brexit not inevitable, but the removal of self-serving pompous political leaders may be...,

theintercept |  “In voting to leave the EU, it is vital to stress that there is no need for haste,” Johnson said, “and indeed, as the prime minister has just said, nothing will change over the short term, except that work will have to begin on how to give effect to the will of the people and to extricate this country from the supranational system.”

Given that the popular mandate his side had just won was summed up in a single word on the backdrop behind him, “Leave,” it seemed odd that Johnson made no mention of the fastest way to get that process started, by pressing for an immediate Article 50 declaration.

That fact did not escape observers in other parts of Europe, like the former foreign minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt.

The reason could be that Johnson has something very different in mind: a negotiated compromise that would preserve most of the benefits of EU membership for British citizens and businesses but still satisfy the popular will to escape the attendant responsibilities and costs.

In this context, it is important to keep two things in mind. First, it was Johnson himself who suggested, when he joined the Leave campaign in February, that a vote to depart could be used as a stick to negotiate not a full departure from the EU, but a better deal for the UK. “There is only one way to get the change we need, and that is to vote to go, because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says ‘No,'” Johnson wrote then. “It is time to seek a new relationship, in which we manage to extricate ourselves from most of the supranational elements.”

Second, as the legal blogger David Allen Green has explained clearly, the measure Britons just voted for “was an advisory not a mandatory referendum,” meaning that it is not legally binding on the government. No matter who the prime minister is, he or she is not required by the outcome to trigger Article 50. And, despite what senior figures in the EU and its other states might say, there is no way for them to force the UK to invoke Article 50.

What all this means in practice is that, while it would be political suicide for any leader to try to avoid acting to satisfy the popular will expressed at the ballot box, there is some wiggle room for a new government to try to find a compromise arrangement that would satisfy a larger share of the population than just the slim majority of voters who demanded separation.

As he makes up his mind on whether to seek the premiership, and considers how to appeal to the nearly half of the British population that wanted to stay in the EU, Johnson did not have to go far to get a sense of the seething outrage in parts of the country, like London, that voted overwhelmingly against leaving. Walking out of his home on Friday, Johnson was booed and jeered by some of his neighbors, who chanted, “scum” and “traitor.”

elite parasites pretend that peasant racism/xenophobia trump their own greed and forced austerity

Time |  In a stunning victory for the anti-establishment forces that have upended mainstream politics across the Western world, British voters chose on Thursday to pull their country out of the European Union, sending global markets into a tailspin and encouraging anti-E.U. forces across the continent to push for their own referenda on whether to break away.

“The E.U. is failing, the E.U. is dying,” declared the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, Nigel Farage, one of the leaders of the campaign for the British exit, or Brexit, from the union formed from the ruins of Europe after World War II. “It’s a victory against big business…against big politics,” he told reporters early on Friday morning, as the results showed 52% of the votes had been cast in favor of leaving and 48% against.

That margin of victory – amounting to around 1.3 million votes – did not simply repudiate the British government’s calls for openness and unity with Europe. It also offered a blueprint for how ballot-box insurgencies across the West could, in the course of a single campaign, shatter the legitimacy of the ruling elites.

This formula is a familiar one, drawing fuel from a potent mix of xenophobia and angst over the loss of sovereignty and national identity. In the last couple of years, it has been deployed with explosive effects across Europe — and looks set to define the race for the U.S. presidency.

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, just happened to arrive in the U.K. to open a golf resort as the final results were announced, and wasted no time in linking them to his own insurgent campaign. British voters had “taken their country back,” he said, echoing a slogan that has helped him win over the base, if not always the old guard, of the Republican Party.

“In a sense, the result of this referendum is a victory for Trumpism the world over,” says Tony Travers, a noted political scientist in London and adviser to the British parliament. “It definitely has the same roots.” Trump supporters, much like backers of Brexit, tend to feel that traditional parties have ignored their concerns over migration and economic inequality for too long. Their response has been a wide-ranging revolt against the status quo that has opened the political arena to a variety of upstart candidates for the first time in a generation or more.

could Granny's unmitigated arrogance and mendacity provoke a consitutional crisis?

observer |  This gives the lie to Clinton’s much-repeated mantra that she never sent or was sent anything marked classified

In reality, nobody goes to jail for mishandling classified information at the Confidential level. However, the Hanley email proves that Hillary’s staff was emailing her classified information in unclassified channels, that it was marked classified, and that it was transiting Clinton’s personal email server. It’s difficult to believe that a mere aide like Monica Hanley decided to break the law like this, as she surely knew she was, on her own initiative.

It’s also difficult to see how the FBI can ignore such an obvious violation of the law. It likewise raises questions about what was in the 30,000 emails that Clinton decided to delete. In the nearly five months remaining until the presidential election, we can expect a regular drumbeat of revelations about EmailGate, none of them flattering to the Democratic nominee.

Last week the Associated Press broke a big story about how Clinton’s “unclassified” emails included the true names of CIA personnel serving overseas under cover. This was hardly news, in fact I broke the same story four months ago in this column. However, the AP account adds detail to what Clinton and her staff did, actions that placed the lives of CIA clandestine personnel at risk. It also may be a violation of theIntelligence Identities Protection Act, a 1982 law that featured prominently in the mid-aughts scandal surrounding CIA officer Valerie Plame, which so captivated the mainstream media. More recently, former CIA officer John Kiriakou spent two years in Federal prison for violating this law.

To make matters worse for Team Clinton, last week it emerged that several of the classified emails under investigation involved discussions of impending CIA drone strikes in Pakistan. Clinton aides were careful to avoid hot-button words like “CIA” and “drone” in these “unclassified” emails, engaging in a practice that spies term “talking around” an issue.

However, the salient fact is that the CIA—which has the say here—considers this information to be Top Secret, as well as enormously sensitive. It had no business being in anybody’s unclassified emails. As the secretary of state, Ms. Clinton and her top staff had access to classified communications systems 24 hours a day. They chose not to use them here—a choice that clearly violated Federal law. Moreover, this new report demonstrates that a previous Clintonian EmailGate talking point, that discussions of drones in emails were no more than pasting press pieces, and therefore innocuous, was yet another bald-faced lie.

How the FBI can look at all this and not recommend prosecution of someone for something in EmailGate strains the imagination. Yet President Obama has clearly signaled that it’s all no big deal. Director James Comey has a tough job before him when he takes the FBI’s official recommendations regarding EmailGate to Attorney General Lynch for action, probably sometime this summer. Since Comey is now under a cloud over the FBI’s embarrassing mishandling of Omar Mateen, the Orlando jihadist mass murderer, perhaps his resignation over that matter would be welcome in the White House, which then could find a new director more willing to bend to Obama’s wishes.

tone-deaf/odor-blind neoliberalcons dropping all partisan pretence to fundraise for granny goodness....,

FP |  A prominent neoconservative intellectual and early promoter of the Iraq War is headlining an official campaign fundraiser for Hillary Clinton next month, Foreign Policy has learned. The move signals a shift in the Clinton campaign’s willingness to associate with prominent Republicans and is the latest sign of how far some GOP defectors are willing to go to block a Donald Trump presidency.

Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, will speak at a Hillary for America fundraiser in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood on July 21. According to an invite obtained by FP, the “event will include an off-the-record conversation on America’s continued investment in NATO, key European allies and partners, and the EU.”

Kagan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Clinton campaign has made clear it believes Trump’s high unfavorable ratings and provocative comments have created an opening for her candidacy among traditional GOP voters, and will soon begin actively courting the Republican electorate.

The campaign has been careful about such overtures in the past as it fended off criticisms from the left by her primary rival Bernie Sanders, who highlighted her 2002 vote in favor of the Iraq War, ties to controversial Republican figures like Henry Kissinger, and warm relationship with Wall Street.

“In her book and in this last debate, she talked about getting the approval or the support or the mentoring of Henry Kissinger,” Sanders said during a February debate. “Now, I find it rather amazing, because I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”

While dozens of Republican foreign-policy insiders have publicly renounced Trump, far fewer have announced their support for Clinton. But cracks are beginning to emerge.

more corporatist twaddle blithely not-seeing the Left Behind...,

newyorker |  If you are reading this post, the likelihood is that you, like me, are one of the winners. Highly educated, professional people tend to work in sectors of the economy that have benefitted from the changes in the international division of labor (e.g., finance, consulting, media, tech) or have been largely spared the rigors of global competition (e.g., law, medicine, academia). From a secure perch on the economic ladder, it is easy to celebrate the gains that technology and globalization have brought, such as a cornucopia of cheap goods in rich countries and rising prosperity in poor ones. It’s also tempting to dismiss the arguments of people who ignore the benefits of this process, or who can’t see that it is irreversible.

But, as Baker points out, “it is a bit hypocritical of those who have benefited” from this economic transformation to be “mocking the poor judgment of its victims”—especially now that the forces of global competition and technological progress are reaching into areas that were previously protected. In a world of self-driving cars and trucks, what is the future for truck drivers, cab and limo drivers, and delivery men? Not a very prosperous one, surely. And the creative destruction that the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter celebrated won’t stop there. With software that can transfer money at zero cost, medical robots that can carry out the most delicate of operations, and smart algorithms that can diagnose diseases or dispense legal advice, what is the future for bankers, surgeons, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals?

There is no straightforward answer to this question, just as there is no easy answer to the question of what can be done to help those who have already lost out. One option is to strengthen the social safety net and, perhaps, to move toward some sort of universal basic income, which would guarantee a minimum standard of living to everybody, regardless of employment prospects. The political enactment of such solutions, however, is contingent on the existence of social solidarity, which the very process of economic and technological change, by heightening inequalities and eroding communal institutions, undermines.

epic corporatist FAIL and twaddle - but at least we got teh geh marriage...,

theguardian |  They used to call it Greek tragedy when the fates wrought their revenge on human folly and weakness. But maybe a better term in the case of the folly and weakness of the modern Tory party is European tragedy. For, as a broken David Cameron announced his resignation on Friday morning, one question must have been battering his exhausted brain more than any other.

How was it that a modern-minded liberal Conservative leader who long ago told his party to “stop banging on about Europe” if it wanted to get back into power after three successive defeats – and who then delivered two terms in government – has himself been brought down by that same party over that same European question?

Cameron himself played the role of tragic hero as he notified the nation of his intention to step down before the autumn. “There can be no doubt about the result,” he said. “The British people have voted to leave the European Union and their will must be respected.”

But he added that the tortuous negotiations ahead with the EU would require “strong determined and committed leadership” that he felt he could no longer provide. “The country requires fresh leadership to take it in this direction.”

And there seemed scant consolation in his laconic summary of what he would rather be remembered for. “I believe we’ve made great steps, with more people in work than ever before in our history, with reforms to welfare and education, increasing people’s life chances, building a bigger and stronger society, keeping our promises to the poorest people in the world and enabling those who love each other to get married whatever their sexuality, but above all restoring Britain’s economic strength.”

is it on a par with black wednesday?

marketwatch |  U.S. stock futures unraveled early Friday morning in New York, after the U.K. declared its intention to end its four-decade relationship with the European Union after a so-called Brexit vote.

Investors have been fretting that such an unprecedented decision to leave Europe’s trading bloc could destabilize the Europe’s fragile union and rattle markets.

Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average YMU6, -2.53%  fell as much as 700 points, but losses were paring from that ugly fall. 

Most recently, the Dow was down 485 points, or 2.7%, to 17,436. Futures for the S&P 500 ESU6, -3.26% tumbled 80 points, or 3.7%, to 2,028 and Nasdaq-100 futures NQU6, -3.24% cratered 173 points, or 3.9%, to 4,289.

Check out: MarketWatch’s live blog on Brexit

Markets began plunging after U.K. broadcasters BBC and ITV in the early hours of Friday morning local time forecast that the “leave” campaign had won the Brexit referendum and that the U.K. will sever its ties with the trading bloc it has been a member of since 1973. 

European stock-market indexes were being punished in the aftermath of the vote, with the Stoxx Europe 600 SXXP, -6.61%  off 8% at 318.81.

But moves in currencies, in particular, the British pound USDGBP, +6.7519% were the most pronounced. Sterling hit a low of $1.3230, a 10% slide from $1.4871 late Thursday in New York. But it has since pared some of that decline most recently at $1.3796. 

The stunning moves come after global markets rallied, betting that Britons would vote to reject Brexit, or a British exit from the EU. 

All three U.S. indexes soared into Thursday’s close, with the Dow DJIA, +1.29%  surging 230.24 points, or 1.3%, to finish at 18,011.07, while the S&P 500 SPX, +1.34% gained 27.87 points, or 1.3%, to close at 2,113.32. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, +1.59%  climbed 76.72 points, or 1.6%, to close at 4,910.04.

Indications that the “leave” vote has won sets up global markets for the most volatile and frightening trading day since the market sank last August on fears about a slowdown in China’s stock market.

the syrian strategic agenda of Granny Goodness and her furies...,

wikileaks |  UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05794498

Date: 11/30/2015 RELEASE IN FULL The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. Negotiations to limit Iran's nuclear program will not solve Israel's security dilemma. Nor will they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program — the capability to enrich uranium. At best, the talks between the world's major powers and Iran that began in Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May will enable Israel to postpone by a few months a decision whether to launch an attack on Iran that could provoke a major Mideast war. Iran's nuclear program and Syria's civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about -- but cannot talk about -- is losing their nuclear monopoly. An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that nuclear monopoly but could also prompt other adversaries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go nuclear as well. The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today. If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself. Back to Syria. It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel's security — not through a direct attack, which in the thirty years of hostility between Iran and Israel has never occurred, but through its proxies in Lebanon, like Hezbollah, that are sustained, armed and trained by Iran via Syria. The end of the Assad regime would end this dangerous alliance. Israel's leadership understands well why defeating Assad is now in its interests. Speaking on CNN's Amanpour show last week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak argued that "the toppling down of Assad will be a major blow to the radical axis, major blow to Iran.... It's the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the Arab world...and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza." Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel's security, it would also ease Israel's understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted. Right now, it is the combination of Iran's strategic alliance with Syria and the steady progress in Iran's nuclear enrichment program that has led Israeli leaders to contemplate a surprise attack — if necessary over the objections of Washington. With Assad gone, and Iran no longer able to threaten Israel through its, proxies, it is possible that the United States and Israel can agree on red lines for when Iran's program has crossed an unacceptable threshold. In short, the White House can ease the tension that has developed with Israel over Iran by doing the right thing in Syria. The rebellion in Syria has now lasted more than a year. The opposition is not going away, nor is the regime going to accept a diplomatic solution from the outside. With his life and his family at risk, only the threat or use of force will change the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's mind. UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05794498 Date: 11/30/2015 The Obama administration has been understandably wary of engaging in an air operation in Syria like the one conducted in Libya for three main reasons. Unlike the Libyan opposition forces, the Syrian rebels are not unified and do not hold territory. The Arab League has not called for outside military intervention as it did in Libya. And the Russians are opposed. Libya was an easier case. But other than the laudable purpose of saving Libyan civilians from likely attacks by Qaddafi's regime, the Libyan operation had no long-lasting consequences for the region. Syria is harder. But success in Syria would be a transformative event for the Middle East. Not only would another ruthless dictator succumb to mass opposition on the streets, but the region would be changed for the better as Iran would no longer have a foothold in the Middle East from which to threaten Israel and undermine stability in the region. Unlike in Libya, a successful intervention in Syria would require substantial diplomatic and military leadership from the United States. Washington should start by expressing its willingness to work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train and arm Syrian rebel forces. The announcement of such a decision would, by itself, likely cause substantial defections from the Syrian military. Then, using territory in Turkey and possibly Jordan, U.S. diplomats and Pentagon officials can start strengthening the opposition. It will take time. But the rebellion is going to go on for a long time, with or without U.S. involvement. The second step is to develop international support for a coalition air operation. Russia will never support such a mission, so there is no point operating through the UN Security Council. Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example shows otherwise. In that case, Russia had genuine ethnic and political ties to the Serbs, which don't exist between Russia and Syria, and even then Russia did little more than complain. Russian officials have already acknowledged they won't stand in the way if intervention comes. Arming the Syrian rebels and using western air power to ground Syrian helicopters and airplanes is a low-cost high payoff approach. As long as Washington's political leaders stay firm that no U.S. ground troops will be deployed, as they did in both Kosovo and Libya, the costs to the United States will be limited. Victory may not come quickly or easily, but it will come. And the payoff will be substantial. Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will see the United States as a friend, not an enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab world, not the corrupt regimes. For Israel, the rationale for a bolt from the blue attack on Iran's nuclear facilities would be eased. And a new Syrian regime might well be open to early action on the frozen peace talks with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian sponsor since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and missiles. All these strategic benefits and the prospect of saving thousands of civilians from murder at the hands of the Assad regime (10,000 have already been killed in this first year of civil war). With the veil of fear lifted from the Syrian people, they seem determine to fight for their freedom. America can and should help them — and by doing so help Israel and help reduce the risk of a wider war.

wasn't waging aggressive war the principle charge agsinst the nazis at nuremburg?

buchanan |  Last week, 31,000 NATO troops conducted exercises in Poland and the Baltic republics, right alongside the border with Russia.

For the first time since 1945, German tanks appeared in Poland.

Now we are planning to base four NATO battalions — one U.S.-led, one British, one German, and perhaps one Canadian, as the French and Italians are balking at being part of a tripwire for war.

How would we react if 31,000 Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Iranian and North Korean troops conducted military exercises across from El Paso and Brownsville, Texas?

How would we react if each of those countries left behind a battalion of troops to prevent a repeat of General “Black Jack” Pershing’s intervention in Mexico in 1916?

Americans would be apoplectic.

Nor are some Europeans enthusiastic about confronting Moscow.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the NATO exercises “warmongering” and “saber-rattling.” He adds, “Anyone who believes that symbolic tank parades on the alliance’s eastern border will increase security is wrong. We would be well-advised not to deliver any excuses for a new, old confrontation.”

Not only is Steinmeier’s Social Democratic Party leery of any new Cold War with Russia, so, too, is the German Left Party, and the anti-EU populist party Alternative for Germany, which wants closer ties to Russia and looser ties to the United States.

This month, we sent the USS Porter into the Black Sea. Why? Says Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, “to deter potential aggression.”

While there is talk of a NATO Black Sea fleet, Bulgaria, one of the three NATO Black Sea nations, appears to want no part of it.

The European Union also just voted to extend sanctions on Russia for annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Ukraine.

Donald Trump calls the NATO alliance a rip-off, a tripwire for World War III and “obsolete.” Hillary Clinton compares Putin’s actions in Ukraine to Hitler’s actions in Germany in the early 1930s. 

the warmongering fury slated to run granny goodness pentagon calls for more bombing...,

theintercept |  Michele Flournoy, the former Defense Department official whom Defense One calls “the woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton,” this week advocated for “sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.” In an interview with that outlet, Flournoy “said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region.” She had previously “condemned the Obama administration’s ISIS policy as ineffectual,” denouncing it as “under-resourced.”

This week, Flournoy specifically advocated what she called “limited military coercion” to oust Assad. In August 2014, Obama announced what he called “limited airstrikes in Iraq” — and they’re still continuing almost two years later. Also note the clinical euphemism Flournoy created — “military coercion” — for creating a “no-bomb zone” that would entail “a declaratory policy backed up by the threat of force. ‘If you bomb the folks we support, we will retaliate using standoff means to destroy [Russian] proxy forces, or, in this case, Syrian assets,’” she said. Despite D.C. conventional wisdom that Obama is guilty of “inaction” in Syria, he has sent substantial aid, weapons, and training to Syrian rebels while repeatedly bombing ISIS targets in Syria.

Even U.S. military officials have said that these sorts of no-fly or no-bomb guarantees Flournoy is promising — which Hillary Clinton herself has previously advocated — would risk a military confrontation with Russia. Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, told a Senate hearing last December that the policy Clinton advocates “would require ‘substantial’ ground forces and would put the U.S. military at risk of a direct confrontation with the Syrian regime and Russian forces.” Nonetheless, the Pentagon official highly likely to be Clinton’s defense secretary is clearly signaling their intention to proceed with escalated military action. The carnage in Syria is horrifying, but no rational person should think that U.S. military action will be designed to “help Syrians.”

It’s long been beyond doubt that Clinton intends to embark upon a far more militaristic path than even Obama forged — which is saying a lot given that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner has bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries in seven years. Repeatedly, Clinton has implicitly criticized Obama for excessive hostility toward Israel, and she has vowed more uncritical support for Israel and to move closer to Netanyahu. Just yesterday, Clinton surrogates battled Sanders’s appointees in the Democratic Platform Committee meeting over Israel and Palestine, with Clinton’s supporters taking an even more hard-line position than many right-wing Israeli politicians. Clinton was the leading voice that successfully convinced a reluctant Obama to involve the U.S. in the disastrous intervention in Libya.

congress adjourned for the holiday leaving geriatric HNIC's sitting on the floor...,

NYTimes |  Paul D. Ryan and his fellow Republicans reclaimed control long enough to force through a major spending bill. They then abruptly adjourned and left the Capitol.

Furious Democrats remained on the House floor, where they huddled around their leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who praised their stand as a “discussion heard around the world.”

Ms. Pelosi expressed bewilderment at the Republican position. “What could they be thinking?” she asked. “Whatever it is, they don’t want to tell anybody about it. That’s why they left in the dead of night.”

The standoff, which began with a Democratic sit-in on the House floor just before noon on Wednesday, did not end until about 3 a.m. Thursday when Mr. Ryan — barreling over Democrats’ objections — took the rare and provocative step of calling a vote on a major appropriations bill in the wee hours and without any debate. He then adjourned the House, with no legislative votes scheduled until July 5.

The House approved the bill, which includes $1.1 billion in emergency financing to fight the mosquito-borne Zika virus — and more than $80 billion in other government spending — by a vote of 239 to 171 shortly after 3 a.m.

Republicans dashed from the chamber into the sticky heat gripping Washington and were met by protesters who jeered, with some shouting, “Do your job!”

Brookings Argues For Back-Room Deals, Party Hacks & Unlimited Money in Politics

theatlantic |  Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. The second-place candidate, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, built his brand by tearing down his party’s: slurring the Senate Republican leader, railing against the Republican establishment, and closing the government as a career move.

The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.

Political disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink, but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party leaders can do about it.

And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon.

No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. They liked that about him. Brookings eBook.

dossier on hillary clinton from dnc

guccifer2 |  It’s not a report in one file, it’s a big folder of docs devoted to Hillary Clinton that I found on the DNC server.

The DNC collected all info about the attacks on Hillary Clinton and prepared the ways of her defense, memos, etc., including the most sensitive issues like email hacks.

As an example here’re some files:

2016er Attacks – HRC Defense Master Doc [updated]

04.29.15 CGEP

2016 Democrats Positions Cheat Sheet 7-7-15

20150426 MEMO- Clinton Cash Unravels

Attacks on Clinton Family Members

Clinton Foundation Donors $25K+

Clinton Foundation Vulnerabilities Master Doc FINAL

Clintons PFD 2015

HRC Defense – Emails

HRC Travel – Private Jets FINAL

MEMO — Clinton Cash Claims (2)

• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED DONATIONS FROM INDIVIDUALS TIED TO SAUDI ARABIA WHILE CLINTON SERVED AS SECRETARY OF STATE
• AN EMBATTLED BUSINESSMAN WITH “TIES TO BAHRAIN’S STATE-OWNED ALUMINUM COMPANY” GAVE BETWEEN $1 MILLION AND $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
• A VENEZUELAN MEDIA MOGUL WHO WAS ACTIVE IN VENEZUELAN POLITICS DONATED TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DURING CLINTON’S TENURE AS SECRETARY OF STATE
• GERMAN INVESTOR WHO HAS LOBBIED CHANCELLOR MERKEL’S ADMINISTRATION GAVE BETWEEN $1 MILLION AND $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, SOME OF WHICH WAS DURING MRS. CLINTON’S TENURE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
• THE CEO OF AN AMSTERDAM BASED ENERGY COMPANY DONATED AT LEAST $1 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION AND LATER ANNOUNCED AT THE 2009 CGI MEETING A $5 BILLION PROJECT TO DEVELOP ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY POWER GENERATION IN INDIA AND CHINA
• INDIAN POLITICIAN AMAR SINGH, WHO HAD DONATED AT LEAST $1 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, MET WITH HILLARY CLINTON IN SEPTEMBER 2008 TO DISCUSS AN INDIA-U.S. CIVIL NUCLEAR AGREEMENT
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED ADDITIONAL DONATIONS FROM INDIAN BUSINESS INTERESTS PRIOR TO HER BECOMING SECRETARY OF STATE
• BILLIONAIRE STEEL EXECUTIVE AND MEMBER OF THE FOREIGN INVESTMENT COUNCIL IN KAZAKHSTAN LAKSHMI MITTAL GAVE $1 MILLION TO $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION BEFORE CLINTON BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE
• SOON AFTER SECRETARY CLINTON LEFT THE STATE DEPARTMENT, THE CLINTON
  FOUNDATION “RECEIVED A LARGE DONATION FROM A CONGLOMERATE RUN BY A
  MEMBER OF CHINA’S NATIONAL PEOPLE’S CONGRESS”
• …AND THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DEFENDED ITS PARTNERSHIPS WITH BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC CORPORATE INTERESTS
• POWERFUL AND CONTROVERSIAL CORPORATE INTERESTS BASED IN THE U.S. ALSO DONATED TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
• AMONG THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DONORS REVEALED IN 2009 WERE SEVERAL FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS WHO HAD GIVEN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
• WHEN HILLARY CLINTON BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE IN 2009, BILL CLINTON AGREED TO STOP ACCEPTING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION FROM MOST FOREIGN COUNTRIES
• IN THE PAST, SOME OBSERVERS HAD LINKED FOREIGN GOVERNMENT DONATIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION AND SECRETARY CLINTON’S WORK AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION CAME UNDER INTENSE SCRUTINY IN FEBRUARY 2015 WHEN IT WAS REVEALED THAT THE FOUNDATION HAD ACCEPTED DONATIONS FROM FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS AFTER SECRETARY CLINTON LEFT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TIED FOREIGN GOVERNMENT DONORS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION’S ENDOWMENT FUNDRAISING UNDER SECRETARY CLINTON
• CLINTON FOUNDATION ANNOUNCED THAT SHOULD HILLARY CLINTON DECIDE TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT, THE FOUNDATION WOULD FOLLOW APPROPRIATE PROCEDURES FOR ACCEPTING DONATIONS FROM FOREIGN DONATIONS, JUST LIKE IT HAD HAD UNDER SECRETARY CLINTON…
• REPORTS THAT STATE DEPARTMENT LAWYERS DID NOT EXHAUSTIVELY VET BILL CLINTON’S PAID SPEECHES DURING SECRETARY CLINTON’S TENURE RAISED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ROLE CLINTON FOUNDATION DONATIONS MAY HAVE PLAYED IN ORGANIZING THOSE SPEECHES
• SOME CONSERVATIVES USED THE FOREIGN DONATIONS CONTROVERSY TO IMPLY THAT THE CLINTON FOUNDATION IS NOT A CHARITY AND QUESTION THE FOUNDATION’S CHARITABLE WORK
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION HAS ACCEPTED DONATIONS FROM INDIVIDUALS, SOME OF WHOM HAD TIES TO FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, DURING HER TENURE AS SECRETARY OF STATE
• THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED MONEY FROM A FOUNDATION FORMED BY FORMER UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT MEMBER VICTOR PINCHUK
• WALL STREET JOURNAL COLUMNIST MARY O’GRADY CITED A CONTRACT BETWEEN TWO CLINTON DONORS FOR HAITI AID AS EVIDENCE OF A CONFLICT OF INTEREST FOR THE CLINTONS

global beta tests continue - was Miss Lindsey Graham at Bilderberg against Trump or for Neoconnery?

googlecache |  Coursera, Carnegie, Alphabet, Bloomberg, Hudson, Alcoa, CFR, AEI, WSJ; then of course every big bank and hedgefund.

Coursera, huh? And Alphabet?

Charles Murray (yeah, that Charles Murray) is there. I wonder what issues he's been asked there about? Why don't they ever invite Pat Buchanan?

Peggy Noonan, Niall Ferguson, Peter Thiel, Robert Rubin, Kissinger himself, Craig Mundie, David Petreaus, Lindsey f**king Graham...

Don't expect any of these people to mention they were ever there, or to talk about what was talked about.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule

Trump has officially shaken the elite to the core. Never in a million years would I think Bilderberg to stoop SO LOW as to invite Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham. I can't even...they usually stick to the rich elite that aren't public officials. Graham is a prop for the US IC to spread the notion that the US is full of war hungry politicians to the Saudis, the Gulf states, and other dictators that respect violence.

Virtually every American they invited has been publicly anti-Trump (Noonan and Ferguson signed the #NeverTrump letter); Thiel is a Trump RNC delegate (he's basically a spy), as is Kissinger (who has been Trump's informal diplomatic liaison during the campaign).

People around Clinton, like Eric Schmidt, are there.

You people that don't know anything about Bilderberg need to get with the program. Go to Sci-hub and search the academic literature.

Here's a quick history of Western diplomacy:

The Round Table, the Inquiry, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg (Marshall, Schuman, Monnet), Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission...and they've been simmering since.

Too bad the censor happy mods took down the Official Bilderberg 2016 thread. I'm sure they'll take this one down too. Keep living in Oz, people. I'm sure you'll find that brain in your regressions and your "peer reviewed" bulls**t.

global beta tests continue - the fbi precipitated the worst mass shooting in u.s. history

alternet |  Before Omar Mateen gunned down 49 patrons of the LGBTQ Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, the FBI attempted to induce his participation in a terror plot. Sheriff Ken Mascara of Florida’s St. Lucie County told the Vero Beach Press Journal that after Mateen threatened a courthouse deputy in 2013 by claiming he could order Al Qaeda operatives to kill his family, the FBI dispatched an informant to "lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite."

While self-styled terror experts and former counter-terror officials have criticized the FBI for failing to stop Mateen before he committed a massacre, the new revelation raises the question of whether the FBI played a role in pushing Mateen towards an act of lethal violence. 

Since 9/11, the FBI has relied heavily on informants to entrap scores of young, often mentally troubled Muslim men and send them to prison for as long as 25 years. As Aviva Stahl reported for AlterNet’s Grayzone Project, the FBI recently encouraged an apparently mentally disturbed recent convert to Islam named James Medina to bomb a South Florida synagogue and pledge allegiance to ISIS, a militant group with which he had no prior affiliation. On trial for planning to commit an act of terror with a weapon of mass destruction, Medina has insisted through his lawyer that he is mentally ill.

Trevor Aaronson, a journalist and author of “Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror,” revealed that nearly half of terror cases between 9/11/01 and 2010 involved informants, including some with criminal backgrounds raking in as much as $100,000 from the FBI. The FBI's assets have often preyed on mentally ill men with little capacity to resist their provocations. “Is it possible that the FBI is creating the very enemy we fear?” Aaronson wondered.

global beta tests continue - with cell phones and the Interweb - which way will the people run?

npr |   Although home to the world's largest oil reserves, Venezuela seems to be running out of almost everything these days: food, medicine, electricity, even beer.

Economic conditions have become so bad that Venezuelans are ransacking grocery stores — even though many are largely empty. A Venezuelan monitoring group, Observatory for Violence, says there are about 10 lootings per day around the country, with food riots sometimes turning deadly.

Four people were killed during separate incidents last week as looters clashed with security forces. More than 400 people were arrested in the coastal city of Cumaná, which was briefly placed under a de facto curfew after 20 stores were cleaned out.

One of the hardest-hit places is the western city of Maracaibo.

Due to nationwide electricity rationing, some Maracaibo neighborhoods go without power for up to 12 hours a day. An intersection is utter chaos because there's a power outage and the traffic lights don't work.

The power outages knock out fans and air conditioners in a city where the temperature often tops 100 degrees.

econmatters outlines how pandering to tards sank the republican party...,

econmatters |   We outline what went wrong with the Republican Party for the last 20 plus years in this video. Hopefully this is a wake up call for the Republican Party, to scale down their future Political Platform to some sound basic economic principles that benefit a large number of constituencies, are attractive to a broader voter pool, and voters can really get behind without being offended and alienated in the process with essentially a bunch of unnecessary ancillary issues which should be outside the scope of a smaller government involvement anyway.

Restoring the American Dream: Economy and Jobs

Job Creation: Getting Americans Back to Work

Small Business and Entrepreneurship

Tax Relief to Grow the Economy and Create Jobs

American Competitiveness in a Global Economy

Fundamental Tax Principles

Reining in Out-of-Control Spending, Balancing the Budget, and Ensuring Sound Monetary Policy

Balancing the Budget

Inflation and the Federal Reserve

Ending the Housing Crisis and Expanding Opportunities for Homeownership

Rebuilding Homeownership

Infrastructure: Building the Future

More American Jobs, Higher Wages, and A Better Standard of Living

A Twenty-First Century Workforce

Freedom in the Workplace

burnt toast?

kunstler |  The email issue won’t go away because it entails serious issues of racketeering in public office, not just niceties of security procedure. One of the Secretary of State’s duties is to approve weapons sales to foreign countries. During her three years at State, Hillary signed off on $165 billion worth of sales by private commercial arms contractors to Clinton Foundation foreign donors. On top of that was an additional $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that gave to the Clinton Foundation. It also happened that the weapons contractors themselves and companies connected financially to them made substantial donations to the Clinton foundation — and paid whopping speaking fees to Hillary’s husband ex-president Bill, during her years at State.

Salon Magazine has also reported that in contradiction of a 1995 directive signed by then-president Bill against arms sales to nations violating human rights, Hillary approved such weapons sales. Salon’s David Sirota writes:

As just one of many examples, in its 2011 Human Rights Report, Clinton’s State Department slammed Algeria’s government for imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association,” tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption” and a “lack of judicial independence.

That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and the next year Clinton’s State Department approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The jump included authorizations for almost 50,000 items classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment.” The State Department had not authorized the export of any of such items to Algeria the year before.

There’s no way that the shady doings of the Clinton Foundation will not become a campaign issue whether Trump emerges as the eventual GOP nominee or not, and of course the other noisome matter of exactly what Hillary told Too-Big-To-Fail banks in exchange for many quarter-million dollar “speaking fees” still lurks behind all that. Hillary’s partisans at the The New York Times and The WashPo have ignored these stories for months, but the telltale stench remains, like a dead body under the floorboards.. In contrast to her beaming victory lap after the California primary, all this stuff promises some serious frowny-face for Mz. It’s-My-Turn in the months ahead.

superdelegate equals unopposed head negro in charge status in the congressional black caucus....,

politico |  Retaining some kind of superdelegate system has been a high priority for CBC members, said Democratic strategist Doug Thornell, formerly the group’s communications director. 

"Sanders did a lot of things right in this campaign, he did a lot better than expected. At the same time he seemed to have a lack of understanding or lack of relationships with black leaders that you saw ultimately hurt him in South Carolina and other states with big black electorates," Thornell said. "And this is something that the CBC is going to be very passionate and push back against. This is a way that African-American officials can represent their district and have a say in the process. They're not going to go along with this at all."

Multiple CBC members conceded that the superdelegate system has its flaws, but also argued it's not worth scrapping. "I've been listening to both sides, all sides of the debate and I think both sides have made persuasive arguments," said one CBC member, who asked to not be named.

"The superdelegate system is not perfect but it has worked for us quite well over the years and frankly the superdelegates have never needed to cast any superdelegate votes to alter what the voters did during the primary elections," said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. "Never. That's not the case this year either. The concern many of us have, of course, is that our numbers would shrink in terms of having influence over and involvement with what happens at the convention."

Cleaver added that the CBC would not be swayed on the superdelegate issue. 

"The black caucus is immovable on this subject because our number one concern is going to be an always be the highest level of minority participation as possible at the convention," Cleaver said. "You're going to see the same thing with the Hispanic Congressional Caucus. Mr. Sanders, if he had met with either or what's called the tri-caucus, he would have found out there is no flexibility."

the first visual search engine for scientific diagrams

economist |  A PICTURE is said to be worth a thousand words. That metaphor might be expected to pertain a fortiori in the case of scientific papers, where a figure can brilliantly illuminate an idea that might otherwise be baffling. Papers with figures in them should thus be easier to grasp than those without. They should therefore reach larger audiences and, in turn, be more influential simply by virtue of being more widely read. But are they? Bill Howe and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, decided to find out.

First, they trained a computer algorithm to distinguish between various sorts of figures—which they defined as diagrams, equations, photographs, plots (such as bar charts and scatter graphs) and tables. They exposed their algorithm to between 400 and 600 images of each of these types of figure until it could distinguish them with an accuracy greater than 90%. Then they set it loose on the more-than-650,000 papers (containing more than 10m figures) stored on PubMed Central, an online archive of biomedical-research articles.

To measure each paper’s influence, they calculated its article-level Eigenfactor score—a modified version of the PageRank algorithm Google uses to provide the most relevant results for internet searches. Eigenfactor scoring gives a better measure than simply noting the number of times a paper is cited elsewhere, because it weights citations by their influence. A citation in a paper that is itself highly cited is worth more than one in a paper that is not.

As the team describe in a paper posted on arXivhttp://viziometrics.org/search/, they found that figures did indeed matter—but not all in the same way. An average paper in PubMed Central has about one diagram for every three pages and gets 1.67 citations. Papers with more diagrams per page and, to a lesser extent, plots per page tended to be more influential (on average, a paper accrued two more citations for every extra diagram per page, and one more for every extra plot per page). By contrast, including photographs and equations seemed to decrease the chances of a paper being cited by others. That agrees with a study from 2012, whose authors counted (by hand) the number of mathematical expressions in over 600 biology papers and found that each additional equation per page reduced the number of citations a paper received by 22%.  viziometrics.org