Posts from — November 2012

Even the BBC noticed that Tea Party Whacko Allen West has finally admitted defeat. This was after a partial recount in St Lucie County showed that he lost to Patrick Murphy by an even bigger margin than originally reported.

I noticed that a lot of people are talking about West running for re-election, but that’s not actually true. Florida redistricted and the make-up of the new version of his district was a much tougher place for a Republican, so he moved to a different district to run again. Murphy, who lost to West in 2010, also moved because he wanted to directly challenge West and would have had to spend a lot of money changing his campaign materials if he didn’t face West again.

A lot of money was wasted on not much of anything, but that’s Florida politics.

I’m working on a rehab at the moment, so I don’t have a lot of time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to write about Gaza because the insanity hasn’t changed. Everyone is lying, but the Israeli lies get more publicity.

Jimmy Carter knew how to get peace, but no one since then has taken his example to heart to repeat it.

If people would actually get serious about making peace it could happen, but no one in power is willing to do the work.

A couple of posts from the ‘Obama-Kadima Campaign’, Israeli Agitprop and Ethnic Cleansing, should bring you up to speed on the ‘Obama-Likud Campaign’.

Russia Today notes ‘Israel knowingly targeted the media’ – RT reporter in Gaza. Of course they did. When you are running a massive PR effort during an election campaign, you want to control the message. This is important, otherwise people might start reporting that Rocket fire from Gaza could destroy Israel — in 4 million years. If you want to save Israeli lives it makes more sense to call in air strikes on drunk drivers than Gaza.

The election is under way with the traditional attacks on the Gaza Strip to prove that the current government is the only way Israelis can feel safe. It failed the last time when Kadima did it.

There is a common question asked by Likudniks: “What would the US do if they were being attacked by Mexico?” For some reason they don’t like my response: “Just what the Palestinians are doing – retaliating with everything we have.”

Israelis also fixate on on Palestinians “recognizing Israel’s right to exist”. There is no such “right”. The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, as well as sundry empires throughout history are all gone. If the Ottoman Empire hadn’t come unglued there would be no Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc. The US Declaration of Independence is based on the notion that governments are temporary, but people have “inalienable rights”.

Why don’t the Palestinians spend money on schools, hospitals, and infrastructure? Simple, because the Israeli blockade prevents it. When outsiders attempt to aid the Palestinians with building and medical supplies, the Israeli government uses force, including deadly force, to stop it.

I would hope that this ‘campaign’ ends like the last one, with a change in government, but a lot of innocent people are going to die before it is over.

Two from CBS about the CEO/MBA-class preventing competition in the job market:

Feds sue eBay, accuse ex-CEO Whitman of enforcing noncompetitive agreement

WASHINGTON: The Justice Department alleged Friday that Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay (EBAY), was intimately involved in making an anticompetitive agreement that prohibited eBay and Intuit (INTU) from hiring each other’s employees.

Twinkies maker Hostess going out of business

IRVING, Texas: The maker of the iconic U.S. snack Twinkies said Friday it is going out of business and laying off all of its 18,500 workers after a national strike crippled its operations.

EBay and Intuit sought to cap salaries for tech workers by agreeing not to hire from each other, i.e. not to compete for labor. When you are in the field you normally sign a contract that limits your ability to move to a competitor of your employer, but EBay and Intuit aren’t competitors for anything except labor.

In the case of Hostess, the hedge fund that owns the operation had already extracted concessions in a 2004 Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and was demanding more concessions from workers. Management hadn’t developed new products to boost its falling sales, they were simply milking the operation for every dime it could produce. They were always going to shut down, or they would have developed something to appeal to the current generation of consumers.

They had no intention of negotiating with the workers, they were simply seeing how low they could go with wages and benefits before shutting the operation down.

The Air Force has one fewer $400 million F-22 Raptors in its inventory due to an ‘incident’ on Tyndall Air Force Base. The pilot assigned to the 325^th Fighter Wing declared an emergency and ejected safely. The aircraft impacted within the perimeter of the base.

The Air Force has stated that the accident had nothing to do with the problematic oxygen system in the F-22.

As news of the record criminal fine levied against BP for the Deepwater Horizon disaster was echoing around the Gulf Coast, a fire on another Gulf oil platform was reported. Two people are missing and four are badly burned on the shallow-water platform South of Grand Isle, Louisiana.

The initial report is that the platform was shut down for maintenance when the accident occurred, so only a minimal amount of oil has leaked into the Gulf and the fire was put out quickly. I hope they can understand why Gulf Coast residents might not wholeheartedly accept that initial conclusion.

Kathy Kattenburg at the Agonist has a round-up of people trying to figure out what the ‘scandal’ is regarding Benghazi.

Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) got fed up at the House hearing and flat told the Republicans that they had a large responsibility for what happened because they cut the funding for embassy security.

McCain lost his control when a reporter pointed out that he and other Senators are complaining that they aren’t being informed at press conferences they schedule at the same time as classified briefings on the subject and they don’t bother to look at the thousands of pages of classified materials that have been provided.

UN Ambassador Susan Rice is apparently in trouble because she doesn’t reveal classified information that would identify sources and methods when appearing on Sunday talk shows. Apparently Senators rely on Sunday talk shows to find out what is going on, rather than attending classified briefings by intelligence agencies.

Take Out

Is he gone? …Shhh!

[Editor: Mini-Sox and his tabby sibling are waiting for me to leave to have a kibble snack.]

Friday Ark

As I assumed would happen, the Republicans in charge are focusing on the counties in the ‘official election probe’.

There is apparently no need to look at the attempt to implement a last minute purge of voters lists, or the effect of padding the ballot with 11 constitutional amendments, but they might look to see if cutting the early voting to 8 days from 14 could have affected something.

I can save them some time – St Lucie County had equipment problems, so they had to recount some ballots to ensure accuracy. I realize that wanting to have an accurate count is a foreign concept for Republicans, but some people believe in it.

It doesn’t take much of a ‘probe’ to figure out that the three largest counties in the state are going to take the longest to count ballots, and when it takes someone a half-hour or more to read and mark the ballot, you are going to have a problem.

If the Republicans actually wanted any of those amendments to pass they would have put them on an off-year primary ballot when the turn-out was low and more Republicans than Democrats would be likely to vote. The only reason for putting them on the general election ballot was to screw up the system, and everyone paying attention knows it.

The BBC reports that Omnishambles has been named word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary. We used to say FUBAR [F***ed Up Beyond Any Recognition] in the military, but Omnishambles is more polite.

This was just in time as the Austerians have managed to push the Eurozone back into recession, just as John Maynard Keynes said would happen around three-quarters of a century ago. Omnishambles is useful in describing what Merkel et al. have done to the economy in Europe.

The Local Puppy Trainer has a standard piece of misinformation from the President of the Florida Senate: Groups press for election reform in Florida

“There are places in the state that obviously had severe problems, but I question whether 67 counties need to be reformed,” he said. “The last thing we need is more micromanagement by the state.”

Gaetz said he would be interested to see whether the “left-leaning” League of Women Voters would offer any criticism at its press conference of Susan Bucher, the former Democratic state representative now serving as the supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County.

“I would think the people in Palm Beach County would be terribly embarrassed by their supervisor of elections,” Gaetz said. “Just because Susan Bucher can’t count votes, there’s no reason why (Okaloosa Supervisor of Elections) Paul Lux needs to be micromanaged.”

Don Gaetz is my state Senator and he knows full well and good that the problems have nothing to with ‘micromanagement’, but are a result of the changes that the Republicans in the legislature made in the election laws, changes he voted for.

The misogynist attack on the League of Women Voters and Susan Bucher doesn’t change the fact that the legislature reduced the number of early voting days from 14 to 8, despite the fact that the two previous governors extended early voting because the 14 days wasn’t sufficient to meet the needs of voters. The complaints aren’t about counting the votes, they are about being able to vote, and Gaetz knows it.

Paul Lux dealt with 128,885 registered voters of whom 95,193 voted on a 4-page ballot. Susan Bucher dealt with 810,186 registered voters of whom 559,136 voted on a 6-page ballot. It doesn’t take much math to see that voters in Palm Beach took 50% longer to vote than those in Okaloosa, or that it takes less time to count the votes in Okaloosa than in Palm Beach.

It’s nice to see that the Republicans are announcing at the beginning that they have no intention of admitting they screwed things up, and certainly don’t intend to fix them. This makes it a lot easier to convince voters to get rid of them in 2014.

Twig at Corrente is getting a letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times:

We, the Enemies?

The editorial “Debt & Taxes in DC” fails to mention proposed entitlement reforms that are being discussed in Washington right now. Cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will devastate the poor and sick in this country. For people already living on the edge of financial ruin, taking away even a small percentage of their income is a recipe for disaster. And yet that’s what both parties are discussing.

In the interests of honesty, let’s call this what it really is: The US government is imposing economic sanctions on its own citizens. As we have done to populations in Iran and other “enemy states,” a huge segment of American citizens will be unable to afford decent food, shelter, or medical care if President Obama’s Grand Bargain/Great Betrayal includes cuts to the social safety net.

So millions of people who have been paying into the system for decades will not get what was promised when they could use it most. At least now we know how the richest nation in the world treats those in need – the same way it treats its enemies.

Politicians keep bringing up China when they talk about the deficit, how we are ‘borrowing money from China’ to pay for programs. That is garbage. China parks a trillion dollars in Treasury bills so it can do business in US dollars because its own currency isn’t convertible on the world market. They need to keep it somewhere, and they aren’t going to put it in a passbook savings account or leave in a checking account.

I have already posted a graphic showing the 2010 Treasury Bond Holders and China holds 7.5% of the ‘debt’. The people they want to cut in the ‘Grand Bargain’ own a good deal more: Social Security 17.9%, Civil Service Retirement 6.0%, and Military Retirement 2.1%. This ‘Bargain’ is a way of defaulting on 26% of the ‘debt’ because the Village doesn’t want to pay for its excesses by raising taxes on the people who made all the money. Stealing from the poor to give to the rich.

Florida has lost the crown for the most dysfunctional election process in the nation to Arizona, which has totally screwed up.

It turns out that when Arizona declared winners in the recent election there were hundreds of thousands of votes still uncounted.

How did they screw-up? They printed their voters rosters used to identify voters before registration actually closed, so if you registered late in the period your name was in a separate unsorted listing added to the book handed out to precincts, rather than the alphabetical main listing. Late changes of address weren’t printed on the roster. All of these problems, as well as absentee ballots that went astray led a huge number of people required to vote on provisional ballots.

Now throw in the fact that many counties that experienced long lines in 2008 reduced the number of voting locations this year.

Several Congressional seats and the Senator from Arizona are not actually sure things a week after the election, while Florida only has to wait for military absentee ballots, the last item to be counted.

It would be really embarrassing if it turns out that Obama won Arizona.

I assume that most people have been checking the Florida results for the Presidential election which stood at a 50.00% – 49.12% win for Zero, but they should also look at the fate of the 11 constitutional amendments that the Republican legislature put on the ballot to see what ‘swing state voters’, like Florida’s think of the Republican agenda.

1. Anti-Obamacare failed 48.5-51.5%
2. Tax break for disabled vets passed 63.26-36.24%
3. State revenue limits change failed 42.44-57.56%
4. Tax break for vacation homes failed 43.18-56.82%
5. Legislative control of state courts failed 36.95-63.05%
6. No public funding for abortions failed 44.91-55.09%
8. School vouchers/funding for religions failed 44.53-55.47%
9. Tax break for spouses of KIA vets and first-responders passed 61.68-38.32%
10. Business tax break failed 45.49-54.51%
11. Tax break for low-income seniors passed 61.26-38.74%
12. Change in the Student Rep in the university system failed 41.55-58.45%

There was no amendment 7, and looking at the percentages it is obvious that people who voted for Rmoney voted against the GOP agenda. The three tax breaks that passed looked decidedly liberal to me. Amendments 4, 8, and 10 are ‘business friendly’ or privatization moves and the voters don’t like them.

If Democrats would start running people who oppose the GOP’s agenda, people like Alan Grayson, they will win elections. If the Democrats stop looking for and supporting Blue Dogs they will regain Congress. Voting for Republican ideas is not the way to bring voters to the polls or get elected.