Adelson is like a stream of bat’s piss

~ odd man out

The Republican governors’ suck-up to Sheldon Adelson was like a certain Monty Python skit.

What would Alexis de Tocqueville think of democracy in America in 2014? How would Thomas Jefferson describe it? I doubt that either man would know what to make of the fact that one mind-numbingly greedy gnome might have the power to anoint the next Republican nominee for president.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, you weren’t watching the news last weekend when a small group of Republican governors who might run for president went a-courtin’ multibillionaire Sheldon Adelson at a Republican Jewish Coalition event. It was an extraordinary display of groveling. Even my friend the Swamp Rabbit, who can drink a bottle of Wild Turkey and not even belch, was retching as he read a Politico story that explained why the potential candidates were jousting to win the casino magnate’s shriveled little heart:

…The new big-money political landscape — in which a handful of donors can dramatically alter a campaign with just a check or two — explains both the eagerness of busy governors to make pilgrimages to Las Vegas, and the obsession with divining Adelson’s 2016 leanings.

All manner of national media flocked to Adelson’s Venetian casino and resort hotel, which hosted the RJC meeting. But reporters were kept away from Adelson by coalition staff, as well as casino and personal security, and his team turned down interview requests, including for an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

As Adelson whizzed around his Venetian kingdom on a motorized scooter during the retreat, he was often trailed by GOP operatives, politicians and fellow donors eager to assess his state of mind, advise him on what he should do or just lavish him with praise and gratitude…

The governors seemed to be vying for the Most Obsequious Reactionary award as they took turns making speeches. John Kasich repeatedly referred to Adelson as Sheldon, as if the two men grew up in the same ‘hood, back in the day. Scott Walker, showing he could be as big a whore for Adelson as he is for the Koch brothers, told the RJC crowd that he lights a menorah during Hannukah and named one of his sons Matthew because the name means ‘gift from God’ in Hebrew. Chris Christie made the faux pas of the weekend by recounting for Adelson and his fellow Zionists a scary helicopter ride he took over Israel’s “occupied territories.”

Christie’s remark reminded me of a classic Monty Python skit: Oscar Wilde, at a dinner party with the Prince of Wales, runs out of aphorisms. He says, “Your Majesty is like a stream of bat’s piss” and then has to come up with an explanatory line to get back in the royal’s good graces. Too bad for Christie that no one was there in Vegas to provide a witty follow-up that might have kept him in the race for Adelson’s money.

“The fat man is on a serious losin’ streak,” the rabbit said of Christie, stating the obvious. “He’s a lot better at bullyin’ than he is at suckin’ up.”

My father’s voice

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

83/365
I think I’ve gone about six months this time without slamming one of my toes into something, usually resulting in a broken toe or a lost toenail. So it was about time for it to happen again. Fortunately, this time nothing’s broken.

And after all these years, I still hear my father yelling, “What the hell have I told you kids about running around the house in your bare feet?”

Crackdown

~ susie

Ucraina, tregua fallisce: decine di morti in scontri a Kiev

Happy to hear this:

KIEV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s Parliament on Tuesday ordered law enforcement agencies to immediately disarm unofficial paramilitary groups, signaling growing resolve in the interim government to confront nationalists and other vigilantes who played a big role in the overthrow of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the country’s pro-Kremlin former president who was deposed more than a month ago.

The bill, introduced and passed unanimously, ordered both the Interior Ministry and the Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s successor to the K.G.B., to disarm the groups because of the “aggravation of the crime situation and systematic provocations on the part of foreigners in southeastern Ukraine and in Kiev.”

The attempt to further consolidate control domestically came as Russia delivered yet another blow to the fledgling Ukraine government, which the Kremlin regards as illegal. Gazprom, the Russian state gas giant, announced a 40 percent increase in the price of natural gas sold to Ukraine, which is heavily dependent on Russia for its gas supply.

The passage of the anti-paramilitary bill comes as tensions in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, have grown between nationalist groups who continue to patrol the main squares of the city and Arsen Avakov, the country’s new interior minister.

H/t William “Ben” Mann.

Very, very interesting

~ susie

City Hall

There are a LOT of people who won’t want Bloomberg poking around in this:

The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records has ordered the City of Philadelphia to release more information about interest-rate swaps transactions and city deals with Wall Street bankers dating back to 1990.

Last October, Bloomberg reporter Romy Varghese asked Philadelphia to make available “all records,” including emails, notes and correspondence as well as financial reports, for at least 18 swaps deals, in which Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Merrill Lynch & Co. (now part of Bank of America), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and Wells Fargo (and predecessors) variously set up bets on interest rates for the city, the Philadelphia Authority for Industrial Development, the Philadelphia Gas Works, Water Department, and the state Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority fiscal oversight body.

According to the state office’s Final Determination by appeals officer Jill S. Wolfe, the city, which has already made some swaps records available to Bloomberg, is also required to provide emails and an unedited financial report that the city has been withholding, within 30 days. Some “internal” notes that Bloomberg also requested don’t have to be provided, Wolfe added, citing past cases in Radnor Township and other towns.

City officials have said they hoped to use the swaps to limit bond borrowing expenses from inflating when interest rates rise — but ended up owing the banks and their clients millions when rates stayed low. Bloomberg did not request documents from the city school district as part of the city request; the district has also reported multimillion-dollar swaps losses. Both city and district have shown little interest in revisiting what went wrong or who should be held responsible.

Yeah, I’ll bet they have.

H/t Jason Kalafat Defense Attorney.

Cuomo sells out DeBlasio

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Gov1

Andrew Cuomo may be short, but that just means he’s even more suited to giving blowjobs to monied interests. He is and will always be a whore who would suck the chrome off a bumper to get ahead:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has struck a budget deal with Republican legislators that includes unprecedented new giveaways to charter schools, particularly in New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio had threatened to modestly rein them in. 

Diane Ravitch sums it up:

The private corporations that manage charter schools in New York City will never have to pay for using public space.

The de Blasio administration must offer space to all charters approved in the dying days of the Bloomberg administration. De Blasio had previously approved 14 of 17; now he must approve all 17. Whatever Eva Moskowitz wants, Eva gets.

The charters located inside public school buildings may expand as much as they wish, and the mayor can’t stop them. If this means pushing out children with severe disabilities, so be it. If it means taking control of the entire building and pushing all of the students out of their public school, so be it.

If a charter chooses to rent private space, the New York City public schools must pay their rent. Where will the money come from? Well, the public schools can always increase class size, or they can lay off social workers and counselors and psychologists. Or they could cut back on the arts. That’s their problem.

So the privately run schools that serve six percent of the students in the city get to make decisions over the city’s elected mayor and the best interests of the other 94 percent of students. These are chains that pay their executives more than the city’s education chancellor. Chains that achieve their testing success (when they achieve it) by pushing out special needs kids, back into the public schools that the charters are taking space from; those public schools are also educating the homeless kids and English Language Learnersthat charters disproportionately do not educate.

This is the system that Cuomo is working not just to protect but to expand, giving private companies rights over public property, giving schools that exclude the kids they don’t want to educate rights over the schools that educate all kids. It’s appalling.

H/t Attorney Kush Arora.

‘Deeply held principles’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Emergency Contraceptive Pills (ECPs), more commonly known as "the morning-after pill" or Plan B, help to prevent pregnancy after unprotected sex. Unlike “the abortion pill,” ECPs simply interfere with ovulation and cannot induce an abortion if conception

You’re shocked, right?

When Obamacare compelled businesses to include emergency contraception in employee health care plans, Hobby Lobby, a national chain of craft stores, fought the law all the way to the Supreme Court. The Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, the company’s owners argued, forced them to violate their religious beliefs. But while it was suing the government, Hobby Lobby spent millions of dollars on an employee retirement plan that invested in the manufacturers of the same contraceptive products the firm’s owners cite in their lawsuit.

Documents filed with the Department of Labor and dated December 2012—three months after the company’s owners filed their lawsuit—show that the Hobby Lobby 401(k) employee retirement plan held more than $73 million in mutual funds with investments in companies that produce emergency contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices, and drugs commonly used in abortions. Hobby Lobby makes large matching contributions to this company-sponsored 401(k).

Several of the mutual funds in Hobby Lobby’s retirement plan have holdings in companies that manufacture the specific drugs and devices that the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, is fighting to keep out of Hobby Lobby’s health care policies: the emergency contraceptive pills Plan B and Ella, and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices.

Thanks to Jason Kalafat.

Flash mob

~ susie

Link:

As World War I got underway, Romain Rolland and Hermann Hesse, two Swiss writers, appealed to their war-frenzied friends in France and Germany citing the lede to the choral movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen! (Friends, not these sounds! Let us rather make more pleasant, more joyous notes). And last Saturday, in Odessa, a Russian-speaking city of Ukraine, one of the cultural treasure-houses of Europe, the city that gave us Anna Akhmatova and Issak Babel, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Nathan Milshtein and Emil Gilels, performers from the Philharmonic flash mobbed a performance of the last bars of the symphony at the Odessa fish market. A decidedly political musical statement. Amazing.