected from the people.

But there's no difference between the parties, right?

Turkey Embassy Attack Called "Act Of Terror"

Details are still coming in, but preliminary information indicates a suicide bomber and a Turkish security guard killed in a blast at the US embassy in Ankara.

Tension is high in Turkey after a suicide bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara as officials identified the attacker as a member of a radical leftist group.

The blast killed a Turkish security guard, authorities say. The bomber died.

Istanbul police identified the bomber as Ecevit Shanli, a member of DHKP-C, a Marxist Leninist terror group.

There are conflicting accounts concerning how many were wounded.

Ankara police and health officials said two were injured, while Ankara Gov. Aladdin Yuksel said one person was hurt.

A senior U.S. official said no Americans were wounded.

The "terrorist blast" occurred at 1:13 p.m. at a checkpoint on the perimeter of the embassy, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

"We are working closely with the Turkish national police to make a full assessment of the damage and the casualties, and to begin an investigation," she said.

Unlike in Benghazi, the Turkish government is fully invested in getting to the bottom of this and assisting US investigators.  I'm thinking the DHKP-C just moved up several places on the "Going to get some drones in your errywhere" list, too.

More on this as it comes in.

The Paranoid, Without Style

Probably won't surprise you to learn that the National Rifle Association has an enemies list.  It will probably be even less of a surprise to you that the list consists of basically everyone who's not the NRA. McAllister at Addicting Info parses the voluminous tome:

A couple of things become apparent while reviewing the NRA list. First, they have no concept of data record formatting. Second, at least some of the folks on the NRA list are dead – which rings familiar to the persistent rumors that many of the NRA “Life” Members are dead as well. Third, unlike Nixon, the NRA didn’t list the politicians who support gun regulations, nor are any of the new media sites – like we here at Addicting Info or Occupy the NRA on the list.

Back to the list. 24 major medical associations, from the AMA to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons populate the list of NRA enemies. And so are the American Bar Association, National Education Association, the Catholic Conference, United Church of Christ, United Methodist Church and the American Jewish Conference. From the world of sports are the Kansas City Chiefs, Kansas City Royals and the St. Louis Rams.

Hollywood is represented by a wide variety of actors…from TV’s Barney Miller – Hal Linden to Rambo – Sylvester Stallone to NCIS’ Mark Harmon to George Clooney, Matt Damon, Kevin Bacon, MacGyver’s Richard Dean Anderson. Also on the list, Sigourney Weaver, Oprah Winfrey, Shania Twain, Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand – the only person to be on both Nixon and the NRA’s lists.

Former politicians Jimmy Carter, Ed Koch and C. Everett Coop are also listed along with political powerhouse, the AARP, 32 Million strong.

It might be easier to write who is NOT on the list.

And if you want to know how and why the NRA will survive this, they'll brutally attack everyone on this list as gun grabbers who support fascist Obama, so you'd better back the NRA or join the list as a bad guy.  About half of America is willing to do that still, because the NRA is still viewed as more socially acceptable than NAMBLA or the KKK.

Until that changes, gun control laws in Congress will not pass.  Period.  Not even the background check stuff.

StupidiNews!

• Mexican officials say at least 25 are dead and more than 100 injured after an explosion at the corporate headquarters of state oil company Pemex in Mexico City.
• Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel faces an uncertain vote after being angrily grilled by several of his former GOP colleagues at his Senate confirmation hearing.
• The judge in the Jerry Sandusky trial in Pennsylvania has denied a request for a new trial, rejecting the defense's logic that Sandusky was railroaded by a speedy trial.
• Dutch mortgage lender SNS has been nationalized as the country's fourth largest bank has been taken over by the government after massive real estate losses.
• New proposed EU regulations on data protection and intellectual copyrights could "spark a trade war" with US tech firms.

Last Call

And now the Syrian/Israeli dustup is getting a nasty response.

Syria warned on Thursday of a possible "surprise" response to Israel's attack on its territory and Russia condemned the air strike as an unprovoked violation of international law.

Damascus could take "a surprise decision to respond to the aggression of the Israeli warplanes", Syrian ambassador to Lebanon Ali Abdul-Karim Ali said a day after Israel struck against Syria.

"Syria is engaged in defending its sovereignty and its land," Ali told a website of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Syria and Israel have fought several wars and in 2007 Israeli jets bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear site, without a military response from Damascus.

Diplomats, Syrian rebels and regional security sources said on Wednesday that Israeli jets had bombed a convoy near the Lebanese border, apparently hitting weapons destined for Hezbollah. Syria denied the reports, saying the target had been a military research center northwest of Damascus.

Hezbollah, which has supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as he battles an armed uprising in which 60,000 people have been killed, said Israel was trying to thwart Arab military power and vowed to stand by its ally.

It's not much of a surprise if you announce it beforehand, guys.   Still, with Russia now involved in this mess, Israel is not exactly helping things.  Odds really are pretty good that the Syrian convoy was going to Hezbollah, but jumping borders in order to bomb it still rather counts as a belligerent act, even in the era of drones in my everywhere.

At this point getting a Secretary of Defense confirmed to help America formulate options with this festering pile of crap now on SecState Kerry's plate would be a good idea, yes?

Ironic Goatees For Everybody

Observation:  If you want to know what Nate Silver would be like if he decided to use his powers for “soft jazz glibertarian concern trolling of liberals” instead of for good, then the Freakonomics franchise is about as close as you can get.   It’s what happens when a Village Centrist and a Chicago school social economist team up for maximum totebagger nonsense.

Every single story there is “Here’s this liberal policy that you probably think is a no brainer.  Now here’s our cherry-picked cost/benefit analysis that shows there’s really a massive hidden socioeconomic price of that policy because the evil and stupid federal government gets involved at this point here.  It’s okay however, because you’re subconsciously doing the counter-intuitive opposite of this policy on your own personal microeconomic scale.  And since so is everybody else, that’s why the policy seems to ‘work’ at the macro level.  You’re just a delusional hypocrite, that’s all.  Still, enjoy the guilt while you ruminate on the fact that government can never, ever work.”

And if the story isn’t about a liberal policy screwed up by the gubment, it’s “here’s this conservative free-market policy that you would think doesn’t work but…” and then you have to punch somebody.  Luckily, hanging around this place long enough has allowed me to recognize the standard McBargle/Reasonoid logic these guys employ and go “But your entire premise is self-serving bullshit that only works as the very definition of confirmation bias.  Go stick your head in a goat orifice.  Thanks.”

Makes me want to set a Thermomix on fire.

Rand Paul: Gordian Knothead

My junior senator's logic causes me actual, physical pain at times.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who describes himself as a libertarian, said Wednesday that he opposed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) because it could unintentionally result in same-sex marriage becoming legal.

“I believe in traditional marriage,” he said during an interview with Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association. “I really don’t understand any other kind of marriage. Between a man and a woman is what I believe in, and I just don’t think it is good for us to change the definition of that.”

Paul noted that his state, Kentucky, had approved a constitutional amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage. He said he was “not sure” about DOMA, but warned the federal law could result in conservatives losing “the battle for the whole country.”

Paul said marriage rights should be decided state-by-state rather than nationally so that “urban centers” couldn’t dictate the law.

To recap, Mr. Small Government here seems to think that it's not only good but completely necessary for the government to define what marriage is and then enforce it.   The guy is totally okay with legislating his beliefs on other people, but only at the state level, so that nobody in the federal government can tell him he's wrong to do so.  This makes him a "Libertarian".

It makes hm a moron, too.  Sadly, as I mentioned, it also makes him my representation in Washington DC.

This makes me sadder than you will ever, ever know.

StupidiNews!

• Former Nebraska Republicans Sen. Chuck Hagel will today face several of his former colleagues in a Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination for Pentagon head.
• The NY Times says it may have been the victim of Chinese military hackers after a profile story on the country's Premier Wen Jiabao and his large fortune.
• Israel is now involved in Syria's civil war after striking at a Syrian military convoy that Israel says was a weapons transfer bound for Hezbollah militants.
• As American farmers continue to automate and cut jobs, farm owners are seeing record profits in a weak economy.
• After two years European Union officials are scrapping a voluntary plan to stop "terrorist content" on the internet.