StupidiNews!

• Holland's Queen Beatrix has abdicated her throne as planned, leaving the Dutch monarchy to her son Willem-Alexander on the Queen's Day holiday.
• Washington State lawmakers have approved a law to re-criminalize large-scale possession of marijuana.
• Senate sources say that the "Gang of 8" immigration bill would add unmanned surveillance drones to patrol remote areas of the US border.
• The Eurozone's official unemployment rate for March rose to a record 12.1% amid youth unemployment twice that amount.
• Microsoft's offerings for cloud-based products has topped $1 billion yearly under its Azure label, the company reports.

Last Call: Just The First

A couple of weeks ago I noted this article on the economics of coming out in a major professional team sport:

According to Bob Witeck, 61, a gay-marketing strategist and corporate consultant, the first openly gay team-sport athlete -- provided he’s a recognizable name -- would earn millions in endorsements and speaking engagements from companies seeking to capture more of a U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adult population whose annual buying power he pegs at almost $800 billion.

“We’ve passed the tipping point to where national advertisers are no longer afraid of the gay market,” said Mark Elderkin, chief executive officer of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Gay Ad Network. 

Well America, it took about two weeks, but we've got our first test of this theory:  12-year NBA veteran center Jason Collins (now a free agent), who comes out in a Sports Illustrated article this week.

I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay.

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, "I'm different." If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand.

My journey of self-discovery and self-acknowledgement began in my hometown of Los Angeles and has taken me through two state high school championships, the NCAA Final Four and the Elite Eight, and nine playoffs in 12 NBA seasons.

I've played for six pro teams and have appeared in two NBA Finals. Ever heard of a parlor game called Three Degrees of Jason Collins? If you're in the league, and I haven't been your teammate, I surely have been one of your teammates' teammates. Or one of your teammates' teammates' teammates.

Now I'm a free agent, literally and figuratively. I've reached that enviable state in life in which I can do pretty much what I want. And what I want is to continue to play basketball. I still love the game, and I still have something to offer. My coaches and teammates recognize that. At the same time, I want to be genuine and authentic and truthful. 

Good luck to you Jason.   Hopefully it'll open the floodgates.  The truth is a hell of a thing, folks.  Here's hoping that the rest of the NBA is as accepting.

Stopped Clock Is Right Alert For Johnny Volcano

Turns out Sen. John "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" McCain doesn't want to put troops in Syria after all.  Given his warmongering, that's an improvement.

An international coalition of troops should be ready to go into Syria to secure the country’s chemical weapons stockpiles, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday, warning that U.S. troops on the ground would only spark more Mideast anger.

But McCain said that putting troops in Syria is the “worst thing United States could do right now,” because the Syrian people are bitter and angry at the United States.

“I think that the American people are weary. They don’t want boots on the ground. I don’t want boots on the ground,” McCain said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Well, he's right, actually.  But, as always with the constantly dishonest and prevaricating McCain, there's always a catch.

But McCain urged the Obama administration to take several actions in Syria, such as arming rebel groups or establishing a safe zone, steps he and other GOP hawks have long pressed for.

Yeah, what does "establishing a safe zone" mean, and how do we do that without troops on the ground to enforce that zone?  Doug Mataconis responds:

What McCain doesn’t understand, or which he chooses to ignore, is that even the “limited” involvement that he’s in favor of poses the significant danger of sucking us further into the conflict in the future. In for a penny, in for a pound so to speak. Additionally,an “international coalition” is far harder to put together than McCain seems to think. Who is going to make up this coalition? The British? Somehow I don’t think the British public is going to want to bear that burden in the wake of their experiences in Iraq. The French? That poses the danger of reigniting passions from the days when France controlled what is now Syria and Lebanon after the post-World War I collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks? That poses the danger of igniting regional tensions, not to mention Kurdish resentment in the areas of Syria where they predominate. In the end, the U.S. would end up having to shoulder a large part of the burden of this “international coalition,” and the mission would be seen as predominantly an American initiative notwithstanding whatever “international” window dressing may be put upon it.

I'll go one step further.  Who's going to pay for this?  Deficit hawk Republicans who are screaming about "the debt crisis" every 35 seconds?  The ones who say we can't spend money for Sandy victims because we can't afford it, but can spend tens of billions, maybe hundreds of billions or more in a protracted Syria campaign?  And in the age of European Austerity, who in Europe has the appetite for war, either?

Here's the truth about Damascus:  there are zero good options.  Bashar al-Assad is by no means innocent in this vicious civil war, but he's also riding the runaway train that is the Syrian Army, and if he tries to rein them in, they'll end him.  Frankly, he's the only thing standing between the generals and a full-out military coup, and the junta would then go weapons free on everything moving.  He's inherited all the sins of his father Hafez, and the cost in blood to the Syrian people will skyrocket no matter what happens.

Getting rid of al-Assad won't stop the war, and if anything he's the plug in the dam bottling up a lake of blood.  If he goes, so does the region...and yet I don't see any way out for him at this point that doesn't end in his demise, Saddam-style.  He knows this, and I don't think he's too keen on his death. 

A lot of people are going to die in Syria if we get involved.  That's going to go up by an order of magnitude or so if we do.  Perhaps pressure on China and Russia to stop blocking the UN on Syria will finally pay off and something can be done through peacekeeping forces, but as Doug says anything the US puts together is a guaranteed hunk of sodium in the bathtub.

There may not be much of anything we can do other than try to contain the fallout.  The alternative is another ten-year war.  I'll pass. President Obama continues to play things cautiously, and given the last guy in the Oval Office, I'm glad for it.

The GOP Plan Is Backfiring

There's new evidence from the Associated Press today that GOP efforts to suppress the black vote backfired in 2012 and resulted in record turnout instead.

America’s blacks voted at a higher rate than other minority groups in 2012 and by most measures surpassed the white turnout for the first time, reflecting a deeply polarized presidential election in which blacks strongly supported Barack Obama while many whites stayed home.

Had people voted last November at the same rates they did in 2004, when black turnout was below its current historic levels, Republican Mitt Romney would have won narrowly, according to an analysis conducted for The Associated Press.

Census data and exit polling show that whites and blacks will remain the two largest racial groups of eligible voters for the next decade. Last year’s heavy black turnout came despite concerns about the effect of new voter-identification laws on minority voting, outweighed by the desire to re-elect the first black president.

That's why you're seeing Republicans scramble to kill early voting and institute increasingly strict voter ID hoops for voters to jump through.  When African-Americans vote, things change.

Romney would have erased Obama’s nearly 5 million-vote victory margin and narrowly won the popular vote if voters had turned out as they did in 2004, according to Frey’s analysis. Then, white turnout was slightly higher and black voting lower.

More significantly, the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida and Colorado would have tipped in favor of Romney, handing him the presidency if the outcome of other states remained the same.

Romney would have won all three of the traditional big three battleground states (OH, FL, PA) without the black vote (plus VA and CO).  4 of those 5 states, including the big three, are currently under Republican control.  No wonder the GOP is furiously trying to make voting more difficult.

What will happen in 2014 and 2016?  Time will tell.

StupidiNews!

• President Obama is expected today to announce the choice of Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx as Transportation Secretary nominee.
• Two Italian police officers were shot and wounded by a gunman near the swearing-in ceremony for the country's new government.
• Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer has suffered a broken shoulder in a bike accident over the weekend, he's expected to make a full recovery.
• With as much as $32 trillion in offshore accounts across the world, revenue-starved countries from the US to Russia are looking to crack down on wealthy tax cheats.
• The Pirate Party has won 5% of the vote and 3 seats in Iceland's parliament over the weekend, making it the most successful showing for the party worldwide.

Last Call: Stark Raving Sane

WIN THE MORNING is moving to a new phase of the austerity battle:  identifying the few Dems that think making 90% of America suffer at the hands of the 1% is a bad idea and publicly shaming them as the new lunatic "Tea Party" fringe of the Donks.

The two parties are miles apart on how to cut the deficit and national debt: Republicans want to slash spending even more. Democrats want to raise revenue.

And then there are the other Democrats — the ones who reject the entire premise of the current high-stakes fiscal fight. There’s no short-term deficit problem, they say, and there isn’t even an urgent debt crisis that requires immediate attention. This group could make it even harder for President Barack Obama to strike a grand bargain because they increasingly see no immediate need for either new spending cuts or significantly more revenue, both of which they say could further slow the economy.

These Democrats and their intellectual allies once occupied the political fringes, pushed aside by more moderate members who supported both immediate spending cuts and long-term entitlement reforms along with higher taxes.

Note the aspersions cast here.  There's a reason for that.

This intellectual shift away from the need for more immediate deficit reduction is likely to make this summer’s debt ceiling fight even tougher. Democrats are now increasingly likely to revolt against GOP demands, which could include a dollar of spending cuts for each dollar increase in the nation’s borrowing limit.

And it makes execution of a “grand bargain” on debt reduction — a pillar of Obama’s agenda and the subject of renewed talks between the White House and GOP senators — appear all but impossible. Because after all, if the deficit is already on the decline as a percentage of the economy and the debt is likely to remain stable for a decade, why would Democrats agree to fresh cuts to cherished social programs such as Social Security and Medicare, including the president’s proposal to reduce cost of living increases by using a different measure of inflation?

The second time in the article the notion of a Grand Bargain is shot down as "impossible" because Dems are likely to "revolt".  Such subtle language usually reserved for intractable cement-heads like Bachmann or Gohmert, now applied to Chris Van Hollen and the Dems.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say Politico was setting up the Democrats to be blamed for whatever debt crisis the Republicans will manufacture in the next few weeks.

Shocking, I know.

StupidiVid: Knocked 'Em Dead

President Obama at last night's White House Correspondents Dinner was a thing of beauty.




Enjoy. I certainly did.

What The Hell Happened To Yggy?

Pretty sure this is a sign that Matt Yglesias has been hanging out with beltway Cato Institute types just a bit too long.

It's very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where 87 people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.

I think that's wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it's entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

OK, sign number one you've been a Beltway econ blogger for too long is that you start assigning cost/benefit analysis to the lives of people in third world sweatshops.

Sign number two is choosing to defend the above post.

Here's what I did. I read a guy who pivoted from the tragedy to a call for the U.S. government or U.S. consumers to try to impose U.S. safety standards on all U.S.-supplying factories around the world. I did not have detailed information about the situation in Bangladesh, but I did—and continue to—have good reason to believe that this call was mistaken. So I wrote a post trying to outline why I think it's appropriate for rich countries to have more stringent standards than poor ones, and I absolutely stand by that conclusion.

But at a certain point as a writer, if you feel like everyone's misreading you, you have to consider the possibility that you've miswritten (thanks to Kendall Clark for making the point). I wanted to write about something I know about (the sound basis for globally differentiated regulatory regimes), and people wanted to read about the news (a scandalous breakdown of Bangladeshi law and basic concepts of informed consent), and mixing them up has done no good.

See, no.  As Lindsey Beyerstein points out, when Bangladesh tried to improve sweatshop conditions, it was US companies that killed the idea.

A group of Bangladeshi and international trade unionists put forward a bold plan to make the garment industry in Bangladesh safer. A surcharge of 10 cents per garment over 5 years would raise $600 million a year, enough to radically transform the infrastructure of the garment industry in Bangladesh. Walmart and the Gap rejected the proposal in 2011.

The Bangladeshi government is unlikely to fundamentally transform the garment industry on its own. Many members of parliament own factories themselves. Whatever the self interests of the elites, Yglesias is right that Bangladesh is a very poor country with many pressing problems. Massive public investments in policing the garment industry may not be a high priority.

The cost of retrofitting the garment industry must be born by the Western firms that flock to Bangladesh for the cheap labor and favorable trade policies. If safety investments were made across the board, then no company could derive a competitive advantage by scrimping on safety. The garments are being made for export, so expense will be passed on to the Western consumers, not Bangladeshis.

The greater point is US corporations are pocketing the difference.  Those profits come at a cost, in this case 300+ lives at last count.  Perhaps we should be talking about how complicit Walmart and the Gap are in these deaths, rather than grousing about globally differentiated regulatory regimes.

Just an idea.  My second piece of advice Matt is take a vacation outside DC.

Winning Rand Paul's Morning

Just a general hint, when a political website gives you a story about how the political perception of a political figure is being changed, politics is being played.

Almost from the moment Rand Paul was elected to the U.S. Senate, a team of advisers has been working over time to distance him from his father’s brand of unconventional politics — both in style and substance.

And they may be succeeding. GOP strategists say the junior senator from Kentucky has come a long way in shedding the eccentric label that dogged Ron Paul’s presidential efforts. Just last week, the younger man was dubbed one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people.

Rand Paul is different from Ron Paul.  More specifically, Rand Paul is a much better liar than his father, he's much more convincing, and he's better at prevaricating and hiding his loathing for Those People.  Paul the elder simply isn't very media savvy.  He can't help but come across as a lunatic because he is one.

But Rand is different in one key way:  he's learned how to disguise the philosophy he's literally named after by embracing the Tea Party as cover.  It's a good match, and Rand uses it well.  So it's no surprise then that Politico is writing a piece where conservative Republican pundits say Rand Paul isn't like his dad.  It's a smokescreen that benefits both groups heading into the austerity era of America.

Rand has tried to maintain this delicate balance by latching onto hot issues at strategic times — like drones, immigration and gun control — that at once thrust him onto the national stage and also appeal to libertarians. “He’s either remarkably lucky or he instinctively knows how to effectively drive a media story,” said Brian Jones, a Republican political and communications strategist.

I'm going to go with the latter.  Rand Paul is far more dangerous than Ron ever will be.  Just keep in mind beneath all the whitewashing is the same deeply mean philosophy of "I've got mine, screw you."

He's perfect for the "new" GOP, isn't he?  He's nothing more than the newest austerity salesman.

StupidiNews, Weekend Edition!

• NYPD officials say a piece of the landing gear from one of the hijacked 9/11 planes was found wedged between two buildings this week.
• A Colorado State Appeals Court ruled that employers can still fire employees for testing positive for marijuana use despite the state law legalizing its use.
• The Senate has delayed a final vote on legislation to force internet companies to collect state sales tax until May.
• Several arrests have been made in connection to the factory in Bangladesh that collapsed, killing more than 300 people.
• Google chairman Eric Schmidt admits that the Google Glass will require new rules of ethics and conduct to keep from being "inappropriate."

Last Call

What Ezra Klein thinks happened on sequestration:

In effect, what Democrats said Friday was that in any case where the political pain caused by sequestration becomes unbearable, they will agree to cancel that particular piece of the bill while leaving the rest of the law untouched. The result is that sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it’s even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affects the politically powerless will persist. It’s worth saying this clearly: The pain of sequestration will be concentrated on those who lack political power.

What actually happened, via Steve M:

Democrats didn't lose the sequester fight today. Democrats have spent the last few decades losing the sequester fight. They lost it long before it even began, because they've done absolutely no pushback against the notion that government budgets are riddled with colossal amounts of waste, the elimination of which is all we need to have balanced budgets and low taxes and a happy dance around the maypole to celebrate our widespread abundance.

Democrats have defended a few programs fairly vigorously at times -- Medicare, Social Security, public broadcasting -- and they've gotten Joe and Jane to accept the notion that the rich are undertaxed. But Democrats have let the "waste, fraud, and abuse" narrative become unquestioned gospel in the heartland. And so the public went into this sequester moment assuming that a few minor adjustments could get all the good stuff paid for.

Republicans understood that. Democrats didn't. So Democrats lost this fight before it began.

I'll go even further.

Please note that in the Senate, that not a single one of the supposed bastions of liberal purity who are far more progressive than President Obama bothered to lift a finger to stop the unanimous consent motion to agree to the FAA deal.  Not Bernie Sanders.  Not Elizabeth Warren.  Not Al Franken.  Not a single effing one of them showed even token resistance to this when they were given a chance to do so.  When one voice saying stop would have least registered the disappointment of the American people, "those who lack political power" as Ezra put it, the Democrats in the Senate did nothing.

Barack Obama did not pass the FAA measure in the Senate by unanimous consent.  Senate Democrats did.  They handed the President this crock of shit and said "You deal with this.  We abdicate any responsibility for it."

Keep that in mind.

If It Weren't For All You Damn Parasites...

...why, handsomely paid business pundits like FOX's Steve Tobak wouldn't be so upset.  You were never supposed to benefit from the easy credit subprime bubble that made the one percent even wealthier, you're supposed to eat your Austerity Sandwich and like it.

Want to know why the gap between the haves and the have-nots keeps growing? Because the haves live within their means. They don’t waste their hard-earned money on all the crap that Americans spend billions, maybe even trillions, on each year.

American consumers seem to have an almost insatiable appetite for just about any type of useless garbage that anyone decides to make in China for a few bucks and sell here for a few hundred. Which is probably why nobody has any savings and everyone complains they don’t have enough money to live on.

Actually, the problem is much worse than that. The all-consuming consumer is like a lifestyle choice that’s quickly becoming the norm. What’s it all for? Honestly, I really don’t know. All I do know is that it wastes far more than our money. It wastes our time. It wastes our lives. And it doesn’t make us happy. It makes us miserable.  

To recap, the economy built on buying useless consumer crap is now your fault, consumers.  When the one percenters buy cars and pet toys and smartphones, that's the economy.  When your ass buys it, it's waste and making you miserable.

Tobak then goes on to rage for another 1500 words at Costco, Whole Foods, and basketball courts that "nobody plays on", and of course ends with saying that really, if all you brokeass mofos would just embrace the fact that you're supposed to be poor like GOP Jesus intended you to be, while guys like Tobak continue to shill for the obscenely rich folks buying up Congress to have them continue to get rid of police, schools, firefighters, environmental protections and the oversight on exploding fertilizer plants, you'd be content with the crumbs that fall to the floor and you'd generally be much happier!

Here’s the thing. Life is for living, not owning or buying. Just ask any legitimate Buddhist monk and he’ll tell you: the less you have, the happier you’ll be. The simple things make you happy. Complicated things make you miserable. No kidding.

Says the former Silicon Valley exec.  Considering Americans have less than ever before, we should be thrilled, right?

The Immigrant Song (And Dance)

Sick of Sen. Marco Rubio getting all the attention, House Republicans have decided that it's time to get started in killing immigration reform by getting the ball rolling on a piecemeal approach that will make a planned comprehensive Senate bill nearly impossible.

Leaders of the House Judiciary Committee announced Thursday they would begin introducing a series of narrow immigration reform proposals, choosing not to wait for a bipartisan coalition to reach agreement on comprehensive legislation.

Saying the committee would examine immigration reform “in a step-by-step approach,” Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said Republicans would introduce the first two pieces of legislation this week. One bill would establish an agricultural guest-worker program, while the other would create an employment verification system for businesses.

The move is part of Goodlatte’s plan to take a deliberative approach to immigration as House Republican leaders work behind the scenes to build support among the party’s conservative membership for a comprehensive overhaul. With the House bipartisan group slow to complete its legislation, the lower chamber has taken a back seat to the Senate, where an 844-page proposal is now moving through committee. 

No, that bolded part is an outright lie.  House Republicans aren't working on this to build support, they're working on it to kill support.  If the only thing to come out of the House Judiciary is party-line GOP enforcement and guest worker stuff (without all that messy "compromise with Democrats over citizenship" part in the Senate) then House Republicans can say "Well, we passed immigration reform and the Democrats killed it.  Why does Barack Obama hate Latinos?"

And boom, immigration reform blows up by June, July at the latest. Just like gun control, Republicans expect minimal damage from scuttling legislation that would only help Barack Obama's coalition.

Keep an eye on Rep. Goodlatte's committee here, because this is how the GOP will sink immigration reform.

StupidiNews!

• It took less than a week of sequestration-fueled air traffic controller furloughs causing nationwide delays to get Congress to consider a bill to restore FAA funding.
• President Obama honored the dozen volunteer firefighters killed in the explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas last week at a memorial at Baylor University.
• Egyptian President Mohammend Morsi admits his biggest challenge is Egypt's "deep state", the bureaucracy left over from former President Hosni Mubarak's rule.
• Add Turkey to the list of countries looking to bust offshore tax evasion in the economic downturn, as the country is looking to collect $130 billion from tax cheats.
• Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk says traffic on LA's 405 freeway is so awful, he's willing to donate thousands of dollars of his own money to hire more workers to widen it.

Last Call: Not Blowing Up In Our Faces

Just another reminder while the Village is celebrating the opening of the Bush Presidentin' And Stuff Center in Texas this week and furiously rewriting the history on how we got into two brutal wars that cost us thousands of lives, millions of jobs and trillions of dollars and all, it's gratifying to see that the current President is trying to not get us into another decade-long Middle Eastern ground war.

The Obama administration shares the suspicions of several of its allies that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, a senior official said Wednesday, but it lacks the conclusive evidence that President Obama has said would lead to American intervention.

Faced with mounting pressure to act against Syria — including a new assertion by an Israeli military intelligence official on Tuesday that Syria repeatedly used chemical weapons — the United States is waiting for the results of an exhaustive analysis of soil, hair and other material to determine whether chemical warfare agents have been used. 

You mean we're actually waiting to gather evidence ourselves before making it up and plunging the country into combat?  How novel.

Even if that investigation proves the use of chemicals, this official said, the White House must determine who used them and whether they were used deliberately or accidentally. He did not offer a timetable for that process. 

“It is precisely because this is a red line that we have to establish with airtight certainty that this happened,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity so he could discuss internal deliberations. “The bar on the United States is higher than on anyone else, both because of our capabilities and because of our history in Iraq.” 

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, speaking in Cairo during a Middle East tour that has been dominated by worries about Syria, said, “Suspicions are one thing; evidence is another.” 

Amazing.  Here we have the Obama administration, including the Secretary of Defense, actively saying that after Iraq, we need to have a higher threshold of evidence before we commit to using our military.  The President will continue to fail to get any credit for that, Team Drones will just yell "Drones!" some more and the right will say that his lack of thirst for ground war means he's a wimp, unlike Bush who totally won Iraq by himself.

But here we are, not invading a country for once.  And silence from the usual suspects.  That is, unless we actually do find that evidence, in which case things get really interesting...

The U.S. intelligence community has uncovered strong evidence that chemical weapons have been used in Syria. Several blood samples, taken from multiple people, have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, an American intelligence source tells Danger Room. President Obama has long said that the use of such a weapon by the Assad regime would cross a “red line.” So now the question becomes: What will the White House do in response?

We're going to find out very soon.