Doing The Business Of The People, Sure

Apparently Republicans in Congress are going to put their "We Hate Obama" whining down on paper and censure the President, or something.

Republican House leaders have been mum on how they'll respond to Obama, and are waiting to gauge the level of enthusiasm for a censure vote on Tuesday during their first full conference meeting since the president announced his actions.

The "censure" strategy has much of the bombast of impeachment — a formal vehicle for Republicans to vent their disapproval of Obama, and throw red meat to the conservative base — without the risks of a politically nuclear confrontation that could backfire on them (not to mention, a guaranteed failure to obtain the two-thirds majority required in the Senate to remove the president from office). 

But there's one big problem with this plan: censuring the president might be unconstitutional. Or at least, any censure resolution that would meaningfully punish the president risks violating the Constitution, legal experts say. 

"If you can put together in the abstract a resolution that does nothing more than express disapproval, I think it's possible for Congress to do that. But you can't do more than that," said Michael J. Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, who has written a law review article exploring the issue. "I think any impact beyond expression would pose a constitutional problem for the attempted censure." 

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe said a congressional resolution to censure a president is not clearly authorized by the Constitution, "so a strict constitutionalist would say that it's an action beyond the authority of Congress."

The clown show continues and Republicans are stumbling all over themselves trying to make up special Double Secret Probation status for Obama because passing jobs legislation is not something the people they work for (massive multinational corporations and banks) want.

But that's what you voted for in 2014, folks.

StupidiNews!

• A rare bipartisan effort in Congress has produced House legislation that will ban Social Security benefits for suspected Nazi party members in the US.
• Both scientists and economists believe that overfishing, climate change, and ocean acidification could all but end commercial seafood fishing on Earth within 35 years.
• Ukraine's energy minister says an accident at the country's Zaporizhe Nuclear Plant has disrupted power across the southern half of the country.
• Swedish PM Stefan Loefven says he may resign this week after a government budget failed to win enough support due to being blocked by the country's growing anti-immigrant right.
• A major hack that wiped several computers' worth of data from Sony Pictures is being traced back to North Korea, as it has similar marks to a cyber attack on South Korea broadcasters from 2013.

Last Call For Gitmo The Hell Out Again

Hey look, Congress stabbed Obama in the back on closing Gitmo again. Quelle surprise!

President Obama’s 5-year-old campaign to close the federal prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, suffered a major setback as lawmakers finalizing the annual defense policy bill rejected steps toward shuttering the facility. 

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Monday that the final bill omits a provision giving the president the authority to transfer terror suspects to the United States if Congress signs off on a comprehensive plan to close the prison. 

Levin had pushed for the authority and hailed it in May as creating “a path to close Guantanamo.” With lawmakers rushing to complete the defense bill in this month’s lame-duck session, Levin said proponents were unable to prevail. 

“Our language … (on Guantanamo) … will not be in,” Levin said. 

The House and Senate are expected to vote and overwhelmingly approve the sweeping policy bill in the coming days, sending it to Obama.

Here “overwhelmingly” means “more than a two-thirds veto-proof margin”, which of course requires a significant number of congressional Democrats to screw Obama over on closing Gitmo and not just the GOP. So after this becomes law, and it will, even if Gitmo does close, the President can’t do anything with the detainees who are there as far as moving them to the US. They’d have to be housed in another foreign facility.

So no, Gitmo is not going to close, and every time President Obama tries to do something about it, Congress throws a veto-proof bill on his desk saying “The hell you ever will.”

If anybody has a viable plan as to how President Obama can actually close Gitmo in this environment, where Congress keeps moving the goalposts and we keep re-electing 95% of the Congress I’m all ears.

I Did It All For The Cookie

The Girl Scouts are going high-tech for cookies this year, and it's about time, too.  Mashable's Rex Santus:

Samoas and Thin Mints could be coming to your inbox soon. Girl Scouts of the USA announced Digital Cookie on Monday, a new digital platform that allows Girl Scouts to sell cookies online for the first time in the cookie program's 100-year history. 

It's a move to get girls interested in computers at a young age. Girl Scouts has always touted the cookie program as a way to lay the groundwork for good business and negotiation skills, and the digital program is modernizing those skills. 

Digital Cookie will not be an online store for cookies, however. As a precaution, Girl Scouts will initiate all sales. So you won't be able to order cookies online unless you're directly contacted by a Girl Scout. This does not change typical cookie season timelines, either. 

The program is supposed to help teach girls five skills: goal setting, decision making, money management, people skills and business ethics. As a bonus, it's also meant to give girls experience in using apps and online marketing. 

There are some concerns about girls' safety, and beyond the fact that only Girl Scouts can initiate sales, the organization is taking numerous precautions. No sensitive information about the girls is kept online, and most actions that happen on the digital interface must be parent-approved. Girl Scouts can reach out to people by email, and only that recipient can access the girl's profile. If the email is forwarded, the link to the Girl Scout's profile will be broken, a Girl Scouts representative told Mashable.

Teaching young women about computers and the internet, online safety, and awesome cookies?  I completely approve and wins all around.  The online safety component it vital, too and I'm very glad to see that's part of the program from the get-go.  I'm hoping Girl Scouts here in NKY get with the program, I'll clean you out of Thin Mints...

Some People Just Want To Watch The World Burn

There's hope for this month's UN climate summit in Lima, Peru after the landmark US-China climate deal President Obama announced last month, but the hard reality is that it's too late to prevent major climate problems in the decades ahead.  Right now, we're playing for humanity's very survival.

Recent reports show that there may be no way to prevent the planet’s temperature from rising, given the current level of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and the projected rate of emissions expected to continue before any new deal is carried out. 

That fact is driving the urgency of the Lima talks, which are expected to produce a draft document, to be made final over the next year and signed by world leaders in Paris in December 2015. 

While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable, scientists say that United Nations negotiators should not give up on their efforts to cut emissions. At stake now, they say, is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one. 

I don't think our grandchildren will forgive us on this one.  When they look back at the last 25 years, when the United States in particular failed on Kyoto because of the Republican party and those beholden to Big Oil, I think we're going to be looking at a generation that will absolutely call us cowards and idiots.  I have a new nephew these days, and when he grows up he's going to ask my brother why we didn't do anything about climate change when we could have.

And we won't have an excuse.

“I was encouraged by the U.S.-China agreement,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University and a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global body of scientists that produces regular reports on the state of climate science. But he expressed doubts that the threshold rise in global temperature could be prevented. 

“What’s already baked in are substantial changes to ecosystems, large-scale transformations,” Mr. Oppenheimer said. He cited losses of coral reef systems and ice sheets, and lowering crop yields. 

Still, absent a deal, “Things could get a lot worse,” Mr. Oppenheimer added. Beyond the 3.6 degree threshold, he said, the aggregate cost “to the global economy — rich countries as well as poor countries — rises rapidly.”

If we fail to do anything in 2015, then the clock will have basically run out.  We'll burn for it, and future generations will find a way to adapt and survive, but they will consider anyone born before the Millennium as a criminal, and rightfully so.   It's no longer a question of if millions will die to climate change in the future, but a question of how bad we're going to allow it to get.

StupidiNews!

• The suspect in a series of shootings that killed four people yesterday in West Virginia is dead, according to state and federal police.
• President Obama is requesting $263 million for a federal response to Ferguson, including body cameras for police departments, training, and reevaluation of surplus military gear.
• Russian state natural gas giant Gazprom has canceled a pipeline project into southern Europe, and instead will route gas into Turkey over EU objections.
• Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing officials to raise the city's minimum wage to $13 an hour as the city's small businesses say they will relocate out rather than pay up.
• Low-cost mobile provider Cricket will pay $2.1 million to settle allegations that it overcharged law enforcement for three years for wiretaps and pen registers.

Last Call For Rock Hard Truth

Your evening assignment is Frank Rich's interview with comedian Chris Rock, who lays out the issues of President Obama, race and America better than anyone else I've read in years.

On Obama:

What do you think of how he’s done? Here we are in the last two years of his presidency, and there’s a sense among his supporters of disappointment, that he’s disengaged. 

I’m trying to figure out the right analogy. Everybody wanted Michael Jordan, right? We got Shaq. That’s not a disappointment. You know what I mean? We got Charles Barkley. It’s still a Hall of Fame career. The president should be graded on jobs and peace, and the other stuff is debatable. Do more people have jobs, and is there more peace? I guess there’s a little more peace. Not as much peace as we’d like, but I mean, that’s kind of the gig. I don’t recall anybody leaving on an up. It’s just that kind of job. I mean, the liberals that are against him feel let down because he’s not Bush. And the thing about George Bush is that the kid revolutionized the presidency. How? He was the first president who only served the people who voted for him. He literally operated like a cable network. You know what I mean? 

He pandered to his target audience. 

He’s the first cable-television president, and the thing liberals don’t like about Obama is that he’s a network guy. He’s kind of Les Moonves.8 He’s trying to get everybody. And I think he’s figured out, and maybe a little late, that there’s some people he’s never going to get.

He goes on to say that Obama should have let the economy crash and then bring in his own people. Not sure I agree with that, but then again who would have really been hurt doing that?  Wall Street? Main Street was going to be screwed either way.

On race and Ferguson:

What would you do in Ferguson that a standard reporter wouldn’t? 

I’d do a special on race, but I’d have no black people. 

Well, that would be much more revealing. 

Yes, that would be an event. Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. 

Right. It’s ridiculous. 

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people. 

It’s about white people adjusting to a new reality? 

Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.

It's amazing stuff and long overdue being said.  Check it out.

A Total Loss

Instagoofball has some 2016 predictions, and nobody's surprised to find he's predicting a total wipeout of the Democratic party, as the conventional wisdom now is that Democrats have permanently lost the white vote forever.

Working class white people don't like President Obama much. According to the latest Gallup poll, only 27% approve of him. That's 21 percentage points down since he took office in 2009.

A standard talking-point is that these voters don't like Obama because they're racist. But that assumes that the key word in "white working class" is "white." In fact, the key word is "working." After all, Obama isn't any blacker than he was in 2009.

That's a pretty bizarre chunk of logic there: because fewer white voters like Obama now than six years ago, none of them can be racist, otherwise they would have hated Obama six years ago. Putting that idiocy aside for a moment the fact that the right wing noise machine has spent the last six years trying to convince white voters that Obama is the racist and that he will give taxpayer money to black voters as reparations and bribery, we arrive at this:

Can the Democrats solve this problem? Sure. These are all policies that could be changed, though a lot of party constituencies would oppose it. And Democrats might choose a working-class-friendly nominee, too, if they can find one. Of course, the current favorite is Hillary Clinton, who went to Wellesley and makes $300,000 for giving a speech, and the No. 2 prospect for 2016 is probably Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard Law professor who made $212,000 for representing an asbestos company. Portraying either of them as working class heroes will be an uphill battle.

And there's another problem: The white working class may have abandoned Obama, but the black and Hispanicworking classes have mostly stayed loyal to him. But what do Clinton or Warren have that might inspire similar loyalty? Come 2016, it may not just be the white part of the working class that the Democrats have trouble with.

Democrats not only cannot be populists because they make money (you know, like that Obama guy) but that racist, anti-white Democratic minority voters are going to stay home because the Dems will nominate a white person, so nobody on Earth will actually vote for them and Republicans will win easily because they are the party of the working class. 

That's actually kind of funny if you think about it.  Certainly the Democrats can lose.

But only if they try to be the Republicans.

 

Another Massive Cop Out

Remember folks, according to conservatives, it's on you the citizens to always obey police officers at all times, or your life is forfeit.  This applies to off-duty police officers too, right?

A Houston woman was shot in the head by an off-duty police officer after she honked at him for cutting her off, KHOU 11 reports.

The victim — who did not wish to be identified for fear of retaliation — said that she was driving on the 610 Loop when Kenneth Caplan cut her off.

“He was about to hit me,” she said, “so I switched to the other lane, got in front of him and cut him off. I guess that pissed him off,” because he pulled alongside her, rolled down his window and opened fire.

“He was aiming at me and I thought he was going to cuss me out. It didn’t register that I was, you know, going to get shot. I just started crying because I knew I was going to die,” the victim said. “I wanted to call my mom to tell her ‘I love you.’”

One bullet grazed her head, opening a gaping wound that would not stop bleeding.

“I was like ‘oh my God, he just shot me.’ I was applying pressure to my head because it wouldn’t stop bleeding,” the victim said. “The blood was in between my nails, just crazy blood, and all over my cellphone, just covered.”

If she had just obeyed the police officer, she wouldn't have been shot.  That's the "lesson of Ferguson" we're supposed to all have learned, yes?  She didn't obey the law and she didn't obey the officer, so her life is forfeit.  That's what conservatives tell us we need to do or else people get shot.

Right?  Clearly she was a threat to the officer with her vehicle.  He was afraid for his life.  He had every right to shoot her, there's no need for a grand jury, and we should take the officer at his word 100%, anyone else is a radical and identity politics hustle, right?

Right?

StupidiNews!

• Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi says he has removed some 50,000 "ghost soldiers" who have abandoned their posts in the Iraqi Army from the rolls.
• A St. Louis police officers' group is demanding that several St. Louis NFL players face league punishment after showing solidarity on the field with Ferguson protesters.
• Hong Kong police are warning pro-democracy protesters not to return to the streets after they were able to successfully shut down a government HQ for several hours on Monday.
• Beijing-based Dalian Wanda Group, parent company of AMC Theaters, is making a $4.7 billion bid to buy a stake in studios Lions Gate and MGM.
• EU police agency Europol has arrested nearly 120 in a major credit card fraud sting to purchase plane tickets for illegal drug transport and human trafficking.

Last Call For Religious Freedom (For Some)

To recap, the First Amendment allows for freedom of religious worship, unless Islam.  Wait, there's no "unless Islam" part?  Could have fooled Minnesota Republican Jack Whitley.

A Minnesota Republican who posted inflammatory remarks about Muslims on his Facebook page resigned from his position as the chairman of the Big Stone County Republican Party on Friday.

Jack Whitley told the Associated Press he had no plans to resign, but was asked to by other board members after his comments became national news.

Whitley had said he was opposed waterboarding terrorists because he believed that Muslim “parasites” should be killed.

After facing criticism for the remarks, he doubled-down, adding that Muslims should either convert to Christianity or leave the United States. He also said that Muslims don’t deserve First Amendment rights because Islam “infringes on the peace and the tranquility of this nation.”

“If you want to consider this a call to arms, then so be it,” he wrote on his Facebook page, which has since been made private.

But remember, liberals are the intolerant ones because the First Amendment applying to anyone other than Christians is "PC fascism" against Baby Jesus.  Besides, if you have a problem with the First Amendment applying only to whom Republicans say it applies to:

“If you want to consider this a call to arms, then so be it”

Then the Second Amendment will remedy it, right?

Held To A Different Standard

Whether or not you believe the White House turkey pardoning tradition is endearing or insipid (or both!) the fact remains that while Obama is in the Oval Office, he is held to a different and higher standard than previous occupants.  And the same apparently goes for his daughters, Sasha and Malia.

A Republican staffer apologized on Friday for comments she made about the way Sasha and Malia Obama dressed for the turkey pardoning ceremony on Wednesday.

Elizabeth Lauten, the communications director for Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN), wrote in a Facebook post that the Obama girls did not dress with "class" and looked like they were dressed for "a spot at a bar."

Yes, that's right, the First Daughters are under attack for being teenagers.  Well, teenagers who are a little different than the previous ones.

Dear Sasha and Malia, I get you’re both in those awful teen years, but you’re a part of the First Family, try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play. Then again your mother and father don’t respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter, so I’m guessing you’re coming up a little short in the ‘good role model’ department. Nevertheless, stretch yourself. Rise to the occasion. Act like being in the White House matters to you. Dress like you deserve respect, not a spot at a bar. And certainly don’t make faces during televised public events.

There are many things wrong with this, but let's start with the way Lauten is trying to slut shame Obama's daughters.  As a reminder, this is what they were wearing Wednesday:



How awful.

Exactly what's wrong with what Sasha and Malia Obama are wearing?  OH NOES YOU CAN SEE HER KNEES.  And remember, this is from the same group of people constantly complaining about how the War on Women is a myth, and that liberals are fascists who are controlling every aspect of how we look and dress in a too politically correct world.  They are teenagers, dressed as such.

And yet she has the unmitigated call to tell the daughters of the first African-American president in US history to "stretch" and "rise to the occasion?"

No, this is a snarling Republican operative putting two young women of color in their place, plain and simple. The assumption of privilege here is overwhelming.

As usual with these cases, her apology was even worse.

"I reacted to an article and quickly judged the two young ladies in a way that I would never have wanted to be judged myself as a teenager. After many hours of prayer, talking to my parents and re-reading my words online, I can see more clearly how hurtful my words were," she wrote. "Please know that these judgmental feelings truly have no pace in my heart. Furthermore, I'd like to apologize to all of those who I have hurt and offended with my words, and pledge to learn and grow (and I assure you I have) from this experience."

I'm sorry you thought I was offending you, and I prayed for hours, so I'm off the hook.

Even more privilege assumed.

Remember, she's a political PR professional, hired as such.  If anything, she's woefully incompetent and should be fired.

On second thought, Republicans should probably promote her.  I'd love to see this person in charge of the GOP's 2016 campaign messaging.  And remember kids, Sasha and Malia are fair game in the eyes of the GOP.

The Grand Screwing In Ferguson, Con't

Andrew "Aptly Named" McCarthy at National Review wonders out loud why the "race hustlers" even made Darren Wilson go to a grand jury after shooting Michael Brown.  After all, the "facts" were Wilson, as a cop, had only to tell his side of the story to end the case right then and there.

For the American Left, a bedrock myth is that white cops kill black kids. It derives from the overarching myth that casts racism as our indelible national sin. As Heather Mac Donald explains, citing exhaustive criminology studies, it flows seamlessly from the quackery that dismisses the disproportionately high incidence of violent crime in African-American communities as an illusion — as the product of police racism and the consequent hyper-targeting of black boys and men, rather than of racial differences in patterns of offending.

Darren Wilson was a white cop and Michael Brown was a black teenager killed in a violent confrontation with Wilson. Therefore, Brown was the victim of a cold-blooded, racially motivated murder, Q.E.D. That is the myth, and it will be served — don’t bother us with the facts.

Once you’ve got that, none of the rest matters. In fact, at the hands of the left-leaning punditocracy, the rest was pure Alinsky: a coopting of language — in this instance, the argot of grand-jury procedure — to reason back to the ordained conclusion that “justice” demanded Wilson’s indictment for murder. And, of course, his ultimate conviction.

I could spend the rest of the day rehearsing why these legal claims are specious. Particularly risible is the story line that the grand jury convened by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch was a sham — a story line that is itself an elaborate fraud.

Prosecutors can indict a ham sandwich, we were lectured, because the state’s burden in a grand-jury proceeding is so scant. Prosecutors need not prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, as they must do at trial; they merely need show probable cause that a crime was committed — and by the person of whom it was alleged — and a trial should therefore be held. There was conflicting testimony about who the aggressor was in the Wilson–Brown confrontation; therefore, the story line goes, there was more than enough cause to indict Wilson and let the ultimate determination of guilt — and you can be sure they mean guilt — be made at a public trial. McCulloch instead used the grand jury to exculpate Wilson, a white (cop) privilege that a black defendant could never dream of obtaining.

To describe this as nonsense is a slander on nonsense. It is freely conceded that the grand-jury inquest into Brown’s killing was more a political than a legal exercise. That, however, was the result of intimidation by the Left’s race-mythology agitators — very much including the president and the attorney general of the United States. It was clearly not aimed at benefitting Wilson.

McCarthy hits all the notes in his piece:  Liberals are like Stalin, Mussolini, and of course Saul Alinsky, Obama is a race agitator, and since Wilson, as a cop, would never have been convicted, there was no reason to even bring the case to a grand jury.

And of course, the real victim here is Darren Wilson, who has been "forced" to resign for a crime he didn't commit.  Or rather, what he did commit was not a crime in the death of Mike Brown.  Brown is dead, but of course with McCarthy and the right, that's not the point.  The community raised half a million for Wilson, and he'll have a nice retirement from his job now.

Congrats, here's your bonus for killing a black kid.  And for no extra charge, we get McCarthy here to dictate the tale of Darren Wilson, Real American Hero, who did his job by killing one of those "thugs".

The same people who tell us that liberals are unapologetic fascists are the same ones who see no problem with domestic law enforcement being judge, jury, and executioner.  That's not strange at all, is it?

[UPDATE] National Review editor Rich Lowry reinforces the "lesson" of Ferguson:

But what I really object to is you can discuss all of these problems, but let's not pretend that this particular incident was something it wasn't. If you look at the most credible evidence, the lessons are really basic. Don't rob a convenience store. Don't fight a policeman when he's stopped you and try to take his gun and when he yells at you to stop with is gun drawn, just stop and none of this would have happened.

To recap, failing to obey a police officer is punishable by summary execution.  Oh well. Eggs get broken, America.

Sunday Morning Read: Art Is Theft, Art As Theft

Your Sunday morning long read is Robert Kolker's NY Magazine piece on the bizarre story of artist Jasper Johns and his assistant James Meyer, and how the reclusive artist is accusing Meyer of stealing his work.  But there's always more to the story than just simple theft, especially when the artist has always been secretive.  And since Johns's work has sold for tens of millions of dollars in the past, well, when you involve sums of money like that, things always get complicated.

Johns’s primary studio — a large, fully renovated old barn on the grounds of his 130-acre estate in Sharon, Connecticut — is a reflection of his personality. There is no Jeff Koons–like army of implementers doing his bidding and no Andy Warhol–like Factory of hangers-on in the corners, watching it all happen. He only occasionally allows visitors; the few assistants he’s employed are meant to recede into the background, there but not there. It was in Sharon that one friend, the art dealer Francis Naumann, first met Johns’s longtime studio assistant James Meyer.

Given how withdrawn Meyer was around Johns, it’s a little remarkable that Naumann managed to get to know him at all. Stocky and mostly silent, Meyer seemed mainly to be on hand to help Johns move things around in the studio; he would join them for lunch, too, but rarely took part in the conversation and almost never shared an opinion. After a number of visits, Meyer let Naumann know that he, too, was an artist. “He was painting a little like Jasper,” the art dealer remembers, “though, of course, he was completely unknown.” When he learned that Meyer had dyslexia and had difficulty writing the personal statements and other literature that an artist needs to be noticed by gallery owners and dealers, Naumann offered to help. “Every once in a while he would send me something that he wrote, and I would try to put it into better English.”

Naumann’s next brush with Meyer — the important one — took place in the spring of 2009. Naumann was contacted by a fellow art dealer named Fred Dorfman, asking if he knew of any collectors in the market for a small work by Jasper Johns, a 12-by-14-inch black-and-white drawing on plastic — “a complete and fully finished, beautiful drawing” signed by Johns, Naumann says. Dorfman emailed a photo of the drawing to Naumann, who then sent it to a client of his, a New Jersey–based collector named Frank Kolodny, who fell in love with it. Soon after, Naumann learned that the person selling the drawing was Meyer. On the face of it, he insists, the news that Johns’s longtime studio assistant was unloading one of his boss’s works struck him as only slightly peculiar. Artists like Meyer “always need money at one time or another,” Naumann says.

Given everything that’s happened since, it’s not surprising that Naumann sounds a little defensive when he tells the rest of the story. It made sense at the time, he says, that Meyer would, over the years, have received at least one of Johns’s works as a present. In fact, Naumann had once seen a Johns drawing not so different from this one hanging above the fireplace in the home of Sarah Taggart, Johns’s secretary. It also made sense, Naumann says, when he learned that Meyer had set two conditions on the transaction: The sale could not be public, and the buyer could not resell the drawing for eight years. “You can’t go tell the artist, ‘I’m selling the drawing you gave me,’ ” Naumann says. “It might make it a little bit uncomfortable if he’s still working for the guy.”

They agreed on a sale price: $400,000. Naumann says he conducted the appropriate due diligence. He negotiated for Kolodny to be allowed to break the eight-year sale restriction if Meyer stopped working for Johns for any reason. He had Dorfman send him a copy of an official record kept in Johns’s office, verifying the work was a gift to Meyer. And he got a sworn affidavit from Meyer himself saying the work was authentic, he’d owned it since 1995, and he had the authority to sell it.

What he didn’t do, however, was pick up the phone to try to discuss the sale with Johns. Better, he thought, to be discreet — and sensitive to the studio assistant who was parting with an artistic treasure he no doubt had witnessed the master create. For the same reason, he says, he never spoke with Meyer. This couldn’t have been an easy decision for the man. Why rub it in?

It would be another three years before Naumann, along with everyone else, would learn the truth — that the page from Johns’s ledger was a complete forgery; that the drawing, though a genuine artwork by Jasper Johns, never belonged to Meyer; that Meyer had covertly pulled it from a file drawer in Johns’s studio; and that there’d been a lot more where that came from.

The whole story, I think, would make an excellent movie. Meyers is an artist in his own right, a frustrated one, obliterated in the shadow of the great Jasper Johns, and that's where things get very fuzzy.  Do read the story.

Shoot The Messenger

As Martin Longman points out, if you thought the Democrats were serious about trying to win the Senate back in 2016 with Sen. Elizabeth Warren in charge of strategy, all that ended Friday when the Dems placed Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia in charge of the party's messaging machine.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia was almost bounced out of Congress, primarily because he and the Democratic Party were criminally overconfident about beating tomato can, Ed Gillespie. It was a humbling experience because Warner was seen as immensely popular in his home state, and just the kind of vice-presidential candidate who could put some Electoral College delegates firmly in the hands of Hillary Clinton, or any other Democratic nominee. Warner's comeuppance didn't last too long, however. Despite leaking that he had voted against Harry Reid to remain the leader of the Senate Democrats, he was just awarded a similar kind of leadership position to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said that Warner will be "taking on the role of policy development advisor at the Democratic Policy and Communications Center."

Mmm, a healthy diet of debt nonsense and "entitlement reform" for all the poors.  The Catfood Commission is back, kids, and this time there's just one man running the whole show.

The split is particularly apparent on fiscal matters, as could be seen on the campaign trail in Virginia where Warner won an unexpectedly close re-election campaign against former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. Warner held campaign events touting fiscal responsibility, even telling a room full of Democrats that some of them might be better off voting for Republicans if they would support a debt and deficit deal that includes revenue increases.

Looking forward to that GOP Congress for the next, oh, forever.  Just need to blow it badly enough to stick Jebbie or Rand in the Oval Office and we'll fiscally responsible our way right into total oblivion.