None Dare Call It Treason, Con't

If you can name another time in American history where a sitting Speaker of the House of Representatives invited a foreign leader to speak to Congress as a rebuke of a sitting US president's foreign policy with the intent of undermining that policy, I'll give you a pony.

House Speaker John Boehner's invitation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress on Iran is an unprecedented rebuke of President Barack Obama as he and Congress are preparing for a battle over Iran sanctions, experts told TPM. 

The move came the day after Obama threatened in his State of the Union address to veto legislation putting new sanctions on Iran. He warned that new sanctions by Congress would disrupt the negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)acknowledged the week before that ending negotiations "is very much an intended consequence" of a new sanctions bill that has been put forward with some Democratic support. 

Although the US and Israel maintain a "special relationship," the discord between the Obama administration and Netanyahu's government has been well documented. Netanyahu welcomed 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in a visit Israel in the midst of the campaign. And anonymous Obama administration officials have been quoted calling the Israeli prime minster "a chickenshit."

But even with that context, experts on American-Israeli relations expressed shock that Boehner had invited Netanyahu to address Congress on Iran next month. One described it as an effort to "humiliate" and "embarrass" Obama as the two sides dig in over Iran. The invitation from the Ohio Republican positions Congress, rather than the White House, as Israel's ally. 

"It's unprecedented. It's hitting below the belt. It's taking partisanship to a whole new level," Guy Ziv, a professor at American University who has studied U.S.-Israeli relations, told TPM. "It is a way for them to embarrass and humiliate the Obama administration."

Bonus points if you can name any other country whose head of state would be allowed to speak to Congress to expressly chastise a sitting president's foreign policy.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

PS, the reason this is an unprecedented show of disrespect is the obvious difference between Obama and the previous 43 presidents.

Another Snowden Job

Happy New Year from Mother Russia, guys!

Is Apple’s wildly popular iPhone series hiding spyware that can collect information about users without their knowledge? As thoroughly as developers have dug through Apple’s iOS code over the past seven and a half years, one would think functionality like that would have been unearthed by now. According to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, however, iPhones are capable of activating “special software” behind the scenes that collects information about users, who are completely oblivious to the fact that their phones are gathering this sensitive data. 

Edward Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena recently spoke with Russian news agency RIA Novosti, and their conversation spanned several topics. As Russian news site Sputnik noted, however, the iPhone was among the topics that were discussed, and Kucherena’s comments were quite interesting, to say the least. 

“Edward never uses an iPhone; he’s got a simple phone,”Kucherena said. “The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him; that’s why on security grounds he refused to have this phone.”

So, it's not even Snowden saying this, but his Russian lawyer, to the Russian press, because "special software."  What proof?  Well, Snowden says so.  It must be true.

It's about ethics in tech journalism or something.

Surely this isn't Putin causing trouble again, going after what has become the symbol of US consumer technical innovation and success, right?

Be like Ed, guys.  Ed would never use an iPhone.  You want to be like Ed, don't you, American?

StupidiNews!

• A major apartment complex fire in New Jersey has displaced some 400 residents as the Avalon Apartments in Edgewater caught fire around 4:30 PM.
• House Republican women revolted against the party and have successfully stopped a nationwide abortion bill that made exceptions for rape and incest only if reported to police.
• President Obama's post State of the Union address tour took him to Boise and Topeka yesterday pushing for his plans for free community college and paid sick leave.
• The European Central Bank is officially expected to announce a major bond-buying program today to shore up the eurozone economy.
• Microsoft has previewed Windows 10 for PCs, tablets and phones and will launch beta builds to Windows Insiders on Feb 1.

Last Call For The Boomers

The Millennials are set to overtake the Boomers in population numbers this year in the US, which is going to be a big demographic key to 2016.

75 is the approximate number, in millions, of millennials that the United States will have this year. The total of millennials — those born from 1981 to 1997 — will reach 75.3 million, overtaking baby boomers (1946 to 1964) as the United States’ largest living generation. 

How does a generation that has stopped enrolling members manage to keep growing? An influx of immigrants, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. And, of course, members of the boomer generation, currently at 74.9 million, are beginning to die in greater numbers.

The way the NY Times defines them, Millennials are today's 18-34 year olds.  They're all old enough to register to vote, and those number will only go up next year.  Meanwhile, in 2016 even the youngest Boomers will be 52, and the oldest, 70.  As long as they are the group of Americans most likely to vote, we'll continue to be ruled by Boomer politicians (and yes, this includes Barack Obama, a young Boomer born in 1961.)

So there's a chance at least that our politics will begin to change.  The question is at what rate?

Of course, that rate will be zero if Millennials sit home like they did in 2014.

The State Of That Union, Con't

Yemen and drones aside, President Obama's speech was amazingly notable for what it wasn't, it was in no way capitulation to the GOP for winning the Senate.it wasn't a mealy-mouthed crawl into irrelevance, and it sure wasn't as hell surrender.  Ed Kilgore sums it up nicely:

In conservative-land, you see, Obama’s first election was a fluke and his second a calamitous accident, both canceled by the ensuring midterms and both destined to be remembered as incidental interruptions of the Long March of Movement Conservatism towards total power. The idea that 2008 and 2012 are just as significant as 2010 and 2014 (maybe a bit more significant insofar as far more Americans participated) is outrageous to the Right, and so Obama mentioning them was the defiant act of a political nonentity. 

Beyond that, the basic framing of Obama’s remarks on the economy left Republicans even deeper in the trap they’ve been in ever since conditions began improving. The main criticism available to them for the performance of the economy is the one Democrats (and Obama himself) have been articulated: sluggish wage growth and growing inequality. But Republicans have little or no agenda to deal with that beyond the usual engorge-the-job-creators stuff dressed up with attacks on the few corporate welfare accounts they’ve agreed to oppose, and then the Keystone XL Pipeline. On this last point, Obama was very clever in dismissing Keystone as one controversial infrastructure project we’re spending too much time fighting over as hundreds of others languish. It made Joni Ernst’s plodding Official Response sound all the more foolish for spending so much time on that one project.

Making the GOP look foolish is easy.  Getting voters to show up and punish the fools in the GOP is the hard part.

The State Of That Union

President Obama's State of the Union speech, in full, did contain some very illuminating passages.

At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious; that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years.

So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works. And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don’t get in the way. We can’t slow down businesses or put our economy at risk with government shutdowns or fiscal showdowns. We can’t put the security of families at risk by taking away their health insurance, or unraveling the new rules on Wall Street, or refighting past battles on immigration when we’ve got a system to fix. And if a bill comes to my desk that tries to do any of these things, it will earn my veto.

Today, thanks to a growing economy, the recovery is touching more and more lives. Wages are finally starting to rise again. We know that more small business owners plan to raise their employees’ pay than at any time since 2007. But here’s the thing — those of us here tonight, we need to set our sights higher than just making sure government doesn’t halt the progress we’re making. We need to do more than just do no harm. Tonight, together, let’s do more to restore the link between hard work and growing opportunity for every American.

This is the point where Democrats need to build on heading into 2016 to create a populist message that will get voters to the polls.  This is the Obama message that Dems cannot "run away" from, but run towards, at full speed.

On the other hand...then there was this.

I believe in a smarter kind of American leadership. We lead best when we combine military power with strong diplomacy; when we leverage our power with coalition building; when we don’t let our fears blind us to the opportunities that this new century presents. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now — and around the globe, it is making a difference.

First, we stand united with people around the world who’ve been targeted by terrorists — from a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris. We will continue to hunt down terrorists and dismantle their networks, and we reserve the right to act unilaterally, as we’ve done relentlessly since I took office to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to us and our allies.

 Six years into his presidency and the President just quoted the goddamn Bush Doctrine.

I know I give the "Obama isn't good enough!" people a deservedly hard time, but I 100% disagree with the President here.  Having said that, I'm not naive enough to think that any Republican or Democrat running in 2017 would stop using drones.  It beats a ground invasion.

Meanwhile, get your crap together, Democrats.

StupidiNews!

• Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo says she intends to sue FOX News over a false report from the network about supposed "no-go zones" in the city. 
•  The US Supreme Court has ruled in a unanimous, 9-0 vote that the state of Alabama cannot force a Muslim inmate to shave his beard against his religious beliefs.
• Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says his country will do the "utmost" to free two Japanese citizens held by ISIS with a ransom of $200 million.
• Shiite rebels have seized Yemen's presidential complex in what appears to be a military coup unfolding in the capital of Sanaa.
• Nintendo of America abruptly announced the end of its Club Nintendo rewards program on June 30, saying that the program will be replaced by something else at some point.

Last Call For What He Should Say

Ahead of SOTU, here's what Brian Beutler thinks President Obama should do: go directly after the Republicans for wanting SCOTUS to destroy Obamacare when given the GOP now controls Congress, they can fix the basic problem of King v Burwell at any point and refuse to do it.

The King v. Burwell challenge is an impressive blow for the preposterous idea that judges should scold legislators for exhibiting awkward statutory draftsmanship. The obvious venue for anyone genuinely concerned that the ACA text doesn’t technically authorize insurance subsidies in states that haven’t set up their own exchanges is Congress. With a single sentence, Congress could stipulate that the law does indeed authorize premium subsidies in exchanges established by both states and the federal government. 

Congress only leaves this in the Supreme Court’s hands if it wants the Court to break Obamacare, and many Republicans in Congress openly admit that this is their hope.
The guardians of such things consider it rude and improper for the president to lecture or lobby the Supreme Court in a State of the Union address, as Obama did in 2010 when he scolded the justices for gutting campaign finance law. But Obama needn’t address the justices directly. Only legislators, and perhaps, the unsavory actors asking the Court to accomplish for them what they’ve failed to accomplish through political channels. 

The two-part message would combine classic State of the Union positivity with a clear warning to conservatives to be careful what they wish for. First, the sensible proposition: Congress should take this issue out of the Court’s hands. It makes no sense to leave nine million insurance beneficiaries and the individual and small group health insurance markets in three dozen states facing tremendous uncertainty at the whim of the Court. If Congress were to pass a one sentence bill affirming what everyone knows, it would moot the case, and thus end the uncertainty. 

But of course, Republicans will never do that.  There's zero chance that this will happen, because as the last three elections have shown, American voters have no interest in punishing the GOP for terrible behavior.

There are a number of reasons why, but the main one is that Republicans have convinced a lot of voters that President Obama's six years in office have been one long handout to minorities, specifically at the expense of white Americans.  And there's no bigger "handout" in this category than Obamacare.

That's not what it actually does of course.  Kentucky a state that's 88% white and has the most effective Obamacare state exchange in the country in Kynect is proof of that.  But the hatred here for the program helped Mitch McConnell to a 16 point win in November, even though the people using it are very happy with it.

The Republican Congress is betting they won't have to lift a finger.  I'm not so certain they will have to myself.

Halfway Home

As we wait for President Obama's speech tonight, a reminder that the last couple of months of good jobs news has finally gotten through to the American public, and that his approval rating is up to 50%.

President Barack Obama's approval rating has risen to 50 percent in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday, his strongest showing in the survey since the spring of 2013. 

Forty-four percent disapprove of how he's handling his job as president.

The improving poll numbers come one day before Obama's State of the Union speech, amid positive economic news and complete Republican control of Congress for the first time in his presidency. 

By a 40 to 36 percent margin, Americans said they trust Obama over Republicans to "do a better job coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years."

People are starting to come around a bit.  Maybe they'll tune in tonight when they wouldn't have bothered to listen if you asked them last month.

The Real Clear Politics poll average has him at 44.7%, his best number since October 2013 and the launch of the Affordable Care Act's exchanges.  There's a lesson there for the GOP.  Obamacare didn't doom the President.  Failing to support it did doom the Democrats in the Senate.

We'll see if any lessons are learned headed into 2016,

You're Not Panicking Enough, Citizen

SCARY BETURBANED HORDE IS SCARY AND ALSO EVERYWHERE.

A key U.S. senator said Sunday that Americans have to assume there are some "sleeper cells" within the U.S. that would like to carry out a terror attack. 

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he was not aware of any specific cells, but noted that the recent attacks elsewhere in the Western world make it a safe assumption. Johnson is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. 

“What you’re seeing happen in Europe, you’re seeing how widespread that is,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think you have to assume that that is a risk that we have to consider.”

We're not at war with Islam, we just want you to assume that your Muslim neighbors may be sleeper agents who will kill you and your family.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said U.S. intelligence needs to focus on the greatest threats to home. 

“In some cases these are Americans that we know have been associated with these extreme groups,” he said. “It’s really important that our intelligence community focus on those that are the highest risks to the United States.”

You know, brown people with funny hats.

We will be expecting evidence of the proper minimum of urine soaking your clothing in our next report, citizen.  Please make sure you and your loved ones are pissing themselves as much as possible over Terrah.

StupidiNews!

• A construction worker is dead and a semi truck driver was injured when a partial collapse of an overpass scheduled to be demolished fell on Interstate 75 in Cincinnati.
• Several hundred barrels of crude oil have spilled into the Yellowstone River as a pipeline break in Montana is being cleaned up.
• President Obama's State of the Union address tonight will focus on middle-class Americans and challenge Republicans to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and big banks.
• Islamic State militants have issued death threats against two captured Japanese hostages as the cash-strapped terrorist group is now resorting to ransom as oil revenues are drying up.
• Boston cabbies are the latest group to take to the courts to stop ride-share services like Uber and Lyft, saying the services are operating illegally under Boston law.

Last Call For An MLK Day Play In One Act

America’s civil rights journey in two sentences:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Letter From a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

“It isn’t hard to find injustice around us, but we must not let injustice smear the good deeds that do occur everyday.”

–Sen. Rand Paul, Break Down The Wall That Separates Us From The ‘Other America’, January 19, 2015

Sage nodding from CHORUS.

Exeunt, FIN.

Because of course, we have to focus on the justice that's being done on a daily basis, not the icky injustices that still exist 52 years later in Post-Racial Obama's America.

But as bad as Rand Paul is, the winner today for All-Time MLK False Equivalence Asshole Bingo goes to convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza!

AN INTERESTING PARALLEL: MLK was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover, an unsavory character; I was targeted by the equally unsavory B. Hussein Obama
— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 19, 2015

Letters From A Minimum Security Country Club Prison.

Whatever Would Give You That Idea?

Gotta hand it to Maryland's pro-Confederacy crew, knowing that Dr. King's birthday is on the 15th of January means the third weekend in January is always a good time to celebrate General Robert E. Lee's birthday too, because both sides.

Dozens of demonstrators wearing Confederate uniforms marched Saturday morning in Baltimore to honor Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two days before the holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. 

About 50 protesters stood silently across the street from the pro-Confederate rally, and some of them carried signs urging the Civil War enthusiasts to change the date of their annual demonstration, reported The Baltimore Sun. 

Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy said they chose the date to honor the Confederate generals at their birthdays – which are Jan. 19 and 21. 

King’s birthday was Jan. 15, and the federal holiday is held on the third Monday of each January. 

The pro-Confederate demonstration has been held on the third weekend of January for years, although members are not sure how the long the event has been held. 

Some group members said they had attended ceremonies in the 1950s at the Lee-Jackson monument, near the Baltimore Museum of Art. 

The event has drawn more attention in recent years, and local Quakers have helped organize silent protests for the past three years asking them to choose another weekend to honor the Confederate generals.

"Oh it's Dr. King's weekend?  Well, we were here first, you know.  Perhaps you should find another time to celebrate your little holiday or whatever while we celebrate our 150 years of Southern culture."

Pretty masterful job or trolling, frankly.  

History Is Censored By The Winners

The producers of the movie Selma arranged for free tickets for hundreds of thousands junior high school kids to go see it and learn about the civil rights struggle of the 1960's, a struggle that continues today.  But in Alabama, where the real-live events depicted in the movie took place, one high school history club has been barred from seeing the movie because of "language and violence concerns".

DeKalb County school superintendent Hugh Taylor cancelled the outing by students at the predominately minority school, saying he was concerned about obscene language and “racial profanity” in the Oscar-nominated film.

An African-American parent of one senior in the history club who had planned on seeing the film questioned the superintendent’s motives.

“It raises my curiosity as to whether something that they are not wanting exposed or the children not to know about.” said Reverend James Stanton. “I don’t believe it is just about the profanity.”

Stanton, who was 20 in 1965, explained that he lived through the era and was warned to stay away out of safety concerns.

“They did not want me to come down and visit because of the violence and the racial problems that they were having at the time.” said Stanton.

According to Taylor, he is concerned about what would happen if a child was offended by the film and wanted to leave the theater, saying he didn’t think teachers should have to be put in the position of playing parent.

Ahh, the ol' in loco parentis argument. Isn't that what permission slips are for?  If Taylor is right, why have after school activities and clubs at all in public school?

Oh, and Taylor's own four kids?  They go to private school.  Go figure.

Here are a bunch of kids who like school and learning, in a predominately minority school.  They like it so much they joined the school's history club to learn more about America's history.  Then you tell them "No, sorry, when it's the history of your people in the state that you lived in, history that your grandparents lived through, well, we think you might be offended by it, so you can't go."

Amazing.  You mean that black kids might learn that there's still racism in Alabama, and in fact it's been part of a long history?

We can't have schools being involved in teaching that.  They need to learn less controversial stuff like the Earth is only 6,000 years old and about intelligent design, right?  Or better yet, we need to let churches teach that in Alabama.

Right?

StupidiNews!

• Yemeni Prime Minister Khaled Bahah came under attack by Houthi rebels in the capital of Sanaa less than one week after the kidnapping of the Yemeni President's chief of staff.
• The share of the world's wealth in the hands of the richest 1% is expected to top 50% by sometime next year, according to Oxfam International.
• Ukraine's military has retaken Donetsk airport from Russian-backed separatists in heavy fighting over the weekend.
• The European Central Bank may announce a half billion-euro plus quantitative easing package as soon as this week to combat eurozone deflation.
• Analysis from water runoff during a music festival in Taiwan in 2011 showed that the 600,000 concertgoers did indeed have a major short-term environmental impact on local ecology.