Maddow keeps pouring it on: We thought about reviewing the Maddow Shows of the past two nights, in which a certain cable news star extended the culture of embellishment which has long since swamped her program.
There's a bag of squirrels inside this particular cable star's head, and the squirrels inside that bag just won't let her go. That said, reports about Maddow's constant embellishments can take a long time to formulate on an otherwise promising Saturday.
Let's look at Elise Viebeck's news report instead.
Viebeck's report appeared in Thursday morning's Washington Post. She addressed a nagging question, a question cable pundits have spent the past week avoiding:
Why do Republicans have to pass the Cassidy-Graham "health reform" bill by next Friday or not pass it at all? What sort of magic occurs on that particular date?
We thought Viebeck did a good job addressing this widely-glossed question. Near the start of her report, she formulated the question as shown below:
VIEBECK (9/21/17): [Republican leaders] face the challenge of persuading 50 people in the Senate to support [the bill] before the end of the month, which would set the stage for Vice President Pence to cast the tiebreaking vote.What kind of carriage turns into a pumpkin on October 1? By what type of necromancy does it take fifty votes to pass the bill now, but sixty votes to pass the bill after that magical date?
There are many questions surrounding this process. But the timing is perhaps the chief source of confusion among congressional observers. Why is it necessary to pass the health-care bill by Oct. 1? Why do Republicans say they have to act in the next 11 days?
We've seen this question glossed on cable about a million times. (Explanations are boring, and hard! Speculation is fun!) We thought Viebeck, in her news report, (almost) got it right.
What happens on October 1? How does a need for fifty votes turn into a need for sixty?
You're asking a very good question. Among other things, Viebecks blames the folderol on "arcane Senate procedure," on the Senate's "mind-bending rules," on a ruling by the parliamentarian and on "conventional Senate wisdom."
Here's the releveant text from Viebeck's report, which left us with a few unanswered questions:
VIEBECK: The answer lies in a combination of Republican legislative strategy, arcane Senate procedure and ordinary partisan divisions.We're not going to summarize that. You'll have to do so yourself.
[...]
McConnell and other Republicans can thank themselves for the deadline, which arose from their effort to pass health-care legislation without Democratic votes.
This is where the arcane Senate procedure comes in.
The Sept. 30 deadline exists because of a process known as budget reconciliation, which allows some fiscal measures to pass without the usual 60 votes. Republicans set this process in motion at the beginning of the year, when they passed a budget bill that included instructions for two committees to begin work on health-care legislation with the goal of saving federal revenue. By giving the health-care effort a fiscal goal, GOP leaders qualified that legislation to be passed by a simple majority.
But those instructions expire at the end of the fiscal year that’s covered under the budget bill. Senators could always write new instructions into their next budget, but they were planning to use that opportunity to direct a different legislative priority—tax cuts. Conventional Senate wisdom dictates that the chamber may consider only one legislative priority at a time under reconciliation.
Republicans would prefer to face no deadline at all. But these hopes were dashed on Sept. 1, when the Senate parliamentarian, who helps interpret the chamber’s mind-bending rules, said the GOP’s “reconciliation instructions” would end Sept. 30, the last day of the fiscal year. That is what McConnell mean when he said the opportunity will “expire” at the end of the month.
That said, we were left with two questions. First:
If reconciliation instructions expire at the end of the fiscal year, why did the Senate parliamentarian have to rule on this matter back on September 1? More significantly:
To what extent can "conventional Senate wisdom" actually "dictate" anything? If there's no explicit, unchangeable rule limiting reconciliation procedures to one topic per fiscal year, why won't McConnell simply brush conventional wisdom aside in the upcoming fiscal year? Why won't he simply say that health reform and tax reform will run on reconciliation?
We were left with that nagging question after reading Viebeck's report. On about a million occasions, we'd been left with incomprehension after watching our cable news stars. (Information is hard!)
Meanwhile, there was Maddow the last two nights, submitting to the many imperatives which seem to emerge from that bag of squirrels.
No one escapes from cable unharmed. Maddow has been transformed into an agent of squirrelly, ongoing distortions, entertainments and cons. We'll plan to give details next week.
Who is Elise Viebeck: She's eight years out of Claremont McKenna. As such, she's a ray of light within an often worrisome group—those youngish high-end reporters.
Why is this important?
ReplyDeleteHate to tell Somerby this, but Claremont McKenna is every bit as elite a school as Harvard, Yale and Princeton. It is just on the West Coast, like Stanford.
ReplyDeleteIt seems unfair to call Maddow a bag of squirrels without offering any evidence to justify the slur.
ReplyDeleteWell, that's true. But Bob has written on the reasons for his low opinion of Maddow and her work many times and appears to be soon to do so again.
DeleteAnd often Bob's other writing on Maddow is not much more than third rate insult comedy. When he's not lecturing others on civility, that is.
DeleteVarious sites have started referring to Centrist Democrats, as if these were not the real Democrats. The non-Democrats are the Bernie folks who are supposedly "progressive" but actually include independents and people who are not democrats at all but are attracted to the opportunity to create chaos within our party. Bernie, meanwhile, remains a socialist.
ReplyDeleteCentrist Democrat = Democrat
Berniecrat = socialist, independent, anarchist, etc. but not Democrat
Anyone who deliberately tries to tear down the Democratic party from within is, by definition, not a Democrat and this language implying they are, is not only wrong but propaganda that needs to be resisted.
And Centrist Democrats lost all the Senate races by worse margins than Hillary. So how's this working out for you? Under Centrist Democrat leadership the party is getting slaughtered at the polls.
DeleteYou don't lose an election for being so-called centrist, especially not to a Republican.
DeleteBernie backed progressive candidates have been losing primaries all over the country. That argues stringly that they'd have no chance in a general election. There is no populist uprising being manifested at the polls.
Would you call Senator Russ Feingold a "centrist" Democrat? Because he lost in WI by a much wider margin than Clinton did.
DeleteWisconsin’s 2016 election was the first one subject to its new Voter-ID law, which was projected in advance to block ~300,000 legal registered (disproportionately African-American and Latino, hence Democratic-leaning) Wisconsin voters from the polls. That was in fact the point and purpose of Voter-ID laws instituted around the country, as GOP politicians gloated. Feingold’s and Clinton’s policies had nothing to do with that; Wisconsin’s solid-Republican state government (all three branches) had everything to do with it.
DeleteRaven, I agree completely.
DeleteI too agree. I used to believe that Democratic pols weren't doing enough to fight the issue of voter suppression, but Raven schooled me a bit on that issue.
DeleteAnd I'm totally impressed that Raven can embed a link in text. Now that's a trick I'm going to have to think about. I've always liked being able to do that, but HTML isn't exactly my specialty.
Secretary Clinton put voter suppression by the GOP front and center in her very first speech announcing her candidacy and she named names. And then she was attacked by her primary opponent for playing identity politics.
DeleteThanks mm. I know. I was woefully under-informed on how seriously this was being taken by the Democrats. And some of the recent court rulings on gerrymandering are quite encouraging. Guess we'll just have to see how it goes.
DeleteLeroy
@ 12:08 PM: Embedding a link in text —
Delete<a href="http://news.google.com" title="Google's News Aggregator">Google News</a>
Google News
(The title="..." parameter is optional, but gives the reader information about your link when hovering cursor over it.)
Thanks Raven. It's gratifying to find find people of good will. As Paul Kurtz eloquently expressed, of all human qualities and possessions, a good will is the the most cherished.
DeleteLeroy
In case that sounded treacly, I meant that you have that sense of good will as a teacher. That's how I view Somerby.
DeleteGood will is all well and good (I just made that up), but we must disagree when necessary. That's why I value this site.
Bob is a really good writer, and gives those of us who give a damn about his chosen subject much to think about. (Okay, not all the time). But posters such as yourself, and other voices I encounter here, only add to what I think is a fun place to go to. We may (and must) disagree at times, and this comment section is a good sandbox for some good discussions about the msm.
Greg, if you're reading this, I'm gonna punch you in the gut. Ha ha!
Teach on,
Leroy
Leroy, that did not sound treacly at all. Paul Kurtz was a fellow Humanist, and I admired him, so thank you for quoting him in my direction.
DeleteWhen I hear "centrist" Democrat I think corporate Democrat.
ReplyDeleteOr Republican-lite
DeleteSee, this is what's wrong with the party. The Bernie half disparages the liberal half. There's nothing corporatist or Republican about the traditional Democratic values, things like social justice which Bernie calls identity politics, using the language of the right.
DeleteYou say that's "what's wrong with the party" as if Bernie was part of the Democratic Party. He isn't. He's an independent. Go look at his own Senate webpage calling him "the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history". He's NOT a Democrat. He only ran for the Democratic nomination for President (and that's over); he never even changed his party designation on his Senate page.
Delete@4:52, Who specifically are these perpetrators of social injustice? Here is a "warrior" at the vanguard of the social justice movement who insists all white persons who get up and go to work each day or sends their kids to school is perpetuating "white supremacy", hence racist.
Deletehttps://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/22/is-trump-a-white-supremacist-yes-but-so-is-america/
Do you really want to tell hardworking people doing right by their families that they're guilty oppressors, and then put it to a vote? Sad fact is that's the substitute strategy for the corporate Democrat, who can no longer even talk about class, let alone challenge concentrated wealth in any way.
You'll note Kimberley’s comment “Barack Obama was indeed the more effective evil.” — The hosting site Black Agenda Report was noted for being bitterly anti-Obama, in fact just between 2006 and 2008 (when he was first running for President) posting 61 anti-Obama articles while not criticizing either Clinton or McCain at all.
DeleteSo now you seriously ask, do they really want to alienate “hardworking people doing right by their families”? Why, yes, yes they do. But they’re not “corporate Democrats”, not at all, you do realize that, don’t you?
Excellent talk by Thomas Frank. After the introduction and pleasantries end at approx 5:00. At 10:00 he contrasts the modern corporate Democrat with "traditional Democratic values" of the past. There has been an unfortunate evolution.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38JNg210L24
@5:40, When I hear corporate Democrats and their apologists, here and elsewhere, demonizing the struggling working class, minimizing their legitimate concerns in order to characterize them as Nazis or white supremacists, then yes, that is alienating to say the least. Democrats have largely lost their former base, why is that?
DeleteWell, the DLC was formed in the 1980s, but it started as far back as 1968, the national convention in Chicago.
DeleteThese days, their base is a coalition of 'educated' (i.e. dumbed down) professionals and misled lumpenproletariat (underclass).
The working class is not represented by any party.
@ 6:11 AM: Ah, Thomas Frank, the former College Republican who spent the entire 2016 campaign season derogating Hillary Clinton and the entire Democratic Party (not just one wing, or even the "center") — e.g., The issue is not Hillary Clinton's Wall St links but Democrats' core dogmas, With Trump certain to lose, you can forget about a progressive Clinton, Some of Clinton's pledges sound great. Until you remember who's president, — and then when Trump won, blamed liberals for it!: Donald Trump is moving to the White House, and liberals put him there
DeleteFrank's critiques that you linked to made and make perfectly good sense. He has since been proven right about the that upcoming election! He does indeed specify throughout, aptly using the terms Democratic "insiders", and "establishment" Democrats, in other words corporate Democrats.
DeleteBarney Frank is an establishment Democrat. So is Al Franken and Loretta Sanchez. Are any of them corporatists? You are maligning a lot of hard working Dems, like Maxine Waters and Ted Lieu, just to smear Hillary for earning a good living while out of office. This whole corporatist schtick breaks down at the personal level because real Dems don't fit your stereotype.
DeleteFrank has done a lot of great work. In the context of Raven’s critique, I ran across this:
Delete“People who really interest me a lot are the people on the left who are willing to criticize the left, and the people of the right, who are willing to criticize the right.”
LINK
The transcription is horrible, but you get the gist. Frank is much like Bob. Former College Republican or not, he adds a lot to political criticism. And I’m not quite sure why he’s wrong, though a further parsing (I skimmed) may be in order.
Leroy
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteRaven, I figure you realized that I hadn't read all of the articles you linked to, just the first one. I truth, I only visited the first one you posted. That's a lot of reading to do. I'm a working man, and tired at the end of the day. Don't worry, I'll get to them, especially since you've provided new sites to bookmark. Thanks for that.
DeleteAnd htf do you remove comments?!
Cheers,
Leroy
Leroy, you can only delete your own, meaning, those the system knows you posted. How can the system know that? Because you signed in, as I did (hence my green username). If on the other hand you post Anonymously, the system can't tell the difference between you and umpty-dozen *other* Anonymous posters, and can't know who is trying to delete whose posts, so the "delete" option simply isn't available....
DeleteAnd... for some reason the actual comment I've tried to post isn't staying posted at all. What got deleted by me above was a *correction* that turned out to be pointless when the original had disappeared. I re-posted the original sans errors, but now that has disappeared too. Gehhh. Why doesn't this happen to the ubiquitous spam?
I'll try again...
When you have people who left the “conservative” or “radical-right-wing” [or the corresponding leftist] ranks — or any religious mind-control cult, for that matter — and are willing to talk both about their experiences there and to their former compatriots about the errors of their ways, that can be very interesting indeed.
DeleteSo I enjoy reading John Dean (and his older site) ... do follow his link to Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians [PDF]..., and David Brock (that’s a link to the wiki on his book Blinded by the Right; here’s his website Media Matters).
Further to the (former) right, see the group Life After Hate, founded in 2011 by former white-supremacy hate-group members to help people leave such groups. The Obama administration (as part of the DHS Countering Violent Extremism Task Force) gave it a funding grant; in June 2017 the Trump administration discontinued that grant, but after Charlottesville a crowdfunding campaign has filled in the gap.
On mind-control cults (a topic I’ve followed for a while), here’s a very old post with a book-list and some links that may still be helpful.
DeleteThe problem with some of “the people on the left who are willing to criticize the left” is that they’re far-leftists (socialists) criticizing moderate-leftists (liberals) — and that’s about as surprising as big cats (e.g. cougars) eating domestic housecats, but “cats is cats”, right? — while others of them were never any kind of leftist at all, but GOP trolls... of one sort or another... if not Russian trolls posing as Americans....
There does not seem to have been a corresponding left-wing troll army simulating the right wing; that is, both sides didn’t pull this stunt.
Jesoos, I never even tried to sign in. I are an effin' idiot!
DeleteAs always, much appreciate the tutelage.
Sincerely,
Leroy
Raven, re: Frank, you seem to lump him in with those who have "seen the light." David Brock is a stark example. Does he really fit into that category?
DeleteAnd as is my wont, I'm usually trying to keep my posts in context with the Bobster™.
Hey look, got to use your text block!
Some have argued that Bob is posing as a lefty, and making arguments FOR the right. Can't agree with that. But he is definitely a dissenter, narrow as his views might seem to be.
Leroy
Err, no, John Dean and David Brock (having put their former right-wing alignment behind) regularly criticize right-wing politics and politicians, offering inside information on both. Thomas Frank, though no longer a College Republican, still spends his time denouncing the Democrats’ “core dogmas” [note how this equates the party to a religious cult] and harangues “Listen Liberals” as though he were one... this is better known as a concern troll. [Urban Dictionary: “... someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with ‘concerns’. The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you're an ally.”]
DeleteWhich might, just might, be what those “some” suspect about Bob Somerby.
Oh, and as an alternative to copy-and-paste for characters like ™ : ™ = ™ ; ℠ = ℠ ; ® = ® ; etc. (and see the other pages there)....
Raven, point taken. I understand that Brock and others have completely reversed their positions re the parties they nominally served. This is a contentious topic to me, because I wonder to the extent that money is involved in such reversals. I look at James Carville and Mary Matalin and see a perfect confluence of the political machines when it comes to influence peddling and opinion-making.
DeleteOkay, that’s a distraction, but to the point.
What are the facts? Does Frank make specious arguments? I have a feeling you’ve posted some already, but it would be nice if you focused on specifics re Frank.
I don’t really think Frank is trolling. He’s a part of the money-making machine. But are his criticisms without merit?
Are Bob’s?
The Democrats are all we have in terms of progressive politics. But I’m not the savant you are. We agree on many things, but what is it about Frank that annoys you (besides his massive paychecks?).
And thanks. I got a real chuckle visiting that link.
Leroy
Both John Dean and David Brock have short bios on Wikipedia for free reading; you can read their own books for their own full-length tellings of how they arrived at their present points of views, and also for free from a library.
DeleteAs to money’s involvement, I had the impression that their right-wing employers were the moneybags. Dean ran into some serious legal trouble working for his employer, President Nixon; Brock ran more into his own self-disgust over such things as the attacks on Anita Hill. (That’s in the wiki on his Blinded by the Right.)
And I didn’t list Thomas Frank’s paychecks as among the things that annoy me; I didn’t even bother looking at his earnings, nor do I care; even if he were to work entirely pro bono, it wouldn’t change the criticism I actually did make. Likewise, I can assume Bob Somerby does this blog as an entirely uncompensated hobby, yet still criticize him for its disingenuous pettifogging, quibbling, carping, equivocating, and hairsplitting (e.g. blasting TV commenters for calling what Trump said "lies" vs. "misstatements" or "untruths"; with double standard, giving him far more benefit of doubt than them).
Which link gave you the chuckle? Urban Dictionary, or the W3schools UTF characters lists?
Raven, I didn't see any specific criticisms of Frank, but rather a long list of links, from which I presume I’m supposed to glean said criticisms. Sorry if I missed anything specific. I can’t agree that Frank is a concern troll. One needs only to understand that we’re in thrall to a political duopoly, whose only purpose is to maintain its own power at any cost, to realize that criticism is warranted. Yes, the Republicans are far, far worse; but that doesn’t leave Democrats immune from criticism, especially given the Republican ascendance not just at the Federal level, but the State as well. We are doing it wrong, somehow, and the malfeasance of the Republicans (not to mention the media which is supposed to inform us) cannot fully explain the moribund state of the Democratic party. Legitimate criticisms are needed now more than ever. Even illegitimate ones can spark debate.
DeleteI may sound naïve in saying this, but I wish the Democrats would embrace the populism of Sanders. There is massive potential in the movement he started.
I’m in agreement with you on some of the maddening hairsplitting engaged in by Bob, and have written so several times. While perhaps cogent as an analytical critique of, say, whether Trump is a liar or not, describing Trump as so deranged that he might actually believe some of the shit that comes out of mouth is, in my opinion, practically idiotic given the effects his words have. When it comes to such issues, I’m glad Bob doesn’t have the platform of a Frank.
I actually did chuckle at the UTF link. I’m so barely competent in HTML coding that you may as well have sent me a page of hieroglyphs. Not to say that I’m not going to work at it! But I’m approaching it at a sedentary pace. And for my purposes, the text block you so generously shared seems the easier route!
That being said, I wonder if you could share again the code for embedding a link in text. It’s not necessary, but I enjoy the technique of inserting hyperlinks in text. Hell, if someone like Mao can do it, I should be able to as well.
Respectfully looking forward to your comments.
What maybe you missed about those Thomas Franks columns all through the 2016 campaign is that they consistently attacked Clinton and the Democrats rather than Trump or the Republicans, then after Trump won the very next Franks column blamed liberals (supposedly his own audience) for that result....
DeleteWell, gee, if that were really so, maybe they’d been paying too much attention to columns by Thomas Franks?
Though if that had really been so, why would the GOP have invested so much effort into suppressing (disenfranchising) as many liberal/Democratic-leaning voters as possible?
Basic text link:
<a href="URL">LINK TEXT</a>
<a href="http://producten.hema.nl/">The Best Online Catalog Ever</a>
The Best Online Catalog Ever
[uses Flash]
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteThanks Raven. But I hope you did take my point: The Republican’s dirty legislative tricks clearly play a role in their ascendancy across the country’s legislatures, but it’s not the only reason.
DeleteI checked out a couple more of your links to Frank, and he is certainly critical of Clinton, and not merely Clinton, but the entire Democratic apparatus, which is fitting. He’s contemptuous of Trump, also fitting.
I checked out your Kos link as well – awesome man! You’re getting published in a very competitive market (assuming your being paid, which I hope you are).
My opinion about the elephant in the room varies slightly from yours. There were TWO elephants in the room. There was, of course, the Republican’s active and undoubtedly, to a degree, successful attempts to suppress Democratic turnout (though I’ve heard of no studies which examine the extent to which Republican voters may have been similarly affected. I think it’s an interesting topic worth examination).
The other elephant was Trump’s celebrity. He was well known by our idiotic electorate. Even I had heard about The Apprentice – never watched it of course – and found out later of his involvement with the WWE, which was completely off my radar, for obvious reasons.
Here’s a man who never held political office, but was able to garner 63 million votes, and I think his celebrity, combined with the corrupt Democratic machine, sealed his victory.
Frank isn’t like Bob, who blames liberals at large, though even Bob's analyses have some merit. Frank outlines the failures of the Democrats to achieve their goals, which seem to be aligned more with the plutocracy than with the common citizen.
Loved your link to that catalog btw, and thanks for the code. From the Netherlands, eh? Well, if that’s true, we’re shortly going to have to adopt our version of your Delta Works. Should be doing it right now.
Cheers my friend.
> “You’re getting published in a very competitive market (assuming you’re being paid, which I hope you are).”
DeleteWhoa, any Kos commenter can also post Kos “diaries” [articles like that], unpaid. There are some writers “on staff”; some others run ads on their blogs for revenue; most, like me, receive no money for writing on Kos.
> “There were TWO elephants in the room. There was, of course, the Republican’s active and undoubtedly, to a degree, successful attempts to suppress Democratic turnout (though I’ve heard of no studies which examine the extent to which Republican voters may have been similarly affected. I think it’s an interesting topic worth examination.)”
If there had been a Democratic “elephant” (voter suppression effort) to target Republican-leaning voters, (1) Why would the GOP Congress not have held hearings about it as big and bold and constant as BenGHAAAZZi? (2) Wouldn’t that effort have required targeting, disenfranchising, the voters who have voter IDs i.e. drivers’ licenses, and most likely the other socioeconomic advantages that lead to voting Republican in the first place... and where exactly has such a notable and newsworthy effort taken place, anywhere?
(Trump’s celebrity cannot be an “elephant in the room” — because, as the saying has it, nobody talks about that, and by definition celebrity is something everybody talks about.)
That *catalog* in the sample link is from the Netherlands. *I* am from Wisconsin.
Hello, Wisconsinite! I made the assumption from .ne only because I see your postings occur at strange hours. Certainly not my finest forensic moment. No matter.
DeleteTo be brief, I thing you misconstrued what I meant when I wrote … (though I’ve heard of no studies which examine the extent to which Republican voters may have been similarly affected. I think it’s an interesting topic worth examination.)”
What I meant was that voter disenfranchisement laws enacted by Republicans may have also affected their own constituency. I know, that’s pretty weak tea, but an interesting question (to me, at least). Undoubtedly, their plans have succeeded in their desired intent, no matter what those figures might be.
Well, sorry you’re not being paid! Writing for free don’t pay the bills, but I’m sure it’s gratifying, as is reading what you have to say.
Cheers,
Leroy
Heh, the link I gave had a .nl [Netherlands] tag, but your .ne tag resolves to Niger, different continent altogether.
DeleteAnd yes, there may indeed have been Republican-leaning voters who had no voter-IDs; but apparently the GOP was confident the overwhelming effect would be against the opposing party rather than their own, reason enough for them to proceed full force and gloat publicly about it more than once....
Writing and posting these particular articles was a labor of love, so to speak: my incentive was simply getting the word out. I'm more than a decade retired from work which featured plenty of technical writing to specs, and am just as happy not to be subject to deadlines, and above all ham-fisted editing by people who know and/or care less about the subject matter (and the truth of it) than I do.
Dag, and I thought I was an expert on country abbreviations (I work in exports). Consider that a typo, hehe!
DeleteI’m about a decade away from retirement myself, if I want to enjoy the same luxury you have undoubtedly earned. If I may ask, writing to specs for what? I understand that specs can be VERY exacting, working in the automotive industry as I do. Writing from in (us).
: )
Leroy
I worked for management services contractors, the services being to run data centers / help desks for other organizations (business corporations or governments); I was a supervisor in the late '80s, and an assistant manager at retirement in 2005, more of a techie/number-cruncher and a writer/teacher/explainer than my bosses, so management reporting (stats), manual writing as part of training staff, and tech writing for how our operations/helpdesk systems/setups/changes worked were all in my bailiwick. Even for the diagrams and maps to show *where* everything was, I made clear bit-mapped images so they could be viewed on CRTs as well as on paper. Since my last years-long contract was a world-wide network, that featured background maps from all over, and there was a flexible software package that would populate the foreground with icons showing the *current* network layout, not an outdated drawing. (This was one of Milwaukee's largest employers, with a topflight reputation, so I made sure to provide good-looking graphics behind the icons for system monitoring!)
DeleteHoly crap. Well, that goes a long way towards explaining your apparent proficiency with html! Keep up the good work.
Deletebtw, can't seem to post html-coded links on this site anymore. What do you think that's all about?
DeleteMmm... Google News works OK....
Delete<a href="https://news.google.com/news">Google News</a>
[for the simplest version, without title parameter]
Just be sure not to use "smart quotes" inside the html; they have to be the straight-up-and-down quote-marks.
Good to know. I thought it might be a security thing - who knows what kind of crap someone might link to. However, I didn't use smart quotes inside the html, so I'm still left wondering, since the code worked in the test site Cmike directed me to. Well, I'll figure it out one way or another. Actually learning how to code might be a good start!
DeleteThank you Raven.
https://thinkprogress.org/reconciliationdeadlinefake-6a7904af0d1d/
ReplyDeleteInteresting post, hardindr.
Delete“The thing is, the September 30 deadline is a hoax.
“Republicans can begin a new reconciliation process in January, meaning next year, the bill (or another version of repeal and replace) could see proper hearings, debate, and get scored, and still pass with a simple majority.”
What I’m not clear about is how the rules of reconciliation, if it were to start anew next year, would proceed. Does it just happen when Republicans want it to? What is the process?
I ask because, even though the article makes the case that the bill could be passed under a new reconciliation process, the timeline for such seems unclear to me. Does that not have something to do with the current (obviously political) rush?
Thanks,
Leroy
In the pursuit of big donor dollars the corporate Democrats have lost sight of, even forsaken their traditional economic values. Hence, they've lost their traditional working class base.
ReplyDeleteHorseshit. Secretary Clinton won the voters who put the economy as their top issue according to all polls.
DeleteSlightly off topic, let's all give out a hearty salute to those good folks with "economic anxiety" at tRump's Alabama Nuremberg rally yesterday.
All politicians take money from corporations, even Bernie. Bernie also takes money from Russia. When asked about it he said "Who cares where it comes from?" So called Centrist Dems weren't responsible for Citizens United. You don't win elections refusing tainted money.
DeleteHey, corporations are people too.
DeleteTo hear the Clinton deadenders tell it, roughly half the nation are Nazis, while 40% of the Democratic party receive their marching orders from The Kremlin.
DeleteThe Bernie bros aren't 40% of the party. A lot if regular Dems have favorable attitudes toward Bernie, not knowing how he has conducted himself, but they don't prefer him. They couldn't pass single payer in CA despite both Bernie and Gavin Newsom's spport and Newsom is more popular than Bernie.
DeleteThat's why the trouble Bernie keeps trying to stir up is destructive. They have no hope of winning so they become spoilers instead.
"A lot of regular Dems have favorable attitudes toward Bernie, not knowing how he has conducted himself."
DeleteWell.
Credit, I guess, for acknowledging reality there: It's true a lot of Dems DO have favorable attitudes toward Bernie. He's far better liked than, say, Clinton.
But you have to then go on and show your ass by saying it's because they're ignorant, unlike you, a person who wisely knows that single-payer failure in CA is somehow the fault of Bernie supporters.
But thanks for standing firmly against trouble-stirring!
Clinton's favorable rating is 71% and Bernie's is 73% among Democrats. That isn't FAR better liked than Clinton. It is the same, but you demonstrate my point about ignorance.
DeleteAnd, yes, those people who like Bernie would perhaps feel less favorable toward him if they knew what happened during the past election, and in the aftermath, as Jane Sanders investigation proceeds.
I clearly said that single-payer has failed despite Sanders, not because of him. But if Sanders cannot achieve victory in the most progressive state in the nation, with the help of someone beloved in the state, such as Gavin Newsom, he is going to get nowhere with it anywhere else. That was my point. Funny you missed it.
Bernie needs to go back to Vermont. Now. He hurts Democratic election chance wherever he campaigns. His people lose and the prospects of flipping seats is reduced. This is not good for our party. He doesn't care, but Democrats should.
For CMike:
ReplyDeleteFrom My Life by Bill Clinton:
"While I was mulling it over, my friend David Edwards, who was working for Citibank, called and asked us to go to Haiti with him. He said he had enough frequent flier miles built up to pay for our tickets, and he wanted to give us the trip as a wedding present...On the most interesting day of the trip, I got the chance to observe voodoo in practice. David's Citibank contact in Port-au-Price offered to take him, Hillary, and me to a nearby village...By the time we got back from Haiti, I had determined to run for attorney general. I took another leave from teaching at the law school and got to work.
Who was David Edwards? Someone he met in London while a Rhodes Scholar, who apparently hosted parties attended by students there, who became a good enough friend to visit his family in Arkansas. Aside from a brief remark on pg 433 where Clinton discusses Bush's investigation of his draft status, Edwards is not mentioned again in the 957-page biography.
This is a tenuous connection with Citibank and Hillary, since the guy was Bill Clinton's friend and apparently only while in London and Citibank hand nothing whatsoever to do with their trip. But this illustrates the kind of innuendo that Bernie-bros are willing to believe.
CMike places a lot of faith in Amy Wilentz, but I'm not impressed if she is willing to write something with so little behind it, that is so misleading and unfair to Hillary Clinton, just to smear her with the name of a bank.
If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might suspect that the Bernie supporters and the Trump supporters are both working as hard as they can to tarnish Clinton because they both know there will be an Act II when the results of the 2016 election are invalidated due to Russian hacking and vote rigging with collusion of both Bernie and the Republicans. Hillary will be the obvious successor and they want to prevent that from happening should Trump and his administration be set aside.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, what is the explanation for all the dollars being spent and the effort expended to attack a woman who has said she will not run for office again? It makes no sense unless you assume they have reason to be afraid of her still. And they are very afraid.
Well, both Bernie and Trump have fought hard — and thus far successfully — to keep their tax records (read, income sources) secret from the public. Unlike Clinton, whose open release of her records is what allowed everyone to know, e.g., who paid her how much for speaking where.
DeleteHowever, Bob Mueller's investigation appears to be following the money, so perhaps Trump's tax records at least will be a stone not left unturned.
Meanwhile the Sanders family face questions in Vermont about that Burlington College collapse, apparently not only from the state but also from the feds, due to allegations that the Senator's office pressured a bank to approve the college's loan. I just tend to suspect tax records may also be examined....
http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/05/politics/hillary-clinton-bill-clinton-paid-speeches/index.html
DeleteBill made $130 million in speaking fees after leaving public life in 2001. Now knowing she was going to run for president, couldn’t she have at least had the political smarts to nix the Wall St speeches until after she left office. Especially considering that Wall St had just caused a crisis that devastated the lives of millions of Americans.
No. Not necessary, because she thought she would be running against a fellow Wall St stooge like Jeb. Instead she got two candidates who never taken a dime from Wall St. The political god punished her all for a few million dollars that the Clinton’s wouldn’t even have noticed from the $100m pile they already had. The thoughtless drive for a few more dollars cost her the presidency.
Now I read Obama is giving $400,000 speeches to the same crowd he bailed out a few years back. It stinks to high heaven.
DeleteShe had not announced that she was running. Once she did, she stopped giving paid speeches. Note also that some of her speeches involved fees donated to charity. Her critics are not scrupulous about identifying which those were.
DeleteHillary was US Senator from New York, a state whose major industry is finance. She isn't going to stiff her constituents any more than Bernie gave back the Nurse's PAC money. Bernie supporters don't understand what happened on Wall Street so they treat all money as dirty (except their own) and treat an essential industry as if everyone in it were dirty. Goldman Sachs is one if the good guys in the book The Flash Boys (Michael Lewis).
The Bernie supporters cannot tell the difference between money raised for the Clinton Foundation and their personal income. The good done by the foundation is trated like graft when audits repeatedly show they are clean. The ugliness of Bernie's attacks, their dishonesty, should repel any serious and fair minded progressive.
@ 9:56 PM: “Bill made $130 million in speaking fees after leaving public life in 2001.” — As Hillary commented, “You have no reason to remember, but we came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.” Even PolitiFact acknowledges, “Their highest possible assets totaled about $1.8 million, while their lowest possible debts were nearly $2.3 million. The most optimistic scenario left them in a hole of about $500,000.” But PolitiFact then downmarks HRC’s statement because, among other reasons, “Almost any president leaving office can expect tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of future earnings as a result of their having been president. Speaking..., and so on, are all very lucrative.”
DeleteIn other words, it’s supposed to never have been true that they were broke and in debt then, because in future, precisely by making those awful horrible terrible paid speeches they’re being criticized for now, they could dig themselves out of that debt.
This is logic worthy of Bob Somerby. (Does anyone know whether he moonlights at PolitiFact?)
Look at it this way, they wanted two things. An end to their dead brokeness, and a Hillary presidency. They got one out of two. Glass half full. Move on.
DeleteThe economic royalists made the Clinton's filthy rich, this after Bill deregulated Wall Street. 1 + 1 = 2
DeleteThe political god punished her all for a few million dollars that the Clinton’s wouldn’t even have noticed from the $100m pile they already had. The thoughtless drive for a few more dollars cost her the presidency.
DeleteThe political god (in reality the GOP barbarians aided and abetted by the insane Beltway political press suffering from Clinton Derangement Syndrome) punished her for being married to a former President who created a fabulously successful Foundation dedicated to reducing poverty and improving global health and responsible for providing low cost aids drugs to over 11 million people in Africa and Latin America.
It's amazing to me that after witnessing the monstrous and unfair attacks on both Clintons going back for decades, where even by every measure one of the most successful charitable foundations ever created by a former president was turned into a negative against her, that people who have the balls to put forth the proposition that if she just didn't get paid for a few speeches to Wall Street everything would have been just hunky dory. Bullshit.
You would think you'd have enough sense that if you were going to go speak at Goldman Sachs, you might tell them something about changing their actions. You might make a criticism. But if you read those speeches, she doesn't criticize them. She's is an advocate for the middle and lower class in words only.
DeleteShe's is an advocate for the middle and lower class in words only.
DeleteHorseshit.
I know you think it is. You can't see the devastation.
DeleteNo, actually I can't follow your contorted logic. Devastation, which Clinton caused because she didn't say something or other when she was giving paid speeches about Woman in Business or GS's Builders And Innovators Summit, therefore she is an advocate for the middle and lower class in words only. Classic CDS. I shouldn't believe my own lying eyes, I should draw your sleazy unsupported inferences based on something she didn't say. Got it.
Deletehttp://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/chart-of-the-day-middle-class-incomes-vs-the-rich-1946-2014/
DeleteMm like a frog in slowly boiling water you are desensitized and blinded towards the economic devastation that has taken place thanks to corporatist Democrats like Clinton. It's true that there has been CDs and an organized effort to take her down but that doesn't absolve her for leaving the middle class behind. Again, I know you don't see it. I know you disagree. one day you will.
Delete@ 2:59 PM: There are two parties active in national politics. On the record (jobs, wages, GDP, stocks, what have you), more “economic devastation” has taken place during the Republican (and deficit-heavy) administrations of Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, than during the Democratic (and more careful) administrations of Clinton and Obama — despite the intense GOP Congressional obstructionism both the Democratic presidents (especially Obama) faced, e.g. the flat refusal to pass remedial programs like the American Jobs Act to recover jobs and wages after the 2008 crash under George W. Bush... but then the GOP was determined to make Obama a one-term president even if that meant causing more economic devastation during his term and blaming it on him.
DeleteRather like having Congress cut the security budget for overseas embassies, then hold hearings to blame the Secretary of State when an embassy is attacked (causing 4 deaths)... though, oddly enough, that was never done for the 13 attacks on embassies and consulates (causing 66 deaths) during the George W. Bush administration.
There really has been the oddest of double standards in use here. For instance, now it turns out the Trumps themselves, Trump Jr. and Ivanka as well as Trump advisors in the White House, have been using private email for government business... the very same thing Donald J. Trump kept shouting “lock her up” (and encouraging his crowds to do the same) about Hillary Clinton for. Well. Time to lock them up, then, by their own previously declared rules, right? Or not? Because that rule wasn’t in effect when HRC was in office, but it sure got enunciated before Trump took office....
Better image link for wages
Delete" which allows some fiscal measures to pass without the usual 60 votes. "
ReplyDeleteThere's the key, right there. During the Obama administration, the GOP with the compliant MSM made the filibuster "normal", and so now, instead of majority rule, we have to have super-majority. It's working against the Republicans now, but worked against the Dems for almost eight years.
60 Votes Is Not Normal, it's a filibuster.
Now getting a 51-vote passage takes the nuclear option. Will McConnell seek it?
DeleteI find it comical that the anti-Hillary commenters here somehow think that Hillary and the Democrats don't really support the middle class. Which party created and supports Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, minimum wage, Unions, health care, etc.? The republicans despise those things and want to get rid of them. So head Republican Trump is against those things too. So much for you "man of the people" Trump supporters. It's all about tax cuts for the wealthy for them, and always has been.
ReplyDeleteHillary and the Democrats would have fought for all of them. They're fighting for them right now, as Republicans' attempts to destroy the middle class continue unabated with Trump leading the charge.
And in particular the Clintons pushed for universal health care back in the 1990s — for instance in September 1993 WJC proposed “an enforced mandate for employers to provide health insurance coverage to all of their employees” — only to face intense opposition from the GOP and insurance companies (recall that year-long “Harry and Louise” ad campaign from the “Health Insurance Association of America” lobby group?)... but at least Hillary helped get one of her long-time goals, CHIPS (Children’s Health Insurance) get passed... something the Reagans and Bushes had not troubled to bestir their ‘beautiful minds’ the least bit to accomplish.
DeleteBut no, it’s the Democrats who “don’t really support the middle class”; while it’s the Republicans (who even now are openly trying to destroy millions of ordinary Americans’ healthcare in order to mollify their wealthy donors’ avarice), those are the middle class’s true friends, yep, yep, yep....
I love how this pathetic loser doesn't even wait for me to weigh in. Bob's attacks on Maddow are too boring and ridiculous to read anymore. He's just not a serious person on the subject of Maddow. Fake Greg seems to be something like a religious nutcase on "Special Victims Unit." Probably obsessed with Maddow too.
ReplyDelete"The usual 60 votes" just slips by without notice. How about the "unusual throughout the entire history of our nation until just a few years ago" 60 votes?
ReplyDelete